When Formlabs first appeared on the 3D printing scene some three years ago, they made history by raising an unprecedented USD$3M. How did they do it?
A new post by the company on Medium tells some of the basics strategies they followed.
While it is possible to raise money – even a lot of money – through a carefully crafted crowdfunding campaign, that is not the hard part. Well, it is in fact hard, but the next steps are far more difficult: delivering a quality product.
If you over-promise and under-deliver, you will soon fade from the business landscape as loss of consumer confidence is near impossible to regain.
Formlabs realized this and used several key strategies to guide their product development and production, including:
- Designing not only for correct function, but also for good user experience.
- Iterating through several models to gradually improve the design.
- Reducing the complexity of the machine and its operational requirements to keep things as simple as possible.
The result is a fine machine that is selling quite well. Here we get a glimpse of the results of their efforts in a video featuring Formlabs co-Founder Max Lobovsky:
We see many crowdfunding launches of products, but many of them fail, perhaps because they don’t follow these and similar principles when developing their products. Launching a product on Kickstarter is not the end; it’s only the very beginning.
Via Medium
