Embedded - 96: Yarn Is Serious Business

Episode Date: April 8, 2015

Carrie Sundra (@AlpenglowYarn) spoke with us about doing a Kickstarter on her own… and nearly failing. The SkeinMinder is an automation tool for small yarn businesses (and enthusiastic amateurs). When the successful Kickstarter nearly fell short, Carrie candidly wrote about it (includes a great description of the economies of scale). Carrie’s yarn company is Alpenglow Yarn. You can use the contact page there to ask for electrical engineering help as well. Carrie is active on Instagram and her blog is a blend of crafts and engineering. Ravelry is the social media site for knitters and crocheters (requires free account to see anything) The insanely popular Potato Salad Kickstarter. 

Welcome to Embedded, the show for people who love gadgets. I'm Alicia White, here with Christopher White. Our guest this week is Keri Sundra, and we're going to talk about something that last week's guest would quite approve of, yarn. Also, electronics and Kickstarter. Before we get started, I want to mention that while last week's show was a joke, the two LMN14 linker posts that went along with it were not jokes. I'm pretty excited to share the information I collected about devices and internationalization. I know that sounds boring, but really it was cool. So please go take a look, maybe click on a few

Newark ads while you're there. And now back to our guest. Hi, Carrie. Thanks for being on the show today. Hi, thanks so much for having me. Could you tell us a bit about yourself? Yeah. Well, I am an electrical engineer. And for over 10 years, I designed and built electronics for small unmanned aircraft. And then I took a break from that for a little while and I opened up a small hand-dyed yarn business. And I then had a period of time of kind of going back and forth between electronics and yarn. And now I am kind of combining both of them and launching

a new product called the Skainminder. Okay, so the Skane Minder, what is that? It is a device that automates the yarn winders that indie dyers use. So you might think that hand dyers have very cool, very modern equipment, and certainly textile mills do. But when you have a small business and you're starting out of your garage or your house or your kitchen, you have these kind of small tabletop winders and they're made by other small businesses

and they are great because they serve this very small niche need and they don't cost tens of thousands of dollars or anything like that, and they don't require a lot of space. But they're also relatively simple in design. They basically have a dimmer switch that is used for speed control and on and off, and they might have a rotation counter. But it's up to you if you want to wind yarn over and over again,

like you generally do when you're in the yarn dyeing business. Then you have to basically sit there and babysit your skein winder and watch the rotation counter count up and turn it off when it gets to the right count. So that's a pretty boring process. And I developed the skeminder to automate that. And so inside there's an Arduino sort of processor, an Atmel something? Yeah, it's an Atmel 328P.

So, you know, the same thing that's like in... The Arduino. Yeah. And so does it have a motor? You know, the same thing that's like in... The Arduino who knows. Yeah. Yep. And so your... Does it have a motor? Are you winding things? The winders themselves, I don't make the winders themselves.

My device is basically designed so that any of these tabletop winders can plug into them, can plug into it. There are about four or five different brands of the tabletop winders can plug into them, can plug into it. There are about four or five different brands of the tabletop winders. And I felt that there were several good options for winding already. I didn't kind of really need to reinvent the wheel on that aspect, but I thought it would be great if I could basically make a device that would add automation to any of them. So the way it works is that you plug the skein minder into the wall, you plug your winder into the skein minder, it has a solid state relay inside of it, and you also attach a reed switch style rotation counter.

So it's like a reed switch on one side and a magnet on the other side, and the switch just closes every time the magnet goes around. So that you also plug into the skein minder box. And the Arduino then controls power to the winder on the basis of that rotation count. And so I actually had to go talk to a yarn friend because I'm not crafty that way. And she mentioned that it looks, that when you're making your own yarn, which to me is like three steps back. I mean, I barely know what knitting is. But so you're making your own yarn. yarn and you if you want to be able to have consistent yarn to give to someone else you

want to be able to always give them however many meters are in a ball you have to stand there and watch it it wind itself and so your device means you can walk away and it will wind itself. Exactly. Exactly. A lot of dyers buy yarn on cones and it's a very big. Yes. Well, they're relatively big. It's a nice form factor for shipping and storing yarn because it is very nicely without getting tangled. It's not a ball, it's really a cone and so it always comes off the top. Yes, yes. But the problem is for hand dyers, you don't hand dye yarn on cones. There are industrial machines actually like force water through

the cones using a lot of pressure and things like that. So there are the, like there is a cone dyeing process, but when you're a hand dyer, you generally dye yarn in skeins. And that's just so the, so that you can stick it in a pot or a pan of water and the water and the dye will permeate the skein nice and evenly. And then you, so do you dye it before or after you put it in a skein? I guess you just said you dye it after. After, yeah. So, a lot of dyers will then buy their yarn in cones and it's also a bit cheaper to buy yarn in cones. They will wind it into skeins themselves and then dye the yarn. Sometimes you even rewind the yarn as well before you finally sell it. And rewinding the yarn is when you take two of the smaller, I want to say strings, because that's a word that I understand what that means, two strings, and you wrap them around each other um no that's actually too flying oh that's

okay so what is rewinding is exactly what it sounds like um and it's a little bit hard it might be a little bit hard to visualize but um like why you would want to rewind yarn but um if you die if you have a skein of yarn, which is a nice round O of yarn, basically, maybe you dye half of the skein one color and half of the skein another color. And so, you could just twist the skein up and sell it like that, but the skein then kind of looks very kind of blocky. Like there's a block of one color, there's a block of another color. When you knit that up, your final fabric isn't necessarily going to look like that, um, because

you knit in rows. So your colors will tend to get more kind of mixed up and jumbled. A yellow row, a blue row, a blue and yellow row. Exactly. So if you take that original skein and then you rewind it at a different circumference, all of the colors will be mixed up in that final skein and you'll get a little bit of a better idea of what your final fabric will look like knit up. Okay. So that's one reason that dyers re-scane. Another reason is simply that a lot of times yarn just kind of gets messy and tangled during the dye process. So it's a little bit nicer to just kind of tidy it all back up again.

All right. So you have a sensor in there to count the clicks. And you've got the Atmel processor. But you've got something else too, because you can tell when it's tangled or when it's not winding. Some sort of tensioner? No, it really, the only sensor input

is the rotation count. And, well, time, of course. So what I'm doing there is I'm basically just looking at the time that my rotation counts come in. And if there's power going to the winder, if the relay is on, and if I haven't seen a rotation count in a little while, then you can kind of infer that, hmm, the winder is not going around even though there's power connected. So something just happened. And yeah, in that case, it'll then shut the power off to the winder to prevent the motor from just sitting there stalled out. That makes sense. Yeah.

So one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you was because you did a Kickstarter and it just closed on Friday. Yes, it did. It was very exciting. A race to the finish. It was. I mean, you started out pretty well and you wanted 65K, is that right? Mm-hmm. Yep.

And then you got to about 30K and it stalled a bit. Yeah, it did for several weeks. And so when I talked to you, I thought we might be talking about, so what are you going to do now? But you did manage to get it all back together and you made your numbers. Amazingly enough. And I'm still kind of surprised that it all did together and you made your numbers. Amazingly enough. And I'm still kind of surprised that it all did come together. But yeah, that's pretty much exactly what happened. And one of the things that's really interesting is that you did not go through an accelerator

program. You didn't do Highway 1 or HACcelerator or any of those. This is your personal, you did this. Yes. Yeah. I just, you know, the hardware accelerators, I think that they're great resources. And certainly from like the teaching perspective and just the amount of support and help they give you and people that they get you in touch with, that's awesome. But there's another component of, you know, the reason that people go through hardware accelerators is to also get hooked up with venture capital. And this project, like, is very, very unsexy from a venture capitalist point of view. There's like, I wouldn't be able to pitch it to a venture capitalist with a straight face. There's just, the market is so small that it just wouldn't

be, it wouldn't be worth an investor to back it. And part of the reason to go to an accelerator is to get help with large scale manufacturing. Yeah. So what kind of volumes are you looking at? It didn't seem like you're in the hundreds of thousands like a lot of other things are. Yeah, exactly. So the whole goal of the Kickstarter campaign was, well, part of the goal of the Kickstarter campaign was just to find out how big the market is. Because, you know, we're talking about a very small, very niche industry where a lot of people

are maybe not doing this as their only job and or are maybe doing it seasonally and there's not an industry association uh there's not one place where everybody who is hand dyeing yarn gets their news or congregates um Ravelry the the social media website for knitters uh is probably the closest thing to that but even Christopher there is a social media site for knitters yeah it's an award-winning social media site for knitters. Yeah, it's an award-winning social media site for knitters, actually. But yeah, I mean, that's definitely the closest place. But even Ravelry has thousands, millions of different forums within it. So it's still really hard to get out in front of people and to find all of these small businesses. So part of the Kickstarter campaign was to try to do that.

And the goal of it was to see if I could get enough backing and enough orders to build a run of 100. That's one of the things I really like about Kickstarter is, and I think it gets lost in the discussion when large companies like Pebble and other things have these mega blowout Kickstarters after having already done one or two. It's really great for assessing the size of your market and figuring out whether or not you should even bother to make a product. But it's also paradoxical, right? Because you had

trouble halfway through. It was like you got to what might have been your market but that wasn't really true yeah and and it was it was really fascinating it was it was a very interesting process for sure um because i kind of had that same thought midway through i was like well um i had maybe about i had about 30 orders for skein minders for a long time. And I thought, well, you know, at orders for 30, it just doesn't, maybe my market is too small. You know, it doesn't make sense to build a batch of 100 when you only have orders for 30, because then you end up carrying inventory for a long time. And, oh man, the cost of inventory just kills you. It's a cashflow killer and it's a growth killer. You just kind of stall out as a business because all of your money is tied up in this stuff

that's not selling. So I had learned that with yarn many times. So I was very determined to not make that same mistake again. And I was very determined to build the skein minder in batch sizes that made sense for the market. The reason that I just picked 100 and that the goal of the Kickstarter was 100 is that that's really the first point at which you reach any sort of an economy of scale with electronics manufacturing. The price just really goes up when you build in batches smaller than that. So I really wanted to build a batch of 100 so I could charge a lower, more accessible price. Okay, so you wanted $65,000 and you wanted to build a hundred of these. They aren't, um, $650 each, are they? No, no, they're, they were 365 each. So that was also another interesting thing. I spent a lot of time, um, doing the budgeting for this campaign.

And, um, there are some things that, that aren't obvious at first that you have to account for in your, in the, your campaign total. Um, there are of course, Kickstarter fees and payment processing fees. Um, but also the amount that you charge for shipping counts for your counts towards your total. Um, you have the cost of, you know, the goods that you're making, of course. And then my particular campaign was also even a little bit more challenging to price correctly because I was offering rewards that were not skein minders themselves. So, yes, I was offering a lot of yarn. And that was basically to encourage knitters to contribute and to also be able to spread the word more. Because if a lot of knitters are talking about something, then the word out to as many dyers as I could about the skein minder and that it was happening at all. So I had to factor the cost of those yarn rewards

into the overall campaign total as well. That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. It was weird to budget it because I had to budget it for building 100 skein minders, no matter how many skein minders were ordered. And so I actually had to like limit the amount of yarn that I was offering as rewards because it was possible if I didn't do that, if I sold too much yarn to actually not raise enough money because I would still have to build 100 skein minders so yeah it was kind of kind of tricky that way how many skein minders are you uh signed up to build now that your kickstarter's closed um 70 so then you'll have inventory of 30 which is a far more handleable number. Exactly.

People may buy those as they hear about your Kickstarter because you had kind of a rush at the last few days. Yeah, yeah. And exactly, those are my thoughts exactly. I was, I basically, in my own mind, I was like, you know, if I get orders for 60 to 70 of these and the rest is yarn, that will work out. I can carry inventory for an extra 30 or so. Some of those will sell by the time the first batch are delivered. I basically thought that I could sell the remainder within the first year. And that was kind of my goal for being able to

just roll over that inventory. But yeah, there was kind of this rush at the end. And I think it was definitely helped by the fact that one of my backers contacted me when I got to about $35,000. And they offered to help out the campaign a little bit more. And it was interesting. We had a very candid conversation about the cost of carrying inventory and things like that. And they basically asked me, like, what what do you need in order for this campaign to succeed? And at the 35K mark, I said, well, like, even if the rest of the money for this campaign showed up in a bubble, you know, I wouldn't want to, it wouldn't make sense to still build 100 of them because, you know, I would be carrying then, like, I would only have orders

for 30 and I would be carrying 70 of them. I said, but if, you know, if the campaign was at 50K and I had orders for about 60 to 70, then it probably would make sense to build that 100. And so they said, like, okay, so, you know, basically, if you were, like, 15 short of your goal, then it would still kind of make sense to build them. And I said, yeah, yeah. And they said, well, you're 30 short of your goal now so i'd like to offer you know new backers basically the chance to um basically the chance to kind of double their money on the campaign and they offered to match the pledges that came in from there until the goal wow so yeah npr sort of. It's a very NPR sort of thing.

It's not a very Kickstarter sort of thing. Yeah, I don't think I've ever... One of my friends texted me later after the campaign update came out and she was like, what are you, NPR? Yeah, exactly. I was like, I guess I am NPR right now. But yeah, it was awesome. And it was a it was awesome. And it was, it's, you know, it was a really generous offer.

I, I personally, it is my goal to pay them back from the sales of the, you know, of the rest of the skein minders that, that are going to be built. So, because, you know, I, they made it happen, but, but once the rest of that inventory is sold, then I will actually have, you know, have that money. And so, and, you know, I just like, I just, I really want the Skainminder to be a business that stands on its own, basically. So who was it who matched the pledges? It was one of my backers. I can't say anymore. It was somebody who just really wanted the campaign to succeed. So, yeah.

But they didn't want N-Skinminders for themselves? that are buying these, well, most of them are buying one and then a few of them are buying two or three. Most of the hand dyers out there now, you know, it just depends upon the volume that they're doing. But I would say that most that are doing a significant volume that are supporting themselves solely on yarn sales, they have like somewhere between two to four winders. I'm still boggled by the whole, we're going to match this, but we don't want any additional goodies. Yeah, it was, as I say, it was a generous offer. I mean, it was a generous offer.

I mean, it's an angel investment sort of offer. It is an angel investment, yes. It is a super backer angel investment kind of offer, and I'm super thankful for it. Well, I think that's cool that Kickstarter isn't this rigid thing where you put up a project and you either get the money or you don't. And if you don't get it then you crawl away you know and hide it seems like this is okay you're on the edge and let's do a hybrid model where you know somebody puts up temporary bridge funds yeah basically and you even said if you didn't quite make it you were still going going to manufacture the product, maybe in smaller number.

Right, exactly. Yeah, the pricing of the product would have had to go up by a lot if the campaign didn't fund and I had to build them in smaller batches. So that was really the incentive for getting the campaign funded was just to keep the price of it as the price of it as low as it could be. But, um, but yeah, it was, it was an awesome offer and I'm, I am super thankful and lucky to be able to take advantage of it. And, um, it really, it, it was amazing people's response to it. Like at first, when they first came up with it, I, I kind of was like, hmm, I don't know. And I called a friend of mine and I'm like, you know, I don't know about this. Does it sound gimmicky or weird or what? I'm kind of struggling here. And she said, you know, I think it's awesome if you were just some sort of random campaign that I was contributing to. And that news came in, I would

be super excited for you. I would be thrilled that there was somebody that, you know, believed that much in the product. Um, and I would be, it would really inspire me to try to contribute more or to pledge if I hadn't already pledged. And I said, all right, well, that's, you know, that's fair. And, um, and also at that point, I really, I had come to terms with the fact that it wasn't going to fund. I mean, I wasn't going to stop trying to get it to fund until the end, but, um, I, you know, when I had weeks of a, a very flat, very flat campaign curve there, and I just, I figured that the market was just too small to support it. And so I was like, well, I don't really have anything to lose at this point. Might as well go for it.

With five days left, you wrote a blog post about the white elephant, the whispers of what if it didn't fund, being up front with this is why I chose and this is what I did. And it was a very, I don't want to say brave, but it was a very, you know, engineering approach to this sort of thing. Look, here are the numbers. It's how it works. Yeah. Yeah. And I think, you know, for people like me and for a lot of engineers, we're in manufacturing every day. We just, we know how manufacturing works. We have a very, you know, we have to deal with economies of scale and price breaks and manufacturing costs like every single day. And so all of that kind of stuff is just normal to us and completely intuitive.

But, you know, manufacturing something for the first time, because hand dyed yarn is actually a form of manufacturing. But, you know, for people who are doing that going through the process for the first time, or who are very familiar with that process, but haven't necessarily applied it to, you know, this electronics thing, I think it's really helpful to spell all that out so that people can see why I made the choices that I made. And also, you know, I didn't want people to think that I was just like, I don't know, increasing the price out of spite if the Kickstarter didn't fund or something, you know, because that's definitely not, that definitely is not it. I really wanted to be able to make it and sell it for like as inexpensively as I could basically, while still actually fairly paying me for my time and, you know, and for the final assembly and test and things like that. But it just, I think that it's, especially if you're not in manufacturing, if you haven't dealt with electronics manufacturing before in particular, the price increase, the cost increase when you start dipping underneath that hundred

number is so big, like your cost curve just goes up tremendously, that that is not necessarily something that is intuitive or really well understood by people who aren't in that industry. So I think, yeah, it was, so I put it out there just so people would kind of understand more what the campaign was about and what I was trying to do with it. Do you think people get a little too hung up on the whole, your Kickstarter didn't fund, therefore it's a failure, therefore you're a failure mode? I mean, it feels like there is some of that, that people don't want to talk about it because of the whole F word, the failure word.

The failure word, yeah. Well, and what I kept telling myself during that period of time is, you know, the product itself is not a failure. I'm quite confident in that. I have, you know, 10 of them out in the wild with dyers who absolutely love them. And if I tried to take their skein minders away for them, they would fight kicking and screaming. I mean, they just, they're like, this is such a big difference in my workflow that I never want to go back to the old way of winding ever again. So I know it's a good idea. I know it's a good product. What I didn't know is if the market would support a run of that many. And so I tried to just keep it,

I tried to keep a very like impersonal look of it, even though I'm, you know, totally emotionally invested in it. So it's really hard to kind of separate yourself out for this, from this project that has been your baby for like the past year that you've worked so hard on, you know, but, um, but I just tried to keep a very cool, cool head about it and keep reminding myself that like the product itself is not a failure. If the Kickstarter doesn't fund, it's just that the market isn't big enough to support it at that level. So, um, and, and so I think that really helped with writing that blog post and just planning out what plan B would be because, um, because I still had plans to continue with it, basically. I still had plans to continue

the project. It just wouldn't be quite at the same scale. And doing your doldrums, for lack of other words. No, it is a good word for them. You became a staff pick. And when I had talked to you before that, you looked at another project that was sort of yarn related and said, I wonder how they're a staff pick. And then three days later, you were. And I was like, huh, I wonder. How does that work? It's all because of you. I doubt that.

It is all because of you because you sent me that link to the spinning wheel, right? To the electric eel wheel. And it was, the thing that was interesting about that, I mean, not only is their project a kind of cool project, it's like, oh my gosh, there's somebody else doing something with like, you know, kind of automation and electronics and yarn. This is great. Now there are two of you. Yeah. All two of you. Yeah, welcome to all two of us. No, there are a couple other people that make, well, you know, they're the winder manufacturers as well. And then there

are a couple other people that make like motorized spinning wheels as well. But yeah, it was interesting because, you know, as I mentioned, Ravelry is a great social media site, but it's still hard to get the word out about projects like this. And I didn't see it talked about on any of the spinning forums on Ravelry. Like, you were the person that brought it to my attention, and I thought, wow, this is kind of weird that this non-yarn person has told me about this thing that I should already know about. Right. And, um, and so seeing that they were a staff pick was basically just kind of inspiring for me because I thought like, wow, well here, here are two of us, you know, I'm doing something that's not that much different from what they're doing. Uh, granted it is more of a niche because their product is going directly to consumers, basically, whereas mine is more of a business product. But I thought, hey, if they can do it, maybe there's hope for me.

So, you know, so I wrote in. There's a Kickstarter has an email address for pitching them, basically, and for telling them your story. And so I wrote them and I told them your story and so i i wrote them and i told them the story behind the skein minder and um the problem that it was solving and how it was bringing automation and technology to this niche industry that didn't have very much of that and uh you know that it was super cool to see that they had already, you know, made this other thing that was kind of similar, a staff pick. And there definitely has been a lot more interest in, I think there's just kind of been a resurgence in crafts in general, definitely knitting lately.

So it was exciting to see them kind of supporting that. And yeah, then like the next day, they were like, congratulations, you're a staff pick. I was like, oh, awesome. Great. Thank you. Did that make much of an impact, really? You know, it is hard to say. It definitely, definitely one skein minder backer, like a backer of the actual device itself

I believe found out about me just from browsing Kickstarter and I think that the staff pic does help with that because you'll just pop up a little bit more in the featured spots within the different categories

so you know I think it definitely did make a difference in the featured spots within the different categories. So I think it definitely did make a difference. How much, it's really hard to gauge. But I do think that it helps add a little bit of legitimacy, I would say, to a campaign like mine. Because they do see thousands and thousands of campaigns. And, you know, you have to figure that something that they're going to make a staff pick has to meet sort of a bare minimum of professionalness. You know, it can't be, I mean, you see a lot of campaigns that are just kind of like, hey, give me money for this thing

that I want to do. And, you know, and sometimes those fund and sometimes they don't. But potato salad guy ruined it for a lot of people. Do you know how many people are now searching for money in order to make the perfect carrot cake and other random, you've got to be kidding me things? I forgot about the potato salad. Yeah, you know, I was thinking about that earlier today that like I wonder how much Kickstarter's brand sort of suffered from that and stuff because I do feel that lately, and it's probably more because more skepticism about Kickstarter campaigns lately and about how just like, oh, anybody can do a Kickstarter campaign and like, you know, raise money for whatever thing. And yes, that's true. Anybody can certainly create one. But I think when you look at a campaign and when you read through a campaign, it's pretty obvious who has spent some serious time and planning on it versus people who kind of haven't and are doing it just for, you know, I would say that I, I did have to answer

some pokey proddy questions about, you know, the campaign and about how much I was trying to raise and things like that. And, and that's fine. I expect to, I expect to answer them. Um, you know, if I weren't able to answer them well, then, you know, you probably shouldn't fund me. It seems like there's a gray area too, though, where the campaign might be well set up, they might have a good story, and then I guess this goes back to a lot of the negative things I see about Kickstarter fall into kind of two camps. One is people who don't understand what it's for,

and they think, well, I gave to this Kickstarter project, therefore I'm an investor, and therefore I do something above and beyond the rewards that were signed up for um that's a fundamental misunderstanding of how kickstarter works and what it's intended to do but the other camp i think is more serious is the people who do fund uh kickstarter projects and they succeed but the execution is so poor that they never get the rewards they were promised or the product just doesn't happen after the fact and there's nothing that

Kickstarter can really do to improve that except to kind of continue to vet the projects beforehand and require more information but you know which they don't do if you're somebody who's just coming to Kickstarter and say oh that looks cool and you it, and then you never get it,

or it's two years late, which I've seen on a couple of things, that's going to be a real damper on ever coming back or trusting anyone. Well, Indiegogo recently sent me a survey, and of the three projects I've done on Indiegogo where I've given money, I've gotten zero of the rewards. So it wasn't very smart of them to send me a survey. Well, Indiegogo is even worse.

Exactly. I mean, they'll allow perpetual motion machines to be projects. So I don't know how to fix that other than to not allow, I mean, Kickstarter obviously can't predict whether or not you're going to execute. Right. And that is certainly still a risk for my backers, right? Like right now is probably the riskiest point for them. But you did ask for quite a lot of money. I mean, I could see somebody with a similar product asking for a lot less

because they didn't realize just how difficult manufacturing is. That's another thing that I see a lot too. Is campaigns that have too low of a total. And that always really kind of raises a big red flag for me, where especially because I kind of know what manufacturing costs are like, when I look at something and I'm like, really, you're going to make this amazing thing where I, you know, I know you have like custom molds that are being machined for that part, and you're only raising

$10,000, and your molds are going to be more expensive than that. And I think, I don't know, I think most of what I've seen that are in that camp actually tend to be the venture-backed projects, where they have some other source of funding. They're putting it on Kickstarter to gain, you know, just to get the word out and to generate interest and excitement. But their campaign goal doesn't necessarily reflect what it actually takes to build what they're doing from scratch because they're already venture backed. So they're actually not trying to raise the entire amount of money that they need to do their product. So that's like another thing entirely. But what I tried to do to reassure people that, yes, I was actually capable of delivering on that was to do the beta program first and to have pointed to that

in the campaign so that people could see that like, oh wow, she has actually already made 10 of these and they've been being used for months and the dyers who are using them are saying really great things about it. Yeah, I think that's a great approach is demonstrate. We've already done this. We just need to ramp up from the prototypes to the final production. Exactly, exactly. And Kickstarter does have some rules still more than Indiegogo, where you have to be really honest about the current state of your production, basically, or your design and development.

And you're actually not, you're not supposed to be able to sell more than one of a product that hasn't at least had a prototype built. And in order to find that information, you kind of have to dig pretty far in the Kickstarter rules and things like that. But they do make a distinction that for projects that are development projects, you're not allowed to offer as a reward a copy of your product because at the start of your campaign, the product doesn't exist yet. So you're only supposed to be able to sell copies

of your product for products that do exist. I see. Yeah. So if you're doing it like a, I guess that means if you're doing a development project you don't have anything you can give out as many teachers as you want it's kind of phase one give us the money to actually build this thing and design it but that's okay but if you actually have a prototype

or something that is complete-ish then you can sell products I didn't know that. That's interesting. Yeah. I can't remember exactly where on the Kickstarter website I read that, but it was somewhere either maybe in the creator handbook or in the FAQ where it does talk about that a little bit. You were talking, going back to venture capitalists

and going back to matching. It's made me start to think about, we have had some guests who had like $10,000 levels, even though their product was $100, that were essentially invest in us. Right. And that was different. They were like, uh, cut in line to, to hear our pitch, things like that.

You get to talk to us first about licensing or something like that. Yeah. Um, so Kickstarter doesn't allow you to actually like give away shares of your company. Right. Um, and which is good.

That would kind of defeat the purpose of Kickstarter. Um, but, uh, yeah, you can, you can do that, I guess. But it's weird. It seems like, and I don't want to accuse anybody of anything, but having those big buckets seems like it's a way to game the system. Especially if you already know that somebody's going to come by and do that. You've got five people lined up.

It's like, well, we can make this go way past our limit, so we look like one of those really big blowout Kickstarters, and then that's when things really get rolling, when people feel like there's a lot of momentum behind it. Yeah, a lot of those are the ones that in 24 hours they fund. Yeah, so they have a limit of,'re raising 500 or $50,000. And then, you know, they, they're at half a million within a week. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it is frustrating for, you know, me as like a little Kickstarter peon to see those giant

campaigns and see that process happening and be like, but it's just a different thing. I mean, you know, all sorts of different people in different types of companies in different phases can use Kickstarter. So, you know, my particular use of Kickstarter is just a lot different than that kind of thing I think is some sometimes gets lost to on backers and people who are thinking of becoming backers because um you know the ones that get a lot of the media attention are those huge campaigns it makes sense yeah is there something you wish someone had told you when you first started considering the kickstarter or when you first put up the Kickstarter? Hmm. Um, I did get some, I did get some like good advice from people, uh, for people all along the way. But, um, I think I, I'm thinking back to, um, Barbara who did the yarn over truck. Um, I believe it was a Kickstarter campaign. It was either that or Indiegogo, but I'm pretty sure it was Kickstarter. But, um, you know,ogo, but I'm pretty sure it was Kickstarter.

But, you know, she raised the money to basically do this yarn truck. And they were successful. And now they have this yarn truck and they travel all over California and, you know, sell yarn at different locations. And they do, like, yarn nights at breweries sometimes and things like that. All sorts of, like like really cool stuff. But she was talking to me about her campaign and she was just like, it will be the biggest roller coaster of your life. You will be like ecstatic one day and like crying the next day. And you, by the time the campaign is over, you will be totally sick about talking about your product. And she was pretty much mostly dead right about all of that. I'm not super sick of talking about my product right now because it was successful. But I have to say in the middle know, it was kind of stalled and in the doldrums, it was, um, it was just really, uh,

it was hard to get the motivation to just keep emailing people and keep reaching out to people and, you know, keep organizing advertising campaigns and keep talking to people about it and keep positive, um, even when things weren't looking so good so um yeah but i don't know is there anything else that like i wish i had known beforehand um well let's get back to that because you you brought up something that i i'm curious about um you were short 10k with 24 hours to go. And since I had only occasionally dropped in to look, I figured you'd been short for a while. I didn't quite realize that you had a nice little bump at the end that went really well. Yeah.

But I wondered, were you tempted to put in your own money at that point? Was there a point it was like, oh, no, we're funding funding if it cost me my last five hundred dollars we are funding darn it i'm not sure you're allowed to do that well yeah so you you are i you are technically not allowed to do that well i mean it's a waste as a creator of course there are probably ways around that i'm sure for for the creative person. So, hey, mom, could you please call? All right. Seriously. You know, so at that point in time, there was actually enough momentum that when I was only 10K away, that was when I actually thought, oh, my God, I think this might actually fund. Wow. Um,

so at that point I wasn't, um, and, and frankly, like, um, yeah, that, that assumes that I have the spare, spare change to put into it. And really I, I used all of my own money almost to do all of the development up until now. So I have about, including running the Kickstarter campaign, like through today, I would say that there are about five to six full-time months of work that have happened on the Skainminder. And that's both engineering time and marketing and promotion time and all sorts of stuff. And so that's time that I basically wasn't doing any consulting work and was using my own funds to support myself. And, you know, that's, that's basically what I have put into the campaign or what I've put into the development of the Skainminder. And, um, that was pretty much the extent of what I was able to personally, to personally do. Um, I did have, so the, the people who bought beta units, they did buy them.

They bought them for a discounted price that was not intended to ever break even on them because, you know, unless I charged an arm and a leg, suss out that price point for the Skainminder and to also make it a tool that they it to somebody, then it might not have to work as well as if they had paid for it. And so I really wanted to make sure that this was a tool that, um, I could sell at the price that I would have to sell in order, you know, for it to be economically viable and that would um and that would absolutely provide that much um uh just that much benefit people appreciate things that they pay for what's that people appreciate things that they pay for and they have more expectations of it you're right they would might not have considered it a product that should be supported if they hadn't paid for it. Exactly. Exactly. And I wanted to have that kind of scrutiny on those beta units too. You know, I wanted them to feel like they should really work and that they should be a valuable addition to their business. So, because if there's any doubt

about that, then I wanted to be able to address it at that point in time before I had even gone through and done the Kickstarter campaign and thought about producing more of them. This is so hard because I'm just thinking now, you're saying you spent about five or six months of your own time. And we haven't mentioned you're a double-E consultant, so it's not like your time is cheap. you know some amount of money on top of that and you know i've seen people

go after these kickstarters and say well you you made a hundred thousand dollars you know you're just going to spend that on you know fast cars and champagne it's like well no after this campaign is done i've done everything i'll have made negative $25,000 or worse. So it's like, yeah, I've made $10 actually. That's not how businesses work. The top line revenue is not what I actually get. Oh, you had a good study recently, you were reading me. Oh, it was about what most Americans think corporations' profit margins are. Let's torture Kerry.

Kerry, how much do you think most Americans would say is the average profit? The average profit that most Americans think that corporations make. Yeah. I don't know. I'm going to guess something that's

outrageously high and ludicrous, like 75%. Okay, as an engineer, you probably can analyze this a little bit more. How much do you think profits corporations make? Man, I mean, I would say, after everything is said and done, I would say 15%. So most Americans say 36%. Too little high there.

Okay, that's good. But, you know, at least they're more realistic than you expected. That is good. The actual average was three. No, the actual average was seven. Six or seven. Yeah, it was six. So I think the mean was six and the median was seven.

So you're not super off But most Americans are pretty far off But that's the idea you have You're selling something so therefore you must be making a lot of money Yeah, there is definitely sometimes Yeah, there are definitely sometimes You come across that kind of attitude. Um, and, and, you know, frankly, the, the best thing that I can do is just help people understand what my costs and expenses are and what they look like. Um, you know, I don't want to be

like giving people my detailed fine, you know, business financials, you know, I don't want to be like giving people my detailed, you know, business financials. You know, I don't want to be showing them like all my Excel spreadsheets and like putting all my dirty laundry out there. know like in in a percentage sense like what what can we what can you expect like what what are your what are your costs for this campaign um like what are you know what are your percentages there and um you know what's in labor and manufacturing and shipping and it's not just for the people who are purchasing or funding campaigns but people who are contemplating starting a campaign. It's really helpful. This is not a goldmine. It's not the jackpot.

It is not a license to print. So you are an electrical engineering consultant. Can you talk about any of the projects you've worked on? Yeah, I mean, I can talk about them of the projects you've worked on um yeah i mean i can i can talk about them in in general kind of senses um most of them have to do with with unmanned aircraft so that's um that is the main focus of uh my whole my experience and what i've what i've done um working full-time and then you know working as a consultant after that I basically have made all sorts of electronics for small unmanned aircraft small being sizes that you can hand

launch or bungee launch that don't generally like require runways or things like that so for commercial applications military military? Mostly military. So like the backpack launch surveillance things that infantry would carry? Yeah, exactly. You weren't there, but Carrie and I discovered that we actually had people in common due to a past project I worked on. One that you actually went to. What? Remember the desert, the tortoises? Oh, okay. One that you actually went to. What? You remember the desert, the tortoises? Oh, God.

Yep, a lot of spending weeks in the desert. All you know is a nice, clear airspace. Melting shoes. That was a different trip. Yeah, totally. But it's interesting, though though because that kind of thing like the electronics experience that i have can be applicable to just a ton of different systems um you know it's basically anything with like microprocessors and sensors yeah and any control

system i mean you can if you can fly something that's pretty much one of the hardest control problems yeah well i wasn't writing the software i wasn't doing flight control software i was i'm mainly a hardware person with like a little bit of microprocessor know-how but um but yeah and how do you find contracts do you work remotely um yeah i work remotely i'm i'm in san luis obispo now and, you know, I do, I just do most of the work myself at home. Mostly just word of mouth, friends and friends of friends. And every now and then I'll get a hit off of LinkedIn. Yeah, mostly just word of mouth mouth a lot of people ask us how we go about consulting and that that's something that i have always tried to make people understand is that we don't get a

lot of business even from the podcast although that sometimes picks up but we get most of our business from people we've worked with so the only way we could do this was if we were in industry for a while and got all of those contacts. Yeah, absolutely. And actually, like, and definitely the more that time goes on, the more that those contacts have worked for different companies. So, so it actually, I think that like, actually, the older I get, the more opportunities I have because there are just more people and companies that are in my kind of extended network. Yeah, and the network expands on its own without you actually doing any work. Yeah, it does. People move around.

Exactly. As people move, as people change jobs. Yep. Yep. You also have another business, the Alpenglow Yarn. Is that right? Alpenglow? Alpenglow. Yes. And this is where you went from industry to having a yarn business. I wonder, was there burnout involved? Yeah, there might have been a little bit of that involved. Yes. Yeah. I had, um, I had been working, uh,

as an engineer on, you know, on autopilots basically for about 10 years. And, um, and I was just like, I was just ready for something a little bit different. Um, I was a little burnt out on electronics. I was a little burnt out on, um, on that particular type of engineering. And I, I wanted to do something on my own. Um, I just wanted to, you know, see about starting a little business and, um, do something that was like a little more retail oriented rather than like military or business to business kind of stuff. So, um, and, you know, at the same point in time, I just kind of fell down this rabbit hole of yarn obsession. I know this probably sounds really weird to most of your listeners. So like yarn people,

people care about yarn. Oh, yarn is yarn is very serious business. But,, like I got into crocheting and knitting and, you know, just found this world of color and textures and interesting stitch patterns and a whole different way of constructing things and making things that, you know, definitely have similarities with what we do in engineering, but is so much more tactile and like a lot more creative. And that just really, that kind of thing really just spoke to me at that point in time. And so, yeah, so I went into hand dyeing yarn. Why dye yarn and not like knit things or be a pattern designer or something like that? I took a class on... Chemistry is fun. kind of even more obscure than just being a yarn dyer is being somebody who actually uses traditional like wood chips and roots and bugs and things like

that to make your color. So that was really fascinating to me. Yeah. Bugs. Bugs. They make a great like pinks and reds. They're, they're cochineal.

I was going to say the violet comes from snails yes the um yeah of course bugs old murex just yeah this image of like one of those wine barrels that people stomp their feet and it's full of bugs instead of grapes bugs instead sorry thanks for that it's not quite like that they actually kind of look like these little rock chips almost they kind of look like mica it's not making it better but they're they're tiny little tiny little dried bugs and they actually live on prickly pear cacti so if you ever see prickly pear cacti that has these sort of like fuzzy cocoon like things on them um that's from the coach neil bug yeah so was making your hobby into a day job a good idea did it decrease your uh

love of the hobby or did it enrich it you know um i do think it was a good idea. It's not easy. And you definitely do, you know, there are definitely times where I get a little bit sick of yarn. I will absolutely admit that. But overall, I think it's definitely worth it because it's very personally fulfilling. And it's also really fun because when you're at shows and when you're talking to people, people are really happy to be there and excited to be there. And they're learning new things. And you're interacting with them at this point of time when they're like on this sort

of like little mini vacation and um it's just it's really it's really fun so yeah so i i have i think it's definitely like personally worthwhile so sorry go ahead i was gonna say it's definitely hard to make a living but it's very personally fulfilling. So along those lines, having done this once, do you have other ideas in the back of your mind? Would you do this again for a different craft-related project? You should ask her that after she's actually had to ship all of them. Well, I've only got it here now. It's just beginning.

I do have ideas for more devices, for sure. And I would like to eventually have a little line of devices that are both tools that help people produce yarn more easily and are also just kind of like fun. I have a few ideas for things that are more kind of end consumer, knitter and spinner related that I think would just be kind of fun to do. So, yeah. It seems like a really cool intersection of technology and craft. And it seems to me that there would be some elements within those communities that would actually push back on that. I don't know if that's been your experience at all. Technophile? Technophobes?

I don't want to say Luddites exactly, but, you know, people who are doing... No, that's what you meant. ...medical techniques. Yeah. Yeah, no, and there are. There are certainly people who... There are certainly shops that are...

Their main focus is to do things as traditionally as possible. And, um, and it's just, it's a very individual thing. Um, like for example, all of the yarn that I use that I buy to dye is machine spun. It is all, you know, produced at different textile mills around the country. And there are some people who sell their own hand spun yarn, and it is important to them to preserve a handmade process basically from the beginning to the end. And of course, their yarn is going to be a lot more expensive because there has been a lot more time that goes into making this yarn. But so somebody like that may not want to buy a skein minder. And that's fine.

There are, you know, it's a varied industry. People like to do different things in order to get to their end product. And that's great. I totally support removing all the boring parts. Anything where you have to watch something for an hour, that's, yeah. Yeah, I haven't, from anybody who's already using motorized winders, I have not gotten resistance from them. Do it once, get your merit merit badge and then buy a skin minder

yeah they're like please please make my process better please please relieve me from being changed to this winder so that i can like actually be useful with my time instead of like just watching a rotation counter count up yeah so is skin minder open source? It is not open source at this point in time. I'm debating actually making half of it open source. And it's something that I want to look into when I have a little bit more time, like after I've delivered those first units. But mostly, I just don't... The people who are using the Skainm um, they just want a device that works. They are focused on their yarn business and they're not necessarily, um, technical in this, in an electronics and, um, programming type of way. Um, they just want to buy something that works and and does this job um but what i think would be really useful for other makers and hobbyists is um basically the half of the skein minder that is the switchable

power outlet but which also provides five volts for a microprocessor um because there are a couple of things out there right now that are just like the switchable outlets. Like there's the power switch tail and stuff like that. Um, they use a, um, like a traditional relay, uh, electromechanical relay. Um, I'm using a solid state relay. Um, but their device also, they don't, um, supply, they don't supply 5 volts from 120-volt wall voltage. So you need another power supply if you're going to hook up your Arduino to one of them. So I think making something that's kind of like a little integrated box that also provides the 5-volt power would be kind of handy. Or an electric imp and you can Wi-Fi it. Yeah, there you go.

There you go. Alright, well I think we have kept you a little longer than I intended. Christopher, do you have any last questions? That was my last question. Sorry.

Carrie, do you have any last thoughts or advice you'd like to leave us with? No, not that I can think of. Like, I guess I would just say to anybody else who's thinking about doing like a weird niche hardware project out there that yes, you should do it. Go for it. The worst thing that can happen is that you'll have to make it in smaller batches and your thing will cost more. Or the worst thing that can happen is you have to make it in a much larger batch than you intended. Yes.

Yeah, yeah, I guess. I can't think of, I just can't see that as being the worst. I mean, it has its own unique challenges and a host of problems for sure, but like those are good problems to have. All right, then my guest has been Carrie Sundra, developer of Skeenminder, electrical engineer for hire, and owner of Alpenglow Yarn.

Thank you also to Christopher for co-hosting and producing. If you'd like to say hello to any of us, email show at embedded.fm or hit the contact link on embedded.fm. Thank you for listening. I have a final thought to leave you with this week from Susan B. Anthony. Modern invention has banished the spinning wheel, and the same law of progress makes the woman of today a different woman from her grandmother.