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Are we now losers? NO, No We Are NOT Losers.

  • Life, Rules, a Journey and Staying Positive.
  • How to build a natural following from Social Networks.
  • New to our Blog?
  • Why we went on a crowdfunding site to start with Failing on Kickstarter to raise enough money.
  • We wanted to raise how much MONEY on Kickstarter?
  • Positive Kickstarter experiences.
  • Crowdfunding forced us to build things that we needed anyways.
  • Crowdfunding whose fault is it anyways.
  • Come along on our let’s get some chips in the bin journey.
  • How we make precision machined parts.
  • What our first YouTube videos will be about and what we are making.
  • Thank you to our supporters.

How will we survive a crowdfunding failure as PRODUCT designers and makers?

Life’s Rule ONE

Never give up, never say this is too much for me, and never blame others for your own misgivings. Learn from your errors and move forward, do not focus on failure, rather learn from it to be stronger going forward.

How we can Continue on our Journey

We just needed to rethink, refocus back onto what we do already, and machine precision aerospace metal parts into perfect products.

Stay Positive

This endeavor of trying the crowdfunding project campaign backers approach was just one of many failures (we like to call challenges) we have endured over our 25 years of working together and like in the past, we will prevail.

We just needed to get back on track and continue our journey to share in the making of precision machined products and build a following of great people excited to see and learn from the two of us as we provide the instruction and sharing of our journey along the way of making GREAT stuff for others.

We must Build Awareness of our Journey

We will raise a natural and not so purchased following like we did for the crowdfunding campaign.  Awareness, develop, earn, interact with our following through social media, all while making and sharing great precision machined products being made in limited quantities. 

We will then share the making through videos and images with those that seek to interact as we make great American Machined goods that are unique.  These are the true experiences from a pair of Kickstarter and Indiegogo makers who failed on their first Kickstarter project.

Learn why we failed and what we began doing next.

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BUT FIRST

Are you NEW to our blog?

If you are new to our Active Atom Precision Machining blog, then we first would like to share who we are and what we are about, and the location of where we make things, even the real reason why we tried to launch a crowdfunding campaign in the first place?

WHO:

Lance Conway and Patrick Lara are childhood friends of 40 plus years and we started our business 25 plus years ago when we launched our small company.

Learn more about the founders and our family ties to making things here in America.

http://www.activeatom.com/company-our-history.php

WHAT:

We are Designers, Machinists, Programmers, Watchmakers and a whole lot more, it is all the parts that we applied to make a product and offer it on Kickstarter, and then we had it fail before the launch even started. (It pays to do your research)

We are now going to make some really great precision machined products.

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WHERE:

Located in California, Southern Section, Inland Region, Mojave Desert, San Bernardino County, Morongo Basin, And Rural Town of Yucca Valley.

Learn what makes our location unique and how our surroundings and culture play a roll in the making of our machined products.

http://www.activeatom.com/location-active-atom.php

Why are we here?

We are documenting our journey of living and working together.

Sharing the good and the bad of what 40 years of being friends is like and then sharing the transition into business in 1993 while watching the world create great things.

We are going to share our skills, knowledge and continual learning advancements, the actual work we perform on our products step buy step, so that we can share our products through social media.

Basically we want to share how we make things.  We are asking people to come along on this journey of two best friends living and working in a rural California Desert town, a working and living place, we call home.

Why Kickstarter?

We wanted to bring 1 of our 34 drawings created from our two decades of sketches to life. We wanted to make things for others designed and made 100% by the two of us for others to enjoy and share with their friends and families.

We wanted to raise the money to buy a couple of American Made machines that could make enough of the product to share with others, as campaign backers they would have received a product in exchange for backing our Kickstarter project.

This was a way for the two of us to depart making parts to blueprints specifications for the watch and timing device industries. This was a path to bring our own creative drawings to life.

Bringing our precision machined aerospace metal products to life was our goal and ultimately placing these perfected products into people’s hands was our dream.

It was also a way for the two of us to make a line of products from our decades of drawings faster then the way we are now going to take, but we will have a lot more fun sharing our making with others going the traditional makers route.

We Failed to Raise Money on Kickstarter

We learned while building up the Kickstarter pre-launch awareness campaign, a campaign that ultimately would build a great crowdfunding launch day and first week event on the Kickstarter platform. Then we came to the realization that the Kickstarter project was going to fail on our first attempt, so we stopped before the campaign launch.

These crowdfunding campaigns can be tough, especially when you think you know it all, like we did prior to launch. It was homework that proved us wrong and shed light on what it really costs to launch a crowdfunding campaign.

Failing to get traction on a crowdfunding project through either Kickstarter or Indiegogo is really common.  Crowdfunding sites require a lot of traffic brought to the platform by your own efforts.

Failure is still no Excuse

There is more to making a great product then just making the product, it can only be great if many others (people you have never met from many walks of life) see the product as great as well.

Finding the positives in our failures to restructure from.

We do have This going for Us

People loved the product, the workmanship, the selection of choices and the projected pricing of our product.  Failing to get traction from enough backers and have a successful crowdfunding campaign became too costly however.

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We were headed down a road too tough to concur.

We needed to raise at least $400,000.00 dollars, but actually needed to raise closer to $600,000.00 possibly $800,000.00 dollars.
To raise that amount of funds we were going to need to spend, and spend to us big money on the awareness of our project pre-launch signups through Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google, YouTube and a few others in the way of advertising.

In addition we contacted 12 crowdfunding campaign websites, marketplaces, and other places where crowdfunding backers hangout and also advertise on these platforms.

All of these things came in at around $30,000.00 to $50,000.00 dollars that needed to be spent.

This amount comes after we spent $200,000.00 and 1.5 years designing, programming and making the prototypes, building the tooling, setting up our machine shop to support the making all in-house, etc.

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Things that we Needed to Build With or Without a Crowdfunding Project

We also knew how to build Internet interactions ourselves, like building our website, SEO/SEM and an online store, a landing page, advertising campaign ads, email marketing list and campaign awareness updates, pre-launch and launch press releases and a blog ourselves.

We also built the correct social network locations and presentation on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and around 6 other social locations to be sure we covered them all.

Crowdfunding Failure is whose Fault?

The fault lies directly onto the two of us, it is not Kickstarters or Indiegogo’s fault.  It is not the backer’s fault that our campaign failed to get launched.  It is or fault that we needed to raise enough awareness and ultimately the money to get our project going. We just needed to raise too much money and those odds through a crowdfunding are not real great.

You need to weigh the product you are offering as the crowdfunding campaign reward to the backers against the number of dollars you will need to make these products and make them in a timely and acceptable manner to please these backers, this made our road to take too much of an expensive challenge.

Crowdfunding Additional Factor

We are no longer young, too much risk taking was a factor in our decisions.  We needed to raise too much money.  The dollars needed to be spent to rise that much money looked like it would take too much to launch on Kickstarter.

The Kickstarter and Indiegogo crowdfunding project websites are no longer new and though they are still somewhat exciting to backers, the excitement has faded a bit.  This means to us that making the campaign platforms useful to people that have ideas, prototypes and a direction towards success is still there, as a place for campaign project makers to send backers for a product that is not produced as of yet, but offered to backers as a reward for funding the project in advance.

However the cost of entry is high, for projects like ours anyway, as being a backer and observer for more then 6 years on Kickstarter, things have changed drastically as to the money investment levels needed to raise the crowdfunding money we were seeking.

We could not or were unwilling to hand over so much money in advance to get a successful Kickstarter campaign launched and funded.  We will place the crowdfunding campaign on a back burner for now, never say never remember Rule ONE from above.

Let’s Move Forward, Let’s Get Some Chips In The Bin!

Join these Two Desert Dwellers on our Maker’s Journey

We will begin something new a product we will be sharing through YouTube and the other social networks at the same time.  We need you to come along with us, join these two best friends as they begin work on a new smaller product, that we can produce with the vintage precision machines we have already, these products we can offer through our online store after they are built.

Join us by signing up for our newsletter or follow us on Instagram or YouTube and see if what we are building and sharing is of any interest to you. Come be friends with these two desert dwellers living, working and having a great time together in the Mojave Desert of Southern California.

Learn how to Make a Machined Product?

We have really great vintage micromachines, a small CNC machine, a larger lathe and the skills of micromachining and microfinishing that has made these two guys a modest living over the years.

We have the tools to make perfect parts, though small, these aerospace grade metal precision machined parts can be made, though in very limited editions, as they will be a combination of machine made and hand finished each will be serial numbered to share the small quantities we will be producing.

What will our First Videos be About?

We rebuild vintage machines and tools for ourselves and our future museum, and in fact we are going to be rebuilding a few and filming the rebuilding of these vintage machines from start to finish as a way to share some of our skills through our social networking channels along the way.

Specific vintage machines we are starting to rebuild will be the featured stars in our videos.  We will share from disassembly to stripping the machines down, repainting, new bearings, seals, guides and finally the full assembly and repeatability and lubrication testing.

Please join us from the beginning, then see these machines and others we have that will begin making the actual parts we will be machining utilizing these great historic machines and ultimately offering for sale on our Active Atom online store.

Two machine rebuilds we are filming to start with.

  • Levin & Son Lathes (featuring very rare attachments not seen in use for decades)
  • Barker Milling Machine (a very rare horizontal vertical in one milling machine)

Making a few Special Products we Hope Others would like to Have

We will after the rebuilds utilize these same machines and tools to make our own parts, similar to the parts we have been making for the past 2 decades for others, only we are going to make our own parts from our own CAD Design blueprints from our decades old drawings, products that will be of the highest quality we are able to achieve.

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Thank You to Our Supporters

If you supported us on our Pre-Launch Kickstarter and Indiegogo project awareness campaigns for our first crowdfunding product please know we truly thank you for your thoughts and your efforts, it really mattered and it really inspires us and keeps us very motivated to bring you something you are going to like soon.

Whatever we make it will be made 100% by the two of us right here in this rural high desert of Southern California town.  Please know this, even though we pulled the project and are now taking this above described route shared here now, we will do our best to bring our original project back to life through an offer someday. We will never give up.

Lance and Patrick.