Category Archives: Philosophy

Crowdfunding Hits, Misses, and Lessons Learned

Posted on by
Reply

Back in November 2020, I wrote about some considerations and dramatics around crowdfunding campaigns. In this post, I’ll give you my top five and bottom five crowdfunding efforts, and maybe a lesson or two to take to the future.

This post has been sitting in my draft folder for a year now, but nothing has changed in it other than the recent time references, which I’ve left as they were in November 2020. I’ll come back with photos later, rather than putting this post off another year.

It was the best of times

My first crowdfunding campaign was the LunaTik and TikTok wrist cases for Apple’s 6th generation iPod Nano (the square one). MINIMAL Design came out with the first huge campaign in 2010, with over $942,000 in backers and a super high quality product that was delivered reasonably. My red LunaTik still sits on my desk, with a functional PRODUCT(RED) Nano in it, and a couple of years ago Scott Wilson, the founder of MINIMAL, mentioned that Apple had used his band/case as part of the prototype design and testing for the original Apple Watch. The watch has come a long way, but the product is still beautiful and functional ten years later. And they’ve come out with more products for the real Apple Watch since then.

Continue reading →

Thirty Days On The Front Lines: A return to tech support

Posted on by
1

In September 1996, I left my desk at IQuest Internet in Indianapolis for the last time. A friend from the MUDs I was on had talked me into talking to her brother, a recruiter at Taos Mountain Software, and two weeks later I had an offer, notice given for my apartment and my job, and the terrifying thought of driving 2300 miles with my possessions in a Ryder truck, my very unhappy cat in the front of the truck, and my Pontiac Grand Prix on a trailer it was too heavy for.

But on the flip side, I was getting out of the Midwest and its glorious winters, escaping a salaried position that ended up being a pay cut, and most importantly, leaving behind end-user tech support. For the next 25 years or so, I did tech support, and infrastructure/architecture/caffeine delivery systems, but for internal colleagues who were generally more aligned with my assigned priorities.

Now, I’ve gone back onto the front lines, supporting end users from around the world in several different languages (thanks to Google Translate or Bing Translate), explaining and troubleshooting and answering questions about cryptocurrency in general, Ethereum and Chia in particular, and specifically how to make them work with one of the more advanced mining pools.

As I told the owner when I started, I’ll scale back or even hand over the reigns altogether when I find something more in line with Silicon Valley expense levels, but for now, it’s an extension of what I’d been doing on Telegram since January, and it’s supplementing my coffers in the process.

I meant to write this last month, when it would have been 30 days, but the conversations get overwhelming and blog posts get distracted-from, so here we are closer to 60 days in reality.

What’s it like working for a mining pool?

Continue reading →

Robert’s Rules for Success, or at least reduced chance of failure

Posted on by
1

I’ve made a few references lately to avoiding Jurassic failures. In some tech circles, including cryptocurrency projects, it seems very popular to make bad decisions and not claim responsibility. And yes, I’ve been writing and talking and thinking a lot about crypto this year. I’m not alone, but I’m the only one on this blog who you’d be able to make that observation about.

The Jurassic reference of course is to Jeff Goldblum’s character Dr Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park.

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.

The Jurassic Park reference is a bit more universal than the one I used to use, which was to Wangdi something. I had a Nepalese classmate in college named Wangdi, and the main thing I remember of him from those years was his disc soccer/disc golf prowess. Well, that, and the time he had someone spread three soccer discs in a throw which he would normally have caught with ease, but in this case he tripped over a sprinkler head about two steps into his run and faceplanted in the quad.

  1. Don’t always do things just because you can

    Corollary: Don’t always do things just because you saw them on the Internet

2. Don’t try to start out at full speed; watch where you’re going and work your way up

Corollary: Set a reasonable plan and try to follow it. Don’t get distracted by squirrels

3. Plan to spend at least one minute for every $100 spent, learning how your item works

Corollary: If you can’t do that, don’t expect others to do it for you for free

Between these two warnings, you can take something away. First, don’t always do things just because you can (or because you saw them on the Internet). Second, don’t try to start out at full speed; watch where you’re going and work your way up.

And third is my One Percent Rule, not to be confused with Arthur Conan Doyle’s Seven Percent Solution. For every $100 you spend on an endeavour, spend at least one (1) minute learning or trying to understand it on your own before demanding help in free volunteer forums or from overworked support staff. So if you’re spending $3,000 on a GPU, but you’re not willing to spend 30 minutes learning how to use it, maybe don’t spend it. See also the first and second rules above.

Continue reading →

When is a crowdfunding project a scam, vs a normal project run by humans?

Posted on by
1

There’s a new wave of crowdfunding efforts in the last year or so, changing the dynamic in a sense. There are some reasons to be concerned about pitfalls in your crowdfunding adventure, but other reasons not to be.

Let’s take a look.

Disclosure: While I have backed over 90 crowdfunded projects across platforms (not including projects that did not “finish” and thus took none of my money) in the past 10 years, and I have had professional relationships with two of the companies mentioned here (VAVA and ZMI), nothing in this post has been reviewed or approved or otherwise influenced by them or any other company or entity. For the crowdfunding projects, they took my money like everyone else’s, and delivered the products like everyone else’s.

A not-so-brief history of crowdfunding

It used to be that a designer or developer or artist would come up with an idea they couldn’t get commercially adopted, post a crowd-funded campaign on Indiegogo or Kickstarter, and hope to make enough money to produce it on their own. This led to some amazing projects and companies.

i

Looking ahead into 2019 with rsts11

Posted on by
Reply

This is becoming somewhat of a tradition… I’ll point you toward a Tom Hollingsworth post and then figure out what I want to look back on a year from now. As long as Tom’s okay with that, I am too.

This year, Tom’s New Year’s post is about content. He seems to think 2019 is the King of Content. I’m not really sure what that means, but seeing as my blogs seem to be alternately seasonal (with most rsts11 content in the winter/spring and rsts11travel in the summer/fall), I’m hoping to get a more balanced content load out there for you this year on both blogs.

You can see the new year’s post for rsts11travel, my travel-themed blog, over on rsts11travel of course.

Looking back on 2018

Looking back on rsts11 for 2018, our top-viewed posts were a bit surprising to me.

Continue reading →