I haven't posted on my blog for a while, and that is mostly because I've been posting updates to my Kickstarter Campaign instead. I'll be putting up another post copying all the interesting things I've learnt from the campaign in a future post, but this post will focus on the money and time spent on this campaign.
Budget Breakdown
Now that I have completed the campaign, I'd like to share a bit more insight into where all of that Kickstarter money went.
Here's a breakdown of the money I raised:
- $10,996 raised on Kickstarter ($9,902.27 after Kickstarter Fees and failed pledges)
- Typically, you can expect about 3% of pledges to fail to collect
- $335 on Indiegogo ($295.26 after fees)
- That brings us to $10197.53 that can be used on the project.
I had invested about $3000 before the campaign for prototyping and tools (laser cutter, various other makerspace additions specifically for this project).
- Anything labelled Prototyping is money I spent before the campaign started.
- I did not really split the tools out, but most of the tools' money was spent before the campaign, with only a few tools bought during the campaign (for example, the hot air machine)
- I tried my hand at advertising for this campaign and I am not sure it went well at all. A lot of my backers seemed to come in organically through Kickstarter. The tracking was terrible, so I really have no idea if my campaign really benefitted from advertising.
I spent a total of $8,976.73 on this project which leaves me with $1,220.80 of profit from this project, though I'm pretty sure that number is lower since I might have missed out some other expenses. And there are still shipments that potentially will get lost or damaged in transit that might need reshipping.
With the cost of everything (especially shipping) going up near the end, I was starting to worry that I would not be able to cover the costs. I had exceeded my expected budget by quite a bit, but I am pretty happy that I didn't end up paying more than I raised.
Time Breakdown
I've been logging my time for quite a while, and logging the time spent on this PCB project is no exception. Since I've started on this project about a year ago, I've spent about 19 full days making the metro maps and 4 full days doing various things related to crowdfunding.
I've checked my time tracking app and I have a total of 592 hours working on this project (excluding the free labour I got from my friend soldering and packaging the MetroM units). This includes everything from the initial phase where I was designing the boards, to the part where I was soldering and packaging everything at the end. Unfortunately, I did not split it out into exactly how much time I spent doing each part.
If I were to do some quick maths, that amounts to about $2 an hour for my labour. Luckily, there is no minimum wage in Singapore, so this is a perfectly acceptable outcome.
This is unfair of course, since I am doing this for fun and I can't really consider it a job, but I just thought it was funny to think of how much my hourly "wage" would be.
Overall, this was a really fun project and I look forward to doing the next ones when I finally have the designs out, bringing all that I've learnt to the next campaign.