#350 – An Interview with Zach Dunham

Chris Gammell: This is The Amp Hour Podcast. Released July 3rd, 2017. Episode 350. An interview with Zach Dunham. Welcome to the Amp Hour. I'm Chris Gammell of Contextual Electronics.

Zach Dunham: And I'm Zach Dunham from Kickstarter. Welcome, Zach.

Chris Gammell: We are at Kickstarter.

Zach Dunham: Yes, we are.

Chris Gammell: Beautiful building. Very cool atrium and everything here.

Zach Dunham: Yeah, we are super lucky to inhabit this space. And yeah, it's a total pleasure to be here.

Chris Gammell: And you were going to speak up, too. And I was going to speak up, yes. And be less of a quiet talker. That's right, yeah. Well, you were just telling me about your background. So you have an interesting background. Don't you walk us back a couple years and tell us about yourself.

Zach Dunham: Sure, yeah. So I studied music in college. And I ended up playing drums professionally for the first six years after school. And like any musician trying to make it in New York, I had a handful of odd jobs helping manage performance spaces, doing lots of field recording.

Chris Gammell: It's sad that they're always like musicians and like... Or is it actors are always waiters and musicians are always pro-audio people that are...

Zach Dunham: Yeah, especially drummers, too. And so I play drums. And yeah, that ended up being the thing. Lots of pro-audio stuff.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. You know, I was a jazz drummer, too. I was really bad. Oh, that's right. I remember we were talking about that. Yeah, really bad. Like, not good at all. So... Have a lesson later, maybe. Yeah, yeah.

Zach Dunham: Yeah, and so migrated away from music, kind of into audio engineering and got really into sound design. I always wanted to be... You know, for a while, I thought I wanted to be a Foley artist. I was sort of like hacking it on the side while I was... What's that? Foley artist? A Foley artist. Oh, I thought that is. It's this amazing job where you... So, in Hollywood films, the way that sound gets produced all the time, like, is, you know, you're not actually recording the plane crash. There's someone there with a big piece of sheet metal, and they're waving it around. And they're doing all this really cool, like, abstractions of sound. And so you're finding objects that make the sound that are similar to what you're seeing on screen. Anyway, I was doing sound design for, like, for games and was, like, making it way more complicated than it needed to be, but having a lot of fun. And then got into analog electronics. Totally self-taught hacking, you know, with, like, Arduinos and going out from there. And through some hardware projects, ended up here at Kickstarter. Awesome. Where I now advise people who are running hardware campaigns. That's great. And design projects, too.

Chris Gammell: And you know former guest Todd Bailey as well?

Zach Dunham: I do know former guest Todd Bailey. Definitely a big fan of him.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Zach Dunham: Yeah. That's great. Man, Foley Artists. How many are there? There can't be that many. When I was researching it, there was, like, 30. Or less. Like, there's, like, a couple studios in L.A. where everything gets done. Right. And here, yeah.

Chris Gammell: So you were, like, well, there's only, like, 10 jazz drummers who make a lot of money. I could go to Foley Artists where... It's way easier. Yeah. Yeah. There's at least 30. All right. That's good. That's good. So, okay. So, well, you mentioned hardware. Tell us about the thing that you built that kind of the public radio thing.

Zach Dunham: Sure, sure. Yeah. So prior to coming to Kickstarter, I worked on this project called The Public Radio. And it's a collaboration between myself and one of my childhood friends, Spencer Wright. And the public radio, you know, the previous tagline was radio monogamy for the internet age. But what it is is a single station radio for your daily routine. And so we would ship this pre-tuned FM radio to the station you listen to every day. And the UI is, like, very stripped down. There's one knob that turns on the radio and adjusts the volume. A little switch pot. And that's it. We were, like, intentionally hiding the UI. And the theory is, like, people who still listen to FM, if you're seeking or scanning or doing the equivalent, you have, like, Pandora or the internet to do that. But if you still listen to, like, terrestrial FM, you probably just have one station you're interacting with. And so I'm going to make a simple thing. It was also a project for us to, like, learn about electronics. So I had, like, just taken the MIT 6.002x course with some friends. And this was a project, you know, it ends and you're learning about tuned circuits and resonant circuits. Oh, really?

Chris Gammell: I didn't know it got that far.

Zach Dunham: Yeah, you're looking at little RC circuits. And so I'm like, what's a good project that, you know, at all feels relatable to this? And I thought at first I was going to make, you know, an analog version of this single station radio where you're, like, picking the cap values. So, which totally.

Chris Gammell: All right. Your QC on the inductors would have been pretty important, right? Really important, yeah.

Zach Dunham: And probably well beyond my, like, ability to think through. Right.

Chris Gammell: And then you would have literally only had one. You would have been like, well, you get public radio in New York. That's all you get. You get one channel. Everything else, you're on your own. Totally. Here's how you re-solder a new inductor in there for you. Yeah. Well, that's cool. That's great. Tell us about the course. I don't know if we've ever, we must have mentioned on here, but. So. Yeah, tell us about that.

Zach Dunham: 6.002X was part of, if I recall, so this was, like, five years ago now or more. It was part of the edX initiative, the MIT and. Stanford. And Stanford and I think maybe Princeton and maybe a couple other schools. Harvard probably. Harvard, yeah. Like all the big ones. All the big ones, yeah. Yeah. And so you, 6.002X is the first EE course that any incoming student at MIT who's on that track has to take. Yep. And, yeah, for me with a jazz composition background and, like, I'd taken a little bit of science in school. Yeah, right. And was pretty good at math, but it totally kicked my ass. I mean, it was really, really hard. Yeah. And they start you off, you know, you're going through everything. You're going through doing these, you know, writing out these long equations, going through, like, figuring out what the Thevenot equivalent of circuits are and, like, a lot of the theory. Yeah. But it was fun. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Right. Well, and we were talking a little bit before, too, that it is a little, so obviously I have a very vested interest in theory versus practice and stuff. And it still seems like it was very theory-based, but you said you were, because you were working with people that, like, in person, it helped a lot, right?

Zach Dunham: Yeah. There was this one moment, I think, where there was, like, a homework assignment and you were talking about, you know, proper transfer of power. And someone was explaining, you know, oh, well, this is why, you know, you have, you know, high Z inputs on a guitar because you don't want this huge loss of power if you're basically creating a voltage divider, right? You're trying to match those two things. And that was, like, so there was definitely a benefit to going through your course with friends. Also, two of my friends were actively working in that field. So Todd was one of those folks who was like, I'll take this course with you guys and school everyone. Yeah. He does that a lot, though, anyways, right? I mean, yeah. Yeah. Well, he was also, like, working in that field and is self-taught. And so it was good for him to, like, go back and get through the theory. But, yeah, that real application was, I think, a huge part. That's great.

Chris Gammell: Well, it sounds like, I mean, high Z input, right? I mean, that's from the music side. So for sure, like, that you have all these impedance things and, like, a lot of... Yep. It feels like there's almost, like, it's not code words, but it's definitely vernacular around...

Zach Dunham: Yeah. And especially so it's funny because coming from an audio engineering world, so much of, like, the way that digital interfaces are designed are, you know, they're relating to these analog techniques. And so when you're in, like, you're using a program like Pro Tools and you are, you know, quote, bouncing the session at the end of it, which is, you know, we would associate with, like, exporting, right? That's the digital equipment, right? Yeah, right. But we still use these terms and they relate to these analog processes where people were, like, literally bouncing tracks off of tape, one tape machine to the next. What was the bounce? The bounce, well, nothing was, like, literally bouncing off the floor, but that was what... I don't know anything about audio, I guess. Yeah, when you would, you have two tracks on a tape and so you're doing this sort of summing technique where you're taking a, like, 24-channel mix on a mixing board and you're bouncing it down to two tracks. Hmm. Bouncing. Yeah, bouncing. Okay. Maybe there's a better... I should know more of the history of that, but, yeah, it's, like, we're constantly making these references that are very narrow in there.

Chris Gammell: Right. Well, and now that we're talking about audio, too, I'm, like, getting, like, a cold sweat here. I'm, like, I don't have a backup of what we're talking about right now, so I'm going to start a second recorder just in case. I don't know if it'll matter now, but just to have a second recorder. Yeah. Wow. Okay. Do you get very anxious about audio stuff still or no?

Zach Dunham: Um, I get, I think, you know, we were setting up and you were talking about a Zoom recorder and I had mentioned how, like, I'm not really much of an audiophile. I get anxious about that where I'm, I very much, like, appreciate listening and, like, just totally zoning out and, like, listening to some signed tones in a room, you know. And, but it's, but I'm, like, people would come over to my apartment and they're, like, what are you doing with these, you know, you know, bookshelf speakers in this placement, man? Like, that's not the proper setup for that. And, like, I would sweat about that. But, yeah, no, I've given. The social aspect of it. The social aspect. Okay. Yeah. Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Okay. Cool. So, oh, sorry, back to the public radio thing. Sure. So, what, what was the outcome of that? So, you did a Kickstarter with that? Yeah.

Zach Dunham: So, we, we did a couple things. You know, this was, like, hacking on this. Like, we were talking about, we were, like, eating ramen noodles and working on this for, like, six months. And it was totally kicking our butts. And finally, we just needed to get it out the door. And so, we did this little beta release on Grand Street, which is now part of Etsy. Oh, yeah. That's right. I remember that. And sent, you know, 30 of these radios around and got pretty good feedback. We ended up dropping the price. And then we launched this Kickstarter campaign, which took off. And we had about 1,700 backers on Kickstarter. And then we did another 400 or so after the campaign on our own site. And so, we ended up manufacturing 2,500 radios and shipping them around the world. And learned just so much in the process. And that was, like, that was definitely a goal of ours. You know, we had just, we were both, both Spencer and I were making kind of pivots in our career at the moment. And we wanted a project that we could, like, write about and learn from and share. And it provided all of that. That's great. And a lot more. We definitely made mistakes along the way. As you do? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I mean, even the people that are doing it a long time, you still. I think it's actually interesting, too, because there's probably a sufficient amount of scope there where you're like, well, this is about what we can do. It's an interesting, it has that interesting, like, single-use device kind of thing. Yeah. What was the price point?

Zach Dunham: We were on Kickstarter the first time around. It was $48, including shipping.

Chris Gammell: Anything below $100 is a whatever buy. And so you get that, too. Yep. And I'm sure you get featured, you know.

Zach Dunham: We got some, Kickstarter definitely featured us. Yeah. And that was really, really helpful.

Chris Gammell: I'm going to be honest. As we sit here in Brooklyn. Yeah. It probably might have tweaked the hipster nerve a little bit.

Zach Dunham: It is like, I mean, if you talk about, like, Brooklyn campy devices, here it's like a single station NPR radio.

Chris Gammell: I wasn't going to say anything.

Zach Dunham: In an amazing job. How can you not? I mean, we talk pretty openly. We can't take ourselves too seriously with it. Excellent. That's good. Oh, my God.

Chris Gammell: That would be too much. It's almost like you were channeling hipster for good, right? For learning and you got a job.

Zach Dunham: I mean, this led into your current gig. That's great. It helps working here, understanding what people are going through. Yeah. Right. You know, running a project for sure. Definitely. I will say the mason jar was not a design thing that we chose from the beginning. We were like, we were testing speakers and we needed an enclosure to test them in. And being two good Brooklynites, you know, here we are sitting with some water and, you know, being poured in mason jars. And to be fair, I do that too. Yeah. Okay. They're huge glasses. Like, that's just great. Like, yeah, I just, yeah, I want a lot of water at one. Totally. And so we just cut out a little circle and a piece of cardboard. And I dropped the speaker on top and then, you know, nested the little O-ring on there. And then we both looked at each other and we're like, oh my God, this is like, this is kind of it. Innovation. But also it was, you know, as people who didn't really have experience producing something that was like injection molded or anything, it was really helpful because we didn't have to produce an enclosure. Of course. And then we have an off-the-shelf enclosure that also fits the aesthetic, call it. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Well, that's great. I mean, like, everybody has one. It feels really accessible, right? It's not like super shiny project either. You know, it's kind of got that little kitschy, but, you know, it's great. Like, it's really, really great.

Speaker ?: So.

Chris Gammell: Thanks. So what did you learn?

Zach Dunham: I mean, we learned that, you know, working with manufacturers overseas has its challenges. It's hard communicating, you know, with people that are halfway around the world, you know, as everyone says. What made you decide to go overseas? We, so the speaker that we were originally using, you know, we found on, you know, a U.S.-based like parts supplier. And we found the company in the Midwest that we thought was, you know, responsible for, like, manufacturing the speakers. And it turns out they're, like, you know, one of many middlemen. And they weren't really keen to creating the type of partnership that we wanted for the speaker. And so that was kind of, like, one of the reasons why we started looking elsewhere. And then there were a few other pieces. Like, our lid is a piece of stainless steel that's stamped. And, yeah, I think, like, price for one. And Spencer had experience working with certainly, like, southern China manufacturers for some of the metal work that he had done in his previous jobs. So he was a bit more comfortable with that. Okay.

Chris Gammell: So it wasn't like you were, like, hopping on a plane for the first time. This was not the first stamp in, at least his passport, right?

Zach Dunham: No. Yeah, to full transparency, we didn't hop on a plane until after, well, after we had shipped all of our rewards. Wow. Yeah. We went with the little money that we had left over at the end of the campaign. We took a trip to China and visited our speaker supplier and our antenna supplier. And the other supplier that's based in Taiwan for some of these parts, yeah, we still haven't visited yet. But Spencer's hopping on a plane in a couple weeks, actually, to go to visit them. Cool.

Chris Gammell: We will definitely talk about that. Yeah. But what else?

Zach Dunham: There were a couple other things you can learn. Yeah, yeah. Like, you know, the, like, electronics. People, when they're running these sort of consumer electronics projects on Kickstarter, they're just like, more is better, right? Like, I'm going to make, like, the more that I sell, right? Like, more features? Oh, no, like, the more backers that I can get to buy, the more, like, sales that I have, right? Right. Like, it's just going to get easier. I'm going to raise millions, man. And, like, that is just going to be a linear graph of, like, it's just going to get easier and easier the more I sell. And, you know, we set our goal, like, if we make 500 of these, if we raise enough money to make 500, we could do it by hand. If we raise enough money to do 1,000 of them, we'll still probably make it by hand over some weekends, but it's going to be, you know, more of a pain in the ass. If we're at 2,000, man, that's going to suck. Yeah. But we also don't have enough money to hire out for that. So that sort of, like, you know, that, you know, a linear graph or whatever of, like, the, you know, as electronic scale and price, that was a big learning for us. Right. Like, we're kind of in a no man's land with 2,500 units. We couldn't really find a CM that we were willing to hand everything over to.

Chris Gammell: So Nate, like, calling, Nate from SparkFun calls it the valley of whatever. The valley of death of hardware. Yeah, I forget what he called it. And he used, I felt so, he used Ian's product. So Ian was not on the labs. He was on our show a long time ago, too.

Zach Dunham: Okay.

Chris Gammell: And he used his project. I was like, oh, that was, I don't know. It was like, you know, it was like $20,000-ish kind of thing.

Zach Dunham: Yep.

Chris Gammell: So, you know, it's, I'm sure you see that a lot now, too. It's like there is that, that somewhere between garage weekends and finding a CM is a lot of heartburn.

Zach Dunham: There's a lot of heartburn. Yeah. And so I always try and tell people, like, plan for multiple outcomes. Like, you want to. That's good. You want to be thinking about where you're going to land with each of these. It's like, I'm going to overfund. All right. Well, you should be, if you're overfunding, like, you should be overfunding by, like, probably 4X or something, you know, in order to get to that next level.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I don't get too many people before their campaigns. But I was recently talking to someone, and I was like, just double the price, like, just every time. Just like, if you can, please, just double the price. You don't know.

Zach Dunham: Yeah. I was at this meetup in Boston recently, and there is. Was it Chris's meetup? Yeah. At Chris's meetup. Yeah, yeah. From Bolt. Sorry, we should. For people who are not in the room and don't know who we're talking about. Yeah, Chris Quintero from Bolt. From Bolt, yeah. And he had invited me to help find some recent Kickstarter creators, and I asked Jeff Lieberman to come. If you're not familiar with Jeff Lieberman, he's this wonderful engineer and artist, and he had recently run a project for this beautiful thing called Slow Dance, which you should really check it out. It's mesmerizing. But he had this great point where he was like, you know, I've been doing installation work, like these big one-off installation projects with a couple other engineers for years now. And we, you know, we're good at this now, and we're always going, you know, things are never going to cost what you think they're going to cost. If you can get to, like, 1.5x what you had after a lot of planning, like, you're doing good. But I always, he was like, I always tell people it's going to take, you know, five times, five times as expensive and take five times as long as you think it is. And then, you know, they're, like, really specific about it. But, yeah, I think it's a great point.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, yeah, exactly. I mean, in the best-case scenario, you go back to your customer and you say, eh, here's some money back, right? Assuming you still have it. Exactly. But you probably don't. Yeah. Like, you hope you do, but it's just not likely, you know?

Zach Dunham: Yeah, this is a big challenge in this world where people are spinning up projects and then asking for money for them, for the development costs of them. And it's tricky business.

Chris Gammell: And they put it in the marketing, too, like, the $99 printer, which I'm sure we'll get to at some point here, too. Yes. Bugs me. Every time. The $350 pick in place. Oh, good. Goodness gracious.

Zach Dunham: Like, at a certain point, like, where does the money go?

Chris Gammell: Like, you have to pay for stuff.

Zach Dunham: You know, like, it's, I don't know, like. Yep. I, yeah, this is, you know, not everyone has the same mentality about this. When we ran the public radio campaign, at the end of it, I did, like, a breakdown of the numbers and did sort of, like, an open books report. This is how much money we brought in. This is how much money we paid out. And I did a graph of, like, each month for these different categories of, like, food, R&D, you know, production.

Chris Gammell: Did you put your, how many hours, what your hourly rate was?

Zach Dunham: Oh, my God. Yeah. Our hourly rate, yeah, for the record, I think we had $7,000 in a bank account at the end of it, and we paid ourselves nothing. And we, yeah, and we spent countless hours. And would I do it again? Yeah, of course, in a heartbeat.

Chris Gammell: Well, I mean, I guess you could say that you got a job from it, but that's, there's no guarantee of that.

Zach Dunham: That's, yeah. Yeah. I mean, that didn't really play into my, people knew who I was here, but that wasn't the reason I got the job. Yeah. Oh, right.

Chris Gammell: No, no, I'm not saying this. He ran, like, the best Kickstarter, so now you just got to work here. Yeah, no, I know that. I'm just saying that, like, so, like, I say that for the Empire, like, I've never, I mean, we used to have advertisers, but it just went towards dollars. But I've always said that, like, I got a job from it, and I've met a lot of great people. And, like, there's all these auxiliary benefits. Totally. Of course. But my hourly rate, it's pretty low, I've got to say. Yeah. Oh, and Dave's not here. I don't know. He's not actually, like, sitting. It would be really funny. We just were, like, in the corner. He speaks up. Yeah, right. He's just in the corner, like, I want to yell about Indiegogo. We were listening. Oh, we should mention, too. We were listening together to what we said last time, or two times, whenever the show was about your announcement, which we'll talk about as well. Sure. Yeah. That was fun. Co-listening. Co-listening. Yeah. We were going to do, like, a live reaction thing, but maybe some other time. We could, yeah, we'll try. We could, like, cut in some kind of sound clips here. Yeah. Cool. Okay, so you got them all delivered. Were you on time when you did it?

Zach Dunham: I think we were two weeks late. We said June, and we were mid-June, and we started chipping them out.

Chris Gammell: That's in the grand scheme of things. That's on time.

Zach Dunham: Yeah, the beautiful thing that we did was Spencer was working in a job where they were changing offices, and so we had this vacant space in the middle of New York. Oh, wow. And so we shipped pallets of mason jars to the lobby of this building and all of our electronics. And then we 3D printed all these jigs, and we would go in every Saturday for, like, three weekends in a row, and we'd push together all the tables in one long assembly line. And then we would order food three times a day, and we had batches of friends come in, and we did these sort of hardware salons or, like, manufacturing salons. That's kind of cool. Yeah. It was fun. You know, there were, like, all these friends who work in software and in, you know, tech but don't make stuff in their day-to-day. Right.

Chris Gammell: In front of developers and designers and stuff like that.

Zach Dunham: Exactly, exactly. And they got a kick out of, you know, putting together these radios. That's kind of hipster, too, I've got to say. You know what we do on the weekends?

Chris Gammell: We go manufacture stuff.

Zach Dunham: It, like, that was how we managed to ship, you know, several thousand of these out. And then, you know, Spencer and I would hang at the end of the line and do QC, and then we would sort of rotate around.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Wait, so wait, how did that—we were talking about that a little bit, but— Yeah. So this device is tuned to a certain radio station. Did you always pick New York's to test it?

Zach Dunham: Yeah, so the way that it works is we would have—we had this little pogo bed set up, and it was a couple different things. So there was a Raspberry Pi on there that would—it was connected to a barcode scanner, and we had a thermal printer. And so we would batch print all of our shipping labels. And so the way that the production would start was you'd scan the shipping label. Okay. We'd go into a database, find that person's—it would marry their shipping address with the frequency that they chose. Tell the Raspberry Pi, okay, this is the frequency that we need to flash into EEPROM. Then it would say, all right, the thing is ready. Put it on the pogo bed and put it down. And then the Raspberry Pi, there's a little—there's a library. I think it's called Pi FM, where you can hack a FM transmitter using one of the IOPENS on a Raspberry Pi. And so we would, at the same time, tell the Raspberry Pi, all right, transmit on this FM station a test tone.

Chris Gammell: Oh, wow.

Zach Dunham: And so while it was on the pogo bed, it would flash, and then, you know, our little script would say, okay, Raspberry Pi, play on 93.9, this 1K test tone. Right. And so every radio would go boop, and then we knew that it was good. That we had, like— That's really smart, yeah. Yeah. Pi FM. Yeah? Yeah, Pi FM. What's it like doing, like, you just put, like, a hanging LC off of a pin or something? You attach a, like, 6-inch piece of wire to a pin. That's it? Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Okay, I'll check that out. That's kind of cool. It's really cool. Yeah. And it transmits, like, decently well. I'm not sure—

Chris Gammell: I mean, it's right next to it, so that helps. It's right next to it.

Zach Dunham: But yeah, I would, like—I would be, you know, like 15 feet away. And if I had a radio that was tuned to that station, it would catch that interference. So it was actually strong enough to, like, transmit, yeah, 10 feet away or so.

Chris Gammell: FCC wasn't so happy, but, you know. Yes. They didn't know about it. Yeah. Don't worry. They don't listen to this show. I don't think they would like a lot of it. Actually, did you end up testing for FCC Part 15 or no?

Zach Dunham: Yeah, also no comment.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah. It was a kit. It was a kit. It was a kit. Yeah, right. All right. Yeah, no, that's—

Zach Dunham: Oh, but actually for that, you know, the breakdown there— And there's a great post on Hackaday about FCC testing and the— Because it's such a complicated world of that. And so there's this whole classification of intentional radiators and unintentional radiators. Yeah, right. And there's a big difference between the rules that intentional radiators have to go through. That's where you actually need— Right. You are a radio device, effectively. We're a radio device, and we're an unintentional radiator. So you don't need a proper FCC ID for your— Right.

Chris Gammell: You were an intentional collector, not a radiator. Exactly. Yes, that's right. Hopefully. And you ended up using a module, you said, for that, for the design?

Zach Dunham: Yeah. So the FMIC is Silicon Labs. What is it? God, it's been a while since I've looked at that. It's one of the Silicon Labs.

Chris Gammell: It means no problems. That's what you pray for, right?

Zach Dunham: Yeah, that's what we pay for. It's not a cheap chip.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Oh, yeah. No, I've seen this before. And is it the one they bought from— I remember there's one that they bought Wolfram, didn't they?

Zach Dunham: Maybe. I think it's the SI4702, if I'm remembering. All right. That's fine. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: But that's cool.

Zach Dunham: Yeah. I mean, that's a great project and everything, too. There were so many components to it that we liked that kept us learning a bit more. And that was the first time I ever wrote a Bash script for something that was useful. Yeah. And probably maybe the second time that I'd ever written a Bash script. Right, right. Maybe the first. There were a lot of first times in that project. And how was it powered? I forget. Two AA batteries. That was definitely a choice. People are like, oh, they should use LiPo battery and then rechargeables and all this stuff. To that, we just try to encourage people to use rechargeable AA batteries. Yeah, that's right. Well, because then shipping, everything changes, too, right? Shipping changes, the regulation changes around it. It's a little thing and then it becomes a lot more complicated.

Chris Gammell: Right, exactly. Exactly. I mean, it's like FCC, too. I mean, if you decided to have it transmit as well, that changes the whole nature of everything, right? Completely. Yeah. So it's almost like design decisions that kind of play out over time.

Zach Dunham: A hundred percent, yeah. And those are very intentional. It's still, you know, this is not Spencer's full-time job. It's not my full-time job. And so we kind of needed to do things like that. I think the mason jar, too. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah. You told that story. Wait, did you already tell that on air?

Zach Dunham: Was that on air? I think so. Yeah, yeah. That's right. Jesus.

Chris Gammell: Sorry. Woo, long day. All right. We're entering another world. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Cool. Okay. Well, let's get to the main event here. We are in the Kickstarter house. Yeah. House. What do you call it? Office? House. HQ. HQ. Perfect. Well, tell us a little bit about the company, too, because I was surprised. The company is public, what is it called?

Zach Dunham: Yeah, Public Benefits Corporation. Okay. Yeah, so if you're, I always explain this, like, if you're familiar with a B Corp, this is sort of the next step that a company can take after becoming a B Corp. And it's just, it only really became a thing that you could do until, you know, recently. And there are only a handful of PBCs. This is American Life, turns out, is a PBC. Patagonia is a PBC. And essentially what it means is, you know, we're legally obligated to consider our impact on, you know, arts and culture, the things that we basically set out. So you have, the other way that it's explained is kind of like a second bottom line. So we don't have a board that we're sort of beholden to meet their sort of fiduciary needs, right? We are accountable for this charter that we set forth. And so at the end of every year, we go back and we look at our charter and we look at the, you know, the areas in which we're hoping to measure our impact. And then we publicly publish a report that says, you know, we made an impact on X number of new jobs, on, you know, donating. You know, one of the things is that we donate 5% of our post-tax profit to arts organizations. And each year, a group of people from Kickstarter get together and they vote on, you know, what are those organizations? And we talk very openly about that.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, you mentioned that there's a lot of reporting at, like financial, not financial, but like also like the... All the stats. All the stats. Yeah, they're totally public.

Zach Dunham: And so you can go back and look at, you know, how much, you know, how much money is being raised in each and every category on Kickstarter from pledged to collected to successful projects. And it's very much like in the company's, you know, ethos is to not just tell creators and projects to be transparent about how their projects are going, but us as a company to really be open and transparent about that stuff as well. And so, yeah, it's a really, it makes it a cool place to work for sure.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's awesome. Well, man, I just totally lost my train of thought. Sorry. They just rolled in a bunch of beer over here. And so that's why, I think that's why my, yeah, I think there's an event going on later. So that's why my brain is all over the place. How did you, I mean, so you came in, how long have you been here now?

Zach Dunham: I've been here for two and a half years. Okay. Yeah. I first was working on a team that thinks a lot about the policy and sort of maintaining the integrity of the site. And so I was working specifically on that team with regard to design and technology projects. And then now I work on the outreach team where, you know, I'm part of this team that does a mix of things. I think generally we help manage the design and tech categories. And the day-to-day is, yeah, a mix of working one-on-one with projects that are going to launch or are live on the site. Coaching on, you know, how to run a campaign and giving feedback on their approach. Playing matchmaker a lot of the time of, you know, you need X support in this area and we're clearly not, you know, suited or have expertise. And let us introduce you to some friends who can help you. Teaching Kickstarter, traveling, going to conferences, and I think just generally being an advocate for those communities. So Kickstarter as a site is set up for 15 different categories. So we're a platform that's, you know, our mission is to help creative projects come to life. And we define that creativity from food and fashion and film. And within design and tech, there are very specific needs. And so we end up reminding the rest of the company about some of those needs, too. So as we're thinking about how to develop the platform, we're kind of the cheerleaders for the design and tech community as well.

Chris Gammell: How is the design and tech viewed from the other side of things as well? Because I remember looking at their stats. And I remember, like, there was a bunch of money there. But then I always forget. Like, I'm like, oh, yeah, crap. Like, Kickstarter is meant to, like, help artists. Like, yeah, that's, like, a big piece of it. But it's, like, for things that couldn't get funding. And yet there is a huge focus because people have, I think, the biggest projects are usually things that are around tech and design and whatever, right? Pebble and whoever.

Zach Dunham: Yeah. Yeah. But at the same time, I mean, you have, you know, film is enormous on Kickstarter. Games is enormous on Kickstarter. You know, our music category has, you know, tens of thousands of projects.

Chris Gammell: Right. But I'm thinking more from the. From the dollars. Yeah. The dollars per project, right? It feels like there's a lot of big hits in this category. Totally. Whereas that's more, like, the other ones are more flat and there's a lot of artists. Yep. Yeah.

Zach Dunham: And so I think that that, you know, the answer there is we have an incredible curation team here at Kickstarter. And so you're never going to see, you know, what we try and do is have much more of, like, a rounded voice and perspective on creativity. And so you're constantly going to see technology projects surfaced alongside food or fashion or film because, like, that sort of cross-pollination ends up making a lot more of an interesting experience when you're browsing. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Zach Dunham: That's kind of our, that's one of our answers and responses to that.

Chris Gammell: Okay, yeah, yeah. I mean, like I think it's going to be like there's just pricing differences, right? Like a hardware device costs $100 might be different than, you know, paying for a digital copy of a movie is like $10, right? And you can, you know, it's just, there are just baseline things that are different.

Zach Dunham: Yeah, and there are huge breakout hits in other categories too. Sure. And you know, $63K.

Chris Gammell: True. Oh, they raised on Kickstarter?

Zach Dunham: Yeah. Millions of dollars. I mean, they had a huge project, right? And you know, dollar amount aside, that just came out on Netflix, the new season that they funded here. And so you see these huge ways in which the other categories are making impacts. And I think that's a lot of what we try and talk about too, is like, we read about these blockbuster campaigns. Sure. There are other really incredible things. Like when you go to a museum and you're like, oh my God, that was a Kickstarter project. No, it's part of the permanent collection here.

Chris Gammell: Right, exactly. And it's kind of enabling a lot of long tail stuff too. Right? That's always been the stuff that's like, why would someone do that? And then the answer is almost always, because they have to. Like they feel like they have to. And then this is a foundation for doing that. You know, that's great.

Zach Dunham: Yeah, totally. It's, I think that we are in an age where, yeah, going to a bank for a loan or just getting investment from a thing like this, those are challenging and they're not keeping in, you know, up to the times of building community at the same time. Like that's a huge thing of running a campaign is that you're not just getting money, you're getting real feedback from people. And certainly within like, I was just talking about this last night actually down in Philadelphia. Someone was asking me about community. You know, this feels so kind of like evasive. Everyone's talking about, well, we're building community, we're building community, but like what does that look like? And it's interesting, I was, we just had the relaunch of this great project, the Neo Lucida, which is a, do you know? Yeah, Pablo is, he's from Chicago. He's in your hometown.

Chris Gammell: I didn't know that, but I remember seeing it the first time through and you also had that at Maker Faire, right?

Zach Dunham: Yes. Yeah. And so that was his, his new version. So if you're not familiar with it, it's a camera Lucida drawing tool. So it's a little prism and you look down through the prism and it splits the light. So you can see your hand drawing on the paper in front of you, but also the object that you're tracing. That's right. And so he ran this campaign in 2014. They had like 11,000 backers. I mean, it just way blew up. And he has like fans four years later, three years later that are following him. And like, you know, almost a third of his, around, yeah, knocking on his door. Like ducklings? Like a third of his, a third of his backers for his second project came from his first campaign. Oh wow. Okay. Which is like a real thing, you know? And that, and that doesn't happen in, I don't know, in other areas where you're just like having cash come in and like a traditional e-commerce where people are buying something and then never coming back. Right. Yep. So there's a stickiness there that is.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it's true. And I mean, yeah, you might have meetups around it or whatever, right? It's certain audiences that will coalesce around your product or your thing or whatever. Right? Yeah. Yeah. That's great. So, so you're seeing, you are seeing community on other hardware stuff as well. I mean, that's the thing that's kind of interesting to me is like, depends on the device, I suppose, or depends on the whatever's going on there.

Zach Dunham: I mean, another one, if you're familiar with Tivoli, the makers of those really fine looking radios, that like classic vintage radios called Tivoli Audio. Okay. I don't know. I think you'd recognize it if you saw it. Yeah, maybe. So the founder of that, Tom DiVesso, started a new company and he's run two projects on Kickstarter. The second one is currently live. He had, he like, you know, it's a Wi-Fi connected radio and so he's using streaming services, you know, Spotify, and he was hoping to offer other streaming services as kind of like stretch goals within his campaign. And he floated this idea and everyone said, no, I don't, I don't need it. I just want Spotify. And so this idea of like product feedback is another huge, very real thing for people that are running these campaigns. Traditionally you'd be, you know, spending all this money doing like market research or like focus groups and you get that. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That's great. That's great. Okay. So what we have some, I'm sure listeners, we have some people who've been on who've done Kickstarters. You mentioned also Dave has done a Kickstarter.

Zach Dunham: He's a micro, microcurrent. That's right.

Chris Gammell: Gold. Yes. Yeah. Right. Something new. So what do you, so you get asked this a lot, I'm sure, but what do you tell people when they're like, oh, I want to do Kickstarter? Like, so you go to a cocktail party and you meet someone and they find out who you are. They say, what should I do next? What do you usually tell them?

Zach Dunham: If you haven't, you know, one, if you, if you haven't backed a project before, I get asked a lot of the time from, from people who don't really know the site that well. They've like, they maybe haven't backed a project before. Like that is such an educational experience. That's true. Spend $10, back 10 different projects for a buck. That's great. And read all of their updates and like be, be a part of it from the other side. I think that's a huge thing. That's true. And find other folks who have run a campaign and ask them, ask them what you're, what you don't know. Or what, you know, what do they know now that they wish that they knew then?

Chris Gammell: Right. And I guess there's a lot of posts and postmortems and stuff like that about.

Zach Dunham: A lot of postmortems. Yeah. The other thing, certainly if you're running a hardware project is, you know, the experience of asking for a fixed amount of money in exchange for a fixed price on a reward. And then you having to go out and make that thing, make sure that you, make sure that you're You know, yeah, that you're far, that you feel comfortable about those things and you're, you're building in some, some buffer. Yeah. Man, double your price. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Every time. I really like that idea though, about the backing 10 projects too, because you get to see, so I've backed a couple of projects and there is a broad spectrum of like, well, first off, which ones actually go through. That's helpful. Yep. And then, but then just how much communication there is, right? There's a ton of communication.

Zach Dunham: Yeah. And then that's actually something that I usually look for in a project. If, if I'm coaching someone, you know, and they're a weekend and there are no comments. Yeah. That's also, that's a bad sign too, right? You know, obviously people like get overwhelmed with that. If they're, you know, 3D printer project with a thousand comments or people asking, you know, how does this work and what's the print speed? But if there's no comments, that's also bad, right? Right. It feels like there's very, yeah, well, it feels like there's very little life to the project. And so sometimes I encourage people to also like help start that conversation. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Well, what is, okay. So talk to people. That's good. Back of the projects. That's good. Yep. I think the other thing that I see though, is like some people who are, they've built like a thing, they built, you know, maybe a couple of a thing and they just, they don't, they like, they are the zero comments kind of thing, right? They don't have any, anyone showing up. Right.

Zach Dunham: Yeah. And so the other big thing is like on this topic of community, I think that Kickstarter is a great place to grow a community, but it's probably not, you don't want to put everything into building the community from scratch on Kickstarter. Right. And so, you know, the, the traditional approach certainly for like a hardware more like product focused campaign is you're doing some amount of grassroots outreach, friends, family growing out from their influencers, building a mailing list, launching that project. And that kind of creates the initial momentum. Right. And then usually the rest of the Kickstarter community, you know, a third of our pledges are coming from repeat backers. Oh. They swoop in and kind of, you know, catch notice of that. But a project that has, you know, the projects that tend to fail, what we see is that that failure rate goes way up for projects that get no backings, right? Or, or, or less than, less than one, one backer. I'm saying that, that wrong. I'll have to, I'll write you with what that status. Okay. Okay. Yeah. It's like an activation energy type thing, right? It's people that are just throwing a project out there and kind of walking away.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Right. And that's, and that's what it, I mean, so as a hardware engineer, like I think about, you know, if you build it, they will come, but even the best Kickstarter projects have not been like that, right? They've been, it's someone who actually, there was a marketing element to it, not a marketing team necessarily, but there was definitely, they were doing something, right? You know, all the, all the biggest projects, even if they were a lean team, they were thinking about marketing or thinking about reaching out, like you said, you know?

Zach Dunham: Yeah. I think that when we look at projects that are, you know, that we're reading about in the news that are really topping the charts or they're doing a number of things, right? It's first and foremost, a really interesting idea.

Chris Gammell: Sure. But that doesn't really matter. There's thousands of interesting ideas. It's about, also presentation and...

Zach Dunham: Well, yeah. That's one, one of the list. I got it. Okay. Right, right. Bullet two is, yes. Bullet two is, it's presented well. Bullet three is, they're probably doing some type of advertising and they're getting, you know, PR support initially or they're just lucky enough to get a lot of PR coverage as well. Yeah. So there's, there are lots of things that are firing at once. Yeah. Kickstarter is usually, you know, featuring them in some way for the ones that really, really blow up.

Chris Gammell: Right. And there's also like acceleration factor of like, if you start getting coverage, then you get more coverage. It's like, you know, it's like that kind of thing. Yeah. So. Yeah. It's tough, but I think that, you know, well, what about like sizes of teams?

Zach Dunham: Do you guys study that at all? Like, you know, it's not something that we study. It's definitely something that we, that we're aware of. Certainly if we're going to work with, we're going to be like coaching and trying to, to support a project that, you know, is like a single one man show, one woman show, it's like really, really tricky for, for those people. And we do try and encourage them, you know, to, to understand the limits of how many hours there are in a day. Hopefully, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We're seeing that, that definitely change. I mean, even when Spencer and I ran our project, just the two of us, that was a lot.

Chris Gammell: So. Well, and all your friends on the weekend though. I mean like, that's the thing, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because we had to. Right. That's important. Huh. So, well, we should also mention, y'all put out a statement recently about like kind of the projects you're looking for. So why don't you tell us about that?

Zach Dunham: Yeah, totally. Um, so, you know, as I said, I work on the outreach team here and a lot of what we are trying to do is help highlight and, and, and, and coach projects that we really want to see on the site as well. And so we took a stance to be a little bit more public about that work recently in this request for projects. That's what it was. Um, and, and it was also a way to, to sort of highlight the various team members, um, on the design and tech outreach team and our specific areas of focus. So I'm here in New York and I'm trying to, um, grow the sort of creative tools types projects. And, you know, those are everything from, uh, musical instruments, uh, to digital fabrication devices. My colleague Heather, who's in the UK, um, you know, London is quickly becoming sort of design center for, for Kickstarter. And so she's really focusing on, um, design projects, most of which, you know, have some sort of interesting story to them that really uncovers either the genesis of the project or the craftsmanship of a project. Um, and then my colleague Clarissa, who's in San Francisco, her focus is around, um, science and exploration. And so she's, you know, working with folks like the Planetary Society and people that are doing just really incredible work, um, pushing the boundaries of research and space. And yeah. And so this was in it, this was in it. It's in for us to, yeah, experiment with making a more public, uh, you know, request for people to submit projects. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's separate from, you know, the official project submission flow that you would have if you want to start a project, it's really just, it's like, here's what we're excited about.

Chris Gammell: Here's what we're excited about.

Zach Dunham: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Chris Gammell: Let's get to the, uh, let's get to the meat of it then. Sure. You're, you're in the, uh, the creative tools, which includes 3d printers. Yes. How's that going? I can't believe you were telling me earlier that people are there. There's just like an uptick or something.

Zach Dunham: And I, yeah, recently in the last, I would say three months, we just had so many, you know, DLP and new FDM printers. And it's why, why are people, I think people it's, it's still a space that people are, you know, obviously really excited about. And I just don't know where to buy one.

Chris Gammell: I can't possibly figure this out. Like, I don't know.

Zach Dunham: Yeah. Um, you know, for me in the creative tools and like digital fabrication space, one of the things that I was excited about as like, as a question that I was posing to myself when doing this work was what's honestly, it was what's next after 3d printers. So looking for other, you know, quote, desktop manufacturing devices that are, I think in following the same line of thought of, um, how do we translate things from the factory floor to a maker space or to a hacker space? What are the tools that we can do? And so, you know, certainly products like Wazer, you know, the desktop water jet cutter, or we recently had a project that I worked with called Knitterate, which was a digital knitting machine. Oh, cool. And these are, they're amazing projects. They're very complicated and they're, they cost a lot of money and they're, um, but they're

Chris Gammell: It is always fun when you like, you see it like, oh my God, they, they already raised a hundred thousand dollars. 20, 20 things. 20. 20. 20. 20. 20 backers.

Zach Dunham: Yeah. Um, and they're definitely stretching the limits like we were talking about of, of what desktop means there. They, they, they, yeah. Reinforced desktop. Reinforced desktop. Yep. This is a desktop elephant. Um, you know, in the, in the, in the 3d printer space, I think that our work here ends up being a little bit different. Um, because, you know, as we were saying, there's, there's so many of these projects. And so what are the other ways in which we can support that community? And a lot of that comes from, comes, I think right now is like thinking about transparency on the site, right? So, um, it's, it's not a category, you know, that has, that, that has been without its challenges. Um, making a 3d printer is not an easy thing, especially when you're promising that it costs $99. And, um, I say this having never built one. So, um, there's so much stuff in there. There's a lot of stuff in there. But so for us, it's like, all right, how can we help backers figure out what are the right questions to ask around a project? And so trying to think of ways to standardize, um, what are demos that people can, can do with these types of projects? Yeah. Um, yeah, not, not, not exciting. No, no, no, no.

Chris Gammell: I'm just, sorry. That's not, that wasn't that I started thinking about like, but like, okay, so I feel like so much of this stuff could be fake still, you know what I mean? Like, and, and we should bring up like, yeah, that was a really positive move. The Kickstarter is not a store. We've talked about that a ton on the show before. Yeah. Kickstarter is not a store. Great policy. Yep. You should have a prototype. Great policy. Right. I could fake a lot of things, you know? And in fact, that's what prototyping is kind of about, right? When you have a prototype, it's like, Hey people, give me money. I got this thing. Look at this.

Zach Dunham: I can make this. Right. Totally. And I think that, you know, with that and some of the things that we're starting to roll out, like the prototypes gallery that we, that we rolled out six months ago is really trying to classify these things. Right. And so I think that's, you know, to my point is like, part of this is in backer education. Yeah. So not everyone knows what like proof of, the differences are between proof of concept, you know, looks like, works like, you know. Good point. There are different stages and progressions. And so the other thing that we try and encourage creators to do as much as possible is clearly communicate the stage, you know, that you're at in this process from prototype to mass production. Right. Even, even for projects that are in the final stages of production, things can go wrong. And so it's with, to your point of, you know, about faking it, I think there are ways that we're trying to, to address that. So specifically with 3D printers, it becomes a lot harder to fake something if you're going to show, you know, a full, full length print and unedited video on camera from multiple angles.

Chris Gammell: Like make it do like a Facebook live.

Zach Dunham: And so this is, you know, this is literally a thing that we're trying to encourage creators to do. We have a Kickstarter live streaming tool built into the site. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah. It's called Kickstarter live and it's great for digital fabrication projects. That's a really great, yeah. Because you can do a live on air print. And I, and you know, I always try and tell people like, ask your backers to send you STL files and print those on camera too. Right. Don't just have the one print that you're like, we've tuned the machine and it does this beautifully.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Right. Right. Yeah. Yep. What's it called? What's the tugboat thing?

Zach Dunham: It's called Kickstarter live. No, no, the, the, the test print. Is it Benchy? Oh, Benchy. Yeah. Benchy is one that we, we tell people to print a lot too. Certainly for FDM because it's, it's. Yeah. It's complicated for ways that I, you know, it, beyond my. It's got like a little smokestack at the top. It's got a little smokestack at the top.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. People couldn't see us doing the little smokestack print motion. Spinning our pointy fingers. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Okay. So, all right. But what I also meant by you can fake it is. Yeah. That's, you can have one. Yeah. And going from one to 10. Yeah. You know, all this stuff, but a hundred to a thousand, thousand to a million. Right. Yes. Uh, what's it called? Coolest cooler. You know, like. Yep. Turns out injection molding a shitload of coolers, you know. Yep. Even if you have $12 million.

Zach Dunham: Totally. And so, this is the area where it's really hard for Kickstarter to make an impact at that point. And part of the reason is that things are already, you know, baked at that point. And when someone has a campaign and they're looking to raise money for a thing, it's too late. And so, a lot of the work, way too late. Oh, yeah. Right. And so, what we're doing now with, you know, this new initiative like Hardware Studio is really trying to make a push to make sure that people know this stuff six months in advance before they run a project. Yeah. Think about cash flow. Think about the manufacturability. How much is it actually going to cost? And you talk about this like, moving from the difference between making one and making thousands. You know, one of our partners in this is Dragon Innovation and something that Scott Miller talks about all the time.

Chris Gammell: Former guest.

Zach Dunham: Former guest. Their tagline is, you know, we help people figure out how to go from one to many. That's right. And this is a big, there's a big hole there. And that's what we're trying to fill with this. Yeah. I think that the big thing is like, that knowledge just has to happen at a certain point in your production. If you are already collecting money on Kickstarter for something and you haven't gone through this process of understanding what your cash flow is, understanding what your margins are, who your manufacturer is, and actually basing those rewards off of real quotes. Yeah, there's a lot that could go wrong.

Chris Gammell: So, well, let's take it back to your thing real quick. Sure. How did you guys survive?

Zach Dunham: I think that, for the public radio you mean? Yeah. One, like as we pointed out, it's not an extremely complicated device, right? Okay. We're making, you know, the complexity level is pretty low. Yeah, sure. The, you know, what I would say is like ambition and scale in the general scheme of things. We were, we were up there, but we weren't trying to make, you know, 10,000 circuit boards or something like that. It was, you know, we had a little over 1,600 backers on Kickstarter and then a couple hundred in our creators and we decided to go with 2,500 units because that, you know, economically made sense. So, I think in scale we were probably in like a medium level of risk, I would say. Sure.

Chris Gammell: I mean, you were in pricing breaks for sure at 2,500. Yeah.

Zach Dunham: That's good. Yeah. That was helpful. But we also chose to work with suppliers who were willing to answer our questions, which was huge. Yeah. So, we did our first round of PCBA in Massachusetts with this great shop called Worthington Assembly. And the guys there.

Chris Gammell: Andrew Seddon and Circuit Hub, they work with Worthington a bunch too. Yes.

Zach Dunham: Totally. Yeah. And the guy, Chris Denny there was like. Yeah, Chris is great. Yeah. I mean, we had never done this before and Chris was, you know, willing to call out things like, you know, in your QFN you have these, you know, like buried vias or whatever. This is gonna have a bad time. This is gonna have a bad time. Yeah, right, right. We need to change, you know, we need to change some things on your board. Okay. So, some DFM type stuff. Some DFM feedback. Yeah. And that's, honestly, I think that's a lot. People forget that their CMs are going to give them some of that feedback. Right.

Chris Gammell: That was. And like, if you would have done, you said you didn't do the injection molding thing, but like, that's another piece where it's like, if you could sit with a mold designer, they're gonna tell you like, that wall's too thin, this is a terrible design, this should be sloping, you have no pitch, or whatever it's called. Yeah.

Zach Dunham: Yeah. So, I think that like intentionally choosing, we were setting, intentionally setting limitations on the project that made it. Gotta love them constraints, right? Yeah. That's great. And then I think that we were, I don't know, we, you know, we didn't take, we certainly weren't paying ourselves. Had we been doing something stupid like that, or renting office space or anything, you know, there were lots of.

Chris Gammell: Right. You weren't trying to transition right into a company or something like that.

Zach Dunham: We were trying to do that. Yeah. Which made a huge, and then relying on friends. Like, you know, Todd looked at our circuit and helped us figure out where that switching, you know, noise and reception issue is coming from. Right. That was super helpful.

Chris Gammell: You did mention that in here. I don't know if you want to mention that. Oh yeah. A big challenge. We did talk about that.

Zach Dunham: Yeah.

Zach Dunham: Yeah. This was before. A big challenge with that radio project was we were using a Class D amp and the switching frequency of the amp had a harmonic that was actually mucking up the front end of the radio. And for months and months, we just could not for the life of us figure out why the reception sucked until we ripped the Class D amp off and at Todd's place and put on a different, you know, just Class A amp and- Burn some power. Burn some power. Yeah. And really figured out. Now it has a Class A B. Oh yeah.

Chris Gammell: Cool. Yeah, I mean with the Class D the chips are just so cheap and, but yeah, those frequencies

Zach Dunham: can be. And right now we probably could find a different chip that had a different switching frequency that would play nice and maybe- Yeah.

Chris Gammell: You can move them around too actually. You can sometimes do that.

Zach Dunham: Oh yeah. I should talk to you.

Chris Gammell: Not me. Don, that's bad. Yeah, no, I don't like Class D stuff. That's, I mean, it's, they're super cheap and efficient, right? But like, yeah, they- Yeah, you end up putting like, ferried beads all over your board. You're basically like snapping gates on and off and on and off and on. Yeah, that's a mess. So, the reason it sounds okay is because we can't hear the bad stuff happening up in the higher frequencies. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so, that's good. I like that you were able to, like that's why that happened.

Zach Dunham: Like that we were able to ship.

Chris Gammell: Well, I like that you were able to ship. That's good. Yeah. So, what are you seeing, like why, what are the big problems that you're seeing then? Like, so, you've seen probably a lot of apology letters. Yeah. To backers. Yep. What's the big ones?

Zach Dunham: Yeah, so again, I think when we were initially thinking about how we are going to go about trying to solve this problem and like the pre-work that went into what is now Hardware Studio. Yeah, right. Or what will be Hardware Studio was looking at projects that kind of all had this similar trend, which was they had, you know, made say sub 100 of a thing and they went on Kickstarter, raised some money. They got to the stage where now we really understand the constraints of, and the spec for, you know, we, campaign's done, now we actually have a spec for what this product needs to be, right? We've learned some feedback from customers, maybe changed a couple of things. Mm-hmm. Then we're going to go out and manufacture it. And at that point, they have a fixed amount of capital that they've raised on Kickstarter. Right. They've promised these, you know, rewards or products at a specific price. And they didn't really have their costs really down, right? And so then they go back and use some of that money to do the design work, to do the redesign. Right. And so you see these campaigns that are going on, they're delayed for a year and a half. Even in cases where people aren't paying themselves and, you know, are putting their own money into it, the money is going into redesigning these products. Mm-hmm. And that's where the issue comes up, where they run out of cash and they, you know, they finally figure out how to make the thing and they have it designed, but now they need to raise more money to actually go and produce it.

Chris Gammell: Right. Then you got to go play with the devil and hit the VC world possibly. Yeah. Oh, boy. Whole other episode. Whole other issue. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: No, actually, so speaking of VCs, so we've had Avi down on the show, but Cain, who's another half of Root. Yeah. I did a talk at my meetup in San Francisco and he said, he's like, you have to remember, a crowdfunding campaign is debt. It's basically you've paid, you've now said to people, you've taken their money, you said, I will give you a thing. And like, and that's a great way to look at it, right? It's taking on debt, but it's a promissory note of stuff.

Zach Dunham: It is. It is. I think that saying kick, the tagline that I know that people have used of Kickstarter is debt is a little bit clickbaity too, I will say. But yes. Kind of. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That was the point. I know. I'm going to name the time. I'm going to name this episode Kickstarter is debt. Printed on like a tombstone or something. I don't know. What's the most provocative thing I can do?

Zach Dunham: I agree with the point that you, you know, you should understand the obligations that you are making to backers. You know, certainly that's something that we talk a lot about. And even for projects that fail, you know, there's a right way to fail on Kickstarter. That's something that we have, that we thought a lot about. You know, our terms of service basically spell out, you know, if you are unable to complete the project as you have, you know, set forth in the campaign, you have to, you know, be full disclosure. What happened to the money? You know, what did you do over the course of, you know, the campaign ending and trying to produce that work? It's not just design and tech. It's, you know, food, film, any project. Sure, sure. Because that's really what this is about, right? People, backers are joining you in this process and this journey and you should be able to share those details at the end. So that's what we really think about is the right way to fail.

Chris Gammell: Right. Well, I mean, so we were talking earlier too that like, you know, it's also Kickstarter is like a channel as well and any channel kind of gets bastardized or spammed and stuff like that. And that it's gotten a little bit, it's, I think you guys have done a really good job. Don't get me wrong. But like, you know, it's a channel for making money. And so there's always going to be some kind of scammy aspect possibly to it. Yep. And so that's what you're going to, that's as long as this company is standing, it's going to be fighting for that, right? Or fighting against it rather.

Zach Dunham: A hundred percent. And we have a lot of really smart people here, you know, on our, we have like 15 person integrity team. Oh really? Wow. Yeah. That's great. And equal numbers on our community support team. And we have a data team. And we're looking...

Chris Gammell: Your numbers were crazy too. I remember you told me like how many projects are coming in a week or something? It was daily, weekly?

Zach Dunham: Yeah. Generally on average between design and tech together, we have a thousand projects that are live across those two categories every month. Wow. At any given time. It's usually what we see. And within tech, you know, I think that there are other models out there, right? There are other, you know, platforms that go about it in different ways. I think we're constantly trying to walk the line of remaining open to, you know, people trying to push the boundaries, but also set up these guidelines that help keep the platform safe. And so, you know, of course the integrity team is looking at, you know, projects that are doing, you know, credit card fraud or very obvious things like that. Right. But also when people flag a project, hey, I think this is fake or, hey, I found this on Taobao, we're not afraid to take it down too. Yeah. And we do suspend projects. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Because you can always turn it back on later, right? Or whatever, right? Not that it happens, but you could.

Zach Dunham: You know. A creator, you mean, to relaunch?

Chris Gammell: Oh, I just meant like if you could like pause it. Oh, no.

Zach Dunham: I mean, if we suspend a project, it's, yeah. It's toast. Toast. Done. Got it. But yeah, you're right. Like we're always going to be, there are people that see this as a platform that you could, you know, take advantage of. And I think that that's why we have those teams here to monitor that stuff.

Chris Gammell: That's good. So tell me more about Studio too. And also, and also Studio too, because, so this is, this is in the works still, right? Hardware Studio. Yeah. People can sign up for the mailing list right now, but you guys have announced that it's with Avnet and Dragon, like you mentioned. So go ahead.

Zach Dunham: Yeah, sure. So I think this is goes, you know, a lot of the challenges that we were just talking about specific for hardware design creators on Kickstarter. This is a new initiative that we just launched in May or announced in May that will go live in September and is directly aimed at, you know, specifically trying to match some of the engineering expertise and talents from these two great companies with, you know, project creators on Kickstarter. And so the program has two parts. One is toolkit, which is sort of our effort to try and, you know, democratize this, this, this knowledge base of, you know, design for manufacturing and, you know, finding a supplier and factory negotiations and all these things. So there you'll find webinars, blog posts from Kickstarter creators, access to tools like Dragon Innovations.

Chris Gammell: Like stuff Scott talks about at his, anytime he gives a talk, which are always awesome. Yeah, like all of that stuff is going to be there.

Zach Dunham: And then this other component called Connection, which is an application based part of the program, where creators will apply in advance of launching their campaign to get access and support from engineers at Avnet and Dragon. And the difference, like what we're really going for there is to not just have a, you know, this is our standard offering and if you don't need some of it, then, you know, so be it. And, you know, you can have these two other things that we're offering then, you know, we're really trying to tailor those offerings to a team's needs.

Chris Gammell: Cool. And that's the one that Dave thought was going to be charged for. Right. He thought this was going to be like a thing you get charged for.

Zach Dunham: So there, I think in that, in that process, and again, we're, this is going to launch in September. And so right now over the next three months, we're really hashing out all the details of how this is going to work. But there will be a mix of certainly free offerings. And for people that are looking to engage in more long-term support with one of those companies, there will be, of course, a paid offering. And that's what I said, yeah.

Chris Gammell: A loss leader for potential services, stuff like that.

Zach Dunham: Yeah. It's a way for both Dragon and Avnet to have access to that community.

Chris Gammell: I mean, yeah, Dragon makes money by offering consulting services effectively, but this is kind of like what they did with Dragon Certified, right? That was kind of the thing they used to do.

Zach Dunham: Yeah. Yeah. Which is, I think, also something that you guys were talking about on that last episode of like, you know, are we going to be simply, you know, putting a big approval badge on projects? Right. Right. And the answer is no. We do want to highlight... It's a small badge. Yes. A very small badge.

Zach Dunham: No. We do want to highlight projects that are going through this. Mm-hmm. But the goal is really to, again, educate backers. These are projects that are going through, yes, this extra round of due diligence, and here's what that looks like, and provide some explanation. Yeah. And only you're ever going to see us putting a big stamp of approval on this project. 100% is going to deliver. Cannot. Yeah. Too big to fail, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's true, too.

Chris Gammell: And, you know, like one of the best things you probably could do as a project backer as well is like, so like how do you really prove that you're going to be okay in manufacturing, right? Sure. There's always risk. Yeah. Even the best people, like some of the 30 years of experience, they could still fail, too. But it's like if you document it, if you talk about what you're going through, like the most open projects are the lowest risk probably.

Zach Dunham: Yes. Yeah. And so, you know, before you had asked me that question about what were the reasons why public radio didn't, or was successful, and I like fell back onto these things I think we look at all the time, which are scale or ambition, complexity of a project, and current state of development. Those are three kind of vectors that if we highlight in the right way, do allow backers to assess the risk of a project. Mm-hmm. And I think that's, like that's the point that we want to get to on Kickstarter is where we have creators who have more access to knowledge and we have backers who are better able to assess the risk of projects. Mm-hmm. And so when you get to that place, you kind of can have the community be knowledgeable whether to come out into support of a project. Sure. And you'll always have the projects that are better at marketing something beyond the stage that it may be at. But I think those are the, you know, we're trying to increase that transparency for backers and increase the knowledge base for creators too.

Chris Gammell: So what about like the, I mean, what's that one I always think about that, it wasn't, it was not Kickstarter, but it was that bracelet that like projects on your arm. Do you remember that one? I remember that one.

Zach Dunham: Yes.

Chris Gammell: Like how do you guys deal with physics around here? I know it's like that, to be clear, that was not a project here. Yeah. That was a project that was.

Zach Dunham: Well, we get them is the thing. Yeah. And then we, and sometimes we end up suspending them. Okay. And then they, yeah, go elsewhere. Sure.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Logistically, whatever.

Chris Gammell: But, but I mean like how do you deal with that? Yep. That aspect of it is like, is that you? Is that someone else?

Zach Dunham: Dave offered his services.

Chris Gammell: I, you didn't listen to that part of the episode, but Dave said he would, he, he said he would review all of them. I'm like, you're, you're crazy, but.

Zach Dunham: We may have a job for him. Yeah. Right. Um, I, you know, I think that, yeah, to be completely honest, like I said, people will flag projects and say, Hey, have you thought about X? You know, I'm looking at this video and there's no way possible that this person can do this thing.

Chris Gammell: And so that's the main mechanism is just community based flagging stuff like that.

Zach Dunham: Yeah. We're not, we don't have in-house mechanical engineers or physicists here working at Kickstarter. And, you know, it's not like, uh, would never be our MO to, to do that to like that every single project in terms of its feasibility.

Chris Gammell: Um, yeah, that would take a long time to get approval then too, right?

Zach Dunham: It would take a while to get approval, but we are every single day looking at, you know, all the projects get, that get flagged by our community members. So whether that's, you know, this razor can't, you know, center the hair on your face. Oh man.

Chris Gammell: I remember that one.

Zach Dunham: Um, no, like there, and we take those things seriously. Wait, was that in here? That was, that was a thing here that was taken down. Oh.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Did they ever show an actual version of it?

Speaker ?: They did.

Zach Dunham: And that, I mean, that was, uh, yeah, that was, that was also an issue that it was, it was not, it was not clear what they were showing. And then it became clear that it was sort of doctored.

Chris Gammell: Got it. Yeah. And that's the thing. Like, I mean, that's another problem, right? It's kind of a downsampling of information, right? If you were in person and you're like, all right, shave your face right now, right? It's going to be very obvious, right? And you'd be like, can I inspect this thing? But you also can't have a prototype for every, you mentioned like how full this office would be of just wackadoodle projects. Yeah. Send us your thing and we'll see if it works. Right, right. We'll, we'll, we'll test that one too for, uh, uh, what is it? Uh, perpetual motion. Oh, perpetual motion.

Zach Dunham: Yeah. Yeah. Dave, if you're listening, there is a perpetual motion, uh, link in one of our design and tech newsletters in the event newsletter, uh, from a Ted talk about how or why perpetual motion machines will never work or, yeah. Right. So that's, that's for you.

Chris Gammell: He loves it. I'm sure. He also doesn't listen to old episodes. So I don't know. Okay. All right. Well, so you say whatever you want about him right now.

Zach Dunham: Okay. What do you think about Dave? Actually? No. Um, no, it's, I was, I was, I was, I was bummed that he wasn't going to be on the show because, uh, I learned about precision rectifiers by watching a YouTube video that Dave had up and that was very helpful to me. Don't.

Chris Gammell: I'm going to cut that out. I know. Okay. You've got to cut that out. Great. Great. Thanks a lot, man. Yeah. I've learned stuff from Dave too. It's fine. Uh, yeah. Well, I mean, yeah, I mean, I guess that is, I mean, so I remember the first time we met too, we were talking about, so you had mentioned some of that 3D printing stuff. Mm-hmm. I mean, are you looking for suggestions on how to make this process more?

Zach Dunham: I think that we're always open to, you know, to feedback from the community on out. Like, I think that the, the, the way that I see it is like, you know, we have great projects in that space too. Formlabs just came out with their Fuse 1, uh, you know, SLS printer. Yeah. They released their Form 2. The Form 1 was on Kickstarter and it, that was a machine that had some, yeah. Well, it was kind of a rough start. But it had a rough start. They survived. They were doing amazing things and, you know, you could say the same about a lot of companies, but that, that printer also, like, the Form 1 people used that for a while and, and had a lot of great use out of it. Yeah. There are plenty of, of projects like that in that space. Mm-hmm. There are also projects with, with lots of challenges and.

Chris Gammell: I mean, that's a, well, complexity, right? That's a hugely complex thing, right? Yeah.

Zach Dunham: And so, if there are, the, the answer is yes. If people, you know, listening have feedback on things that we, that, you know, you want to see, those, those types of projects demoing or showcasing, send me an email, I would, I'd be happy to

Chris Gammell: That's interesting. Uh, yeah, I don't, I don't know. I mean, like, the thing is, here's the thing, right? Yeah. So you guys have this new, I'm excited about hardware studio. I think that's going to be good. Yep. But like, even, I mean, like companies hire Dragon, right? They, they work with that. All these people, and stuff still doesn't work. Like, there's people working on this stuff full-time. Yep. And they're jobs. And like, man, it still sucks. Like- Yeah. I'm glad that you're not saying hardware's hard. Oh, you had to say it, didn't you? You knew I wasn't, I knew I wasn't dancing around that, you know? But anyways, yeah. Um, I have, that has left my vernacular, but uh, yeah. I used to say it. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, like, it's, I don't know, it's just risky. And it's like, and the timelines can just stretch forever.

Zach Dunham: Yeah, and so what? Do you think that, like, we should walk away from it? Yeah, just give this whole thing. Kickstarter? Yeah. So last year. No, but I mean, like, you know, I think this is certainly something we get asked a lot around fulfillment rates. And I know that's something that you guys brought up previously, you know, around the study that we did that 9% of projects fail to deliver on Kickstarter. And the truth is, from our perspective, like, it's a number. One, we're glad that there's a number out there because I think that there's a lot of people that are just saying, like, all those projects. Right, right, right. Whatever it is. Everything, everything's snake-like. Everything's snake-like. Yeah, exactly. But the other thing is, you know, there's going to be some amount of failure in a system where people are trying new things and pushing boundaries. And you have people like Zach and Spencer who have, you know, never designed circuits before and they're launching radio projects. Right, right.

Chris Gammell: Well, I do always like that part of the projects that are, what are the risk factors? Like, when people give that an honest treatment, that's really helpful, I think.

Zach Dunham: So, and I think the other piece to that is, yes, people get advice and coaching from experts and still can't pull it off. I think the other thing you have to read into is, when did they get that advice and did they take that advice? True.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, right. Like, yeah, you should really go redesign your whole board because that's not going to pass any FCC testing, right?

Zach Dunham: And they're like, well, I don't have any money to do that, so I guess I'll just go with what I have.

Chris Gammell: Right. Yeah. Yeah, it's tough. I don't know. I mean, I don't know how much, is there like, so you said there's consulting stuff with Hardware Studio. Is it like, is it going to be that advice piece? Is it like, like full design, like sourcing everything?

Zach Dunham: So, yeah, like I said, that, the depth of that I think still remains to be seen, but it's not going to be, we're not thinking of that connection piece as, oh, you're, you know, designing an IoT device. Here's some, you know, reference designs for, you know, Intel chips and, you know, be on your way. And we'll put a badge on your page. It's not, it's not going to be that. I think where that falls between that and someone saying, send us, you know, your Eagle files and we're going to like get in there and start redesigning the circuit. That's certainly, you know, a level of service that I think both Avnet and Dragon are exploring, but it remains to be seen. Like I said, we're not trying to have it be like a cookie cutter that we apply to every single project. We're really trying to find ways to be more adaptive to each project that's coming in. And it's, you know, there is going to be an acceptance rate where this isn't going to be like a thing where anyone who wants this level of support, they're going to, they're going to take on.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And I mean, like, like, so like Avnet, Arrow, they, like all those big distributors, they have FEs in-house that do this stuff. Yep. The hardest part for anyone, including like chip vendors, anyone, is just getting their attention, right? It's like, they always say, oh, what's your EAU? And you're like five. EAU is estimated annual usage for people listening who don't know. And like, then they go, why was I talking to you again? Yeah, exactly. And so like, and I think, that's why I think these kind of programs make sense too. They are interested in that potential next big thing. And, you know, they've seen the stats and they're willing to take a little bit of a risk on, well, yeah, we'll give some stuff away. Because that means at the end of the day that, you know, like an Avnet will get your, your bomb quoting and, and offering you auxiliary services and all that stuff. And Dragon, same thing, right? So these all make sense to me. So it's good. But there's still no guarantee of success, right?

Zach Dunham: There's, there's not. And like I said, it's certainly not something that's going to be, you know, the, you know, the takeaway from Hardware Studio. You're never going to see like us advertising Hardware Studio, you know, apply for 100% success rate. You know, it's like, that's just, I think. Because then I would apply for everything.

Chris Gammell: You'd have like companies applying and be like, well, if I can't fail, then my job gets a lot easier.

Zach Dunham: Yeah, I think that like our takeaway is, you know, so we were talking about that Class D amplifier switching thing, that, that, that issue that I had. And it was like three months. Yeah. And I would like us to create a place where someone like me in that instance could go and say, and drop into, you know, a thread following a blog post on Class D amps or something and say, hey, I'm using a Class D amp. And for the life of me, I can't get rid of this noise. And someone in there to say, what are you, you know, like that would be that amount of like revealing and democratizing that type of knowledge, I think would be successful. Whether or not I as a creator in that instance would go in and like redesign my board to be a Class A, B and then run this campaign and deliver. Right. That's another. Right. I think that what we can ask for is that people are engaging. People are learning something new. Right.

Chris Gammell: Well, and I think so like to use that example again, too, it's like you didn't know it was the Class D either. No. You just knew it's not working. Right. And that's the. So like I tell people this in my course all the time. It's like sometimes the hardest thing is knowing what to Google for because when you figure it out, you're like, oh, shit, there's the answer. Right. Yeah. It's like 100%. Like and and in that case, you had Todd helping you and like. Right. And like but like there's so many. Sometimes it's just about having that person looking over your shoulder and being like.

Speaker ?: Look at that.

Zach Dunham: A hundred percent.

Zach Dunham: Right. Yeah. Yeah. And I think about this all the time. Right. So this stuff, you know, the stuff you know, you don't know. And then the stuff you don't know, you don't know. Right. And that like that's the area that I want this program to try and tackle.

Chris Gammell: But by definition, some of the stuff will be completely brand new, too. So it's somewhere it's just about having willing participants being like, well, yeah, I'll take a look. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Zach Dunham: Developing that that kind of openness with with the community and getting people to engage. Yeah. Will be a challenge, too.

Chris Gammell: I recently was talking to a bunch of potential students for my course. And it was really surprising, actually, because a lot of them were like, you know, they had done some electronics. And the main thing people said is like they're like, I just want a sanity check. I just want to like be able to like talk about this thing. Because especially because we're so spread out these days. Right. Like I was just hanging out with a friend and he's the only EE in this company. Right. And that's a very common thing where you're you might be working with 10 people, but you're the guy. I was the guy. Yeah. I shouldn't have been the guy. Like I was the guy doing the analog stuff like that. Come on. I'm not that good. And and like and then it's lonely and you don't know what to ask. You don't know where to go. Totally. And now like you have people that are doing this for something that doesn't exist yet. Yep. And so where do you go?

Zach Dunham: Yeah. And then community, man. It's it's midnight and you're you're dropping into Stack Exchange and you have some gnarly engineer making fun of you. Yeah. Stack Exchange.

Chris Gammell: What a what a cesspool. No, that's not true. I found a lot of value from. Sorry. I'm sorry. Found a lot of value from there. But yes, it's it is not the most forgiving place. And honestly, sometimes again, if you're not if you're on all these threads, you just don't know what you're looking. What you're looking for. Right. Yeah. A hundred percent. You can't put in radio don't work. Yeah, man. But if you could, that'd be that'd be a great service. Yeah. Get on a Google.

Zach Dunham: So, yeah. What would you to put it back to you? Like, what do you think what do you think should be in that sort of toolkit element of this program? Well, being an educator in this space.

Chris Gammell: Solving the problem that those people I had. Yeah.

Zach Dunham: Yeah. You don't know what you don't know.

Chris Gammell: I mean, honestly, it's it's partially a willingness to participate in a regular form. Right. Because so so what I was thinking about doing is actually having like a regular meeting. Like, you know, like every week we get together. One person's in the hot seat. They talk about their issues and then people kind of throw suggestions. Right. That's nice. Yeah. But the problem there is like for if there's seven people in a group and you're there one week, you got to show up the other six. Right. And so it's like, how do you motivate people to be there? Yep. The hardest thing in the world is to give people to give a shit on the Internet. Right. Totally. And so and it's even harder when you have to show up at a certain time. Kickstarter has some scales. So that might be good.

Zach Dunham: Yep. That's interesting. I like that. I like a virtual study group.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, kind of.

Zach Dunham: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: The one thing that I've. So Luke, we've had on the show, Luke Iceman, who is the hardware guy at YC for a while. And the thing he always pushed was like, you know, at first I was like, come on, this is going to be us. But like he's like, yeah, there's this huge alumni community of like willing people.

Zach Dunham: And like we see that all the time here, actually, of past Kickstarter creators just literally just emailing us saying, hey, I saw this project, you know, or we just went through this. We were more than happy to share our experience.

Chris Gammell: Right. It's like it's like a requiem. It's like I want to like solve my past pain by helping someone's future pain. Right. Totally. Yeah.

Zach Dunham: And that's that's that is that is an element that we plan to bring into it where there's a regular, you know, column that's penned by a Kickstarter creator who's in the fire or has, you know, has just just shipped.

Chris Gammell: And you know, it'd be good. It would be like a hotline. You know what I mean? Like like literally and not to be glib about it because there's very serious people that are helping with like like emergency hotlines and stuff like like like crisis hotlines. Sure. Those are really like amazing work. Like that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying this only because it's a close enough analogy, but like something like that where it's like, yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, call this number day or night. We're going to patch it through. Like there's people all around the world. Right. Yeah. And then like that'd be kind of interesting to be interesting to see who actually calls it. Right. So I don't know. One time. What does one unlucky person that goes to Dave? Oh, man. It's a perpetual motion project. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, God. You just always patch them through to Dave. He's not listening. We can just mess with him. We just plan to mess with him. He'll never see it coming, man. I have his number. But yeah, stuff like that. I mean, like that community piece is super helpful. Right. I mean, that's that's what Todd was for you in that case. Yeah. And that you help other people with. Right. I mean, just institutionalizing that is kind of a draw on people's time.

Zach Dunham: Yeah. No, I like that. I will. I will think about that.

Chris Gammell: OK, cool. Well, what else should we know about Kickstarter? You. I mean, we're an hour and a quarter in.

Zach Dunham: So I think that we've that we've covered a lot. Yeah. I'll say, you know, I'm not I'm not unique in this regard of like having a role here, coaching design and tech projects and having some experience and background in that. You know, the games lead, Luke, who interrupted us so rudely before to grab that camera. They didn't know about that until now, man. No, he like he's an extremely talented game designer and is just so well respected in that community. And, you know, our film team is made by filmmakers and screeners. And so the yeah, like we we care about this stuff. Right. We try and be knowledgeable of the communities that we help represent here. And that's great. I think that's important to us.

Chris Gammell: Awesome. Where can people follow you online?

Zach Dunham: My website that I try and update every once in a while is Zach Dunham, Z-I-C-H-D-U-N-H-A-M.com. And I'm pretty quiet on social media, to be honest. I need to step up my social media game.

Chris Gammell: So maybe I mean, I don't know what we were talking. Oh, actually, we should mention that, too. Sorry. You are relaunching your radio.

Zach Dunham: Oh, yeah. We're relaunching the radio in two weeks on June 20th. Right.

Chris Gammell: And when this goes out, it probably will be live. So I'll link to that, too. Cool. Awesome. Yeah.

Zach Dunham: I hope future self, it's going well.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Good luck, future Zach. Yeah, that's cool. And you guys were talking about, you're making it more manufacturable and finding partners or stuff like that.

Zach Dunham: The goal with that is to set up a U.S.-based manufacturing line. I mean, it's a weird, quirky device. And so we really need to find partners who are willing to kind of, yeah, handle some of the complexities of it. But we will not be setting up a Soho Saturday afternoon production line this time around.

Speaker ?: Oh, weird.

Zach Dunham: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Well, and people can, I mean, if they want to follow their first project, they can give a dollar and follow along, right? That's true. Buy Zach a cup of coffee. Yeah. All right. Cool, man. Well, thanks. And we'll have tons of links in the show notes. Awesome. Thanks so much for having me. Thank you.

Zach Dunham: It's okay.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, go ahead. Sorry. I'll cut it out.

Speaker ?: Oh, sorry. Oh, you're a podcast.

Chris Gammell: We'll put this in the post.

Zach Dunham: Please put me apologizing.

Speaker ?: Do you know which one you think?