Kickstarter
Gigabot
3D printing and Kickstarter go together like peanut butter and jelly, the symbiotic relationship between the two allows exponential growth for both parties. Kickstarter get more traffic and therefore more projects to take their 5% off and 3D printing products get more exposure because of said traffic. It is perfect.
Take our favourite 3D printing pen the 3Doodler for instance, would that have worked as successfully going down the private investment route? Probably not, the tech is nothing revolutionary and therefore finding backers may have been difficult. But it is a neat product, with nice marketing and definitely a creation that could sell, the solution Kickstarter offers is simple, find out how much of a market there is for your product before going into production essentially eliminating any risk that your invention won’t sell. What the 3Doolder pen has done for Kickstarter is to publicise the name, it’s been mentioned pretty much everywhere since 3Doodler, even on prime-time BBC One simply because of the success of the 3Doodler. The Perfect storm.
So it is no surprise that Kickstarter is growing past cellmates Indiegogo in terms of technology projects. We see a 3D printer, a 3D scanner or something 3D related on pretty much a weekly basis. Today’s is the the turn of re3D’s printer the Gigabot, as you can probably guess from the name, the USP of the Gigabot is that it is BIG!
With a 216,000cm2 build volume it has up to 30 times that of most desktop 3D printers, it is aiming big but with a 100-micron layer resolution capacity it is also aiming fine. Though with a starting price of $4,000 dollars this is going to appeal to a more industrial side than those desktop 3D printers.
Proving our 3D printing and Kickstarter theory correct after one day Gigabot's already at 85% funded, with 59 days to go we’ve a sneaky suspicion that funding won’t be a problem for Gigabot!
