But we’re not the only ones… nearly 600 people backed the project putting us there in the top 10% of grossing projects on Kickstarter! By backing the project, people get to become part of the development process and can claim that they are directly responsible for making the product a reality.

If you’re not familiar with crowd sourcing here’s how it work. You have an idea. You put your idea up on a crowd funding website like kickstater and say you need to raise X amount of cash in X amount of days, usually 30-60 days. You send a link to your project to as many people as you know and hopefully people will then pledge money towards your idea to help make it happen. What do people get for their pledge? We’ll that depends on what rewards you set. For a product based idea, most projects rewards are focused around pre-ordering the product at a discounted price below the intended RRP if the project gets funded. I say if because most of these crowd funding sites are an all or nothing deal. If you reach your funding target within the time frame, you get the cash, go make your product, and ship it to your customers. If you don’t reach your target, no money changes hands and you go back to the drawing board.

The beautiful thing about crowd funding is that it lets the market validate your product idea before you have to invest large chunks of money in tooling and production. And by validate we mean with their wallets (not just their mouths or keyboards). Knowing you have the cash before you need to spend it on production makes the manufacturing decisions much easier to make.

however, its not as simple as it seems. A lot of projects on crowd funding sites fail to raise a $1, even if they are a fantastic idea so you need to make sure you’ve ticked all the boxes before you list your project.

Here’s our top 5 crowd funding tips:

1. Have a well designed, refined product. A working prototype is a big plus – An industrial designer can help you with this.
2. Know how much money you need to cover design, prototyping, tooling, production, shipping, and marketing.
3. Make a captivating video explaining the product to your target market.
4. Tell people about it! This is probably the most important step. The project won’t fund itself so you have to tell everyone about it, blogs, twitter, Facebook, the local paper, even your grandma!
5. Communicate and engage with your audience. Monitor questions, comments and posts on your project 24/7 and respond as quickly as you can. They are your potential customers so acknowledge them.

If you like the Opena case they are available for purchase online at www.openacase.com

Is exactly what Markus Kayser has done. Using a large Fresnel lens and a simple 3 Axis gantry design, he has harnessed the power of the sun to print (or melt to be more exact) sand into 3D glass objects based off a 3D CAD model. Very inspiring work!

More information at www.3d-printers.com.au