Mr Beam was started as a hobby project aiming to get more experience in 3D printing. For fun we put it on Kickstarter and ended up in kind of a roller coaster.
After many years as a all purpose developer in several startups, I decided to explore the shiny new world of 3D printing.
Laser cutting seemed to be cool, useful and fun. The idea of reusing a dvd burner laser was nice and budget saving, some weeks later the first prototype wrote "hello world" on a piece of wood.
After spending another two month of improvements two friends joined and the idea of kickstarting a mini series production was born.
Finally the Kickstarter campaign was the reason for a lot of travel: Erfurt, Berlin, Barcelona, Tiflis, Vienna, Rome, Austin, San Francisco. On the road were awesome highlights as well as deep depressions.
All in all we didn't get rich in the end, but we got lots of experience in many different areas.
We believe that crowdfunding is a huge opportunity to develop things that otherwise never would have been done. We are happy to share all the lessons learned on our way. Hopefully other projects cause less headache with this knowledge.