Is it the end of Tindie Fundraisers? - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: fenclu
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: January 07, 2014, 04:54:55 pm
content: I'm a couple of months away from putting my product on Tindie. Since I'm on an INCREDIBLY tight budget I can't really afford to take the risk of putting 250 USD into my project. I decided to go with the Tindie Fundraiser - much simpler than a real crowdfunding campaign and seems to work pretty well. Perfect.So, yesterday I asked Tindie a random question about the fundraisers at Twitter. Their response ends with the words "However we are sunsetting fundraisers today". WTF?And that's it. I asked them for more details but they didn't respond. Now, I might just be an idiot and have misunderstood their tweet (ya know, I'm not a native English speaker). If it's true, though, I'm in the deepest shit, because my project will probably just die.It's funny, cause that tweet was the only place I found this information. It's not mentioned anywhere else.Here's the tweet:https://twitter.com/tindie/status/420332176484229120

author: Unknown
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 07, 2014, 05:41:07 pm
content: I speak English, due mainly to me being English, and I have absolutely no idea what they mean either.

author: madworm
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: January 07, 2014, 05:50:25 pm
content: Seems fundraisers have been "put to sleep". At least I can't create any new ones.

author: mrflibble
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 07, 2014, 07:58:18 pm
content: Quote from: Lurch on January 07, 2014, 05:41:07 pmSunsettingsounds like something they would learn at the Euphemistic Management Resort.

author: fenclu
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: January 07, 2014, 08:03:35 pm
content: Am I the only one that thinks this is a little suspicious? Given that it's not just a misunderstanding, they seem oddly quiet about it. They keep announcing all these discounts, while not mentioning the end of their big feature.

author: Len
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: January 07, 2014, 08:08:32 pm
content: Quote from: fenclu on January 07, 2014, 08:03:35 pmYep, that's called "marketing". You don't expect them to advertise that they're making their product worse, do you?

author: gxti
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: January 07, 2014, 08:12:54 pm
content: Quote from: fenclu on January 07, 2014, 08:03:35 pmIt was literally announced in the same email as the discount you're talking about.QuotePersonally, while it's nice to say nobody should ever remove features, I think it's a reasonable decision. Trying to be everything to everybody is not a path to success.

author: fenclu
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: January 07, 2014, 08:17:55 pm
content: Ah crap. I do subscribe to the newsletter, however that e-mail ended up in the spam folder. Gotta love the Google spam filter.

author: headroom
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: January 11, 2014, 04:53:23 pm
content: I am selling my own LED drivers on Tindie. I initially intended to do this as a fundraiser as well to mitigate financial risk. After long consideration and watching what is sold on Tindie I decided that it would likely not work too well.Most of the stuff that is sold on Tindie are obviously not consumer end products but are the little things that make prototyping electronics easier and quicker. In that range a customer would not want to wait 3-4 weeks or months before they start their project.If you're short on cash and need to rely on the money fundraiser to pay for materials then they'd have to wait many weeks before receiving their orders. That form of patience is relatively rare these days, particularly in electronics. An order from Mouser or any other of the big three her in the US rarely takes more than 3-4 days to arrive at my door.That is also likely the reason that they stopped the Fundraisers. They've done this before temporarily BTW.

author: PartFusion
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: January 15, 2014, 10:03:15 pm
content: I sell a few products on Tindie too. I think the workaround you might try, is to use back orders.Create the new product, set your stock level to zero and enable back orders, then you have 90 days to fill the orders. The customer will only be billed when your nearly ready to ship the orders.We also have a new discussion forum for sellears on reddit,http://www.reddit.com/r/Tindie_Sellers/if you have more questions.