The next question was what becomes of our 2,000 Kickstarter backers if we do need to cancel the project. The issue is that the $350 price is calculated based on a production run of 5,000 units. If we only make 2,000 units, things get significantly more expensive per unit. Most importantly, the tooling costs become prohibitive. To use the number from our previous example: Spending £50,000 to tool up for 50,000 units makes sense because you get the economies of scale, but the tools don’t actually become any cheaper if you want to manufacture just 2,000 units. That means that instead of contributing £1 per unit, if we are only ever creating 2,000 Triggertrap Ada kits, the tooling represents £25 per unit. In effect, that means that the cost per casing has just gone up 25x. Not pretty.

The core of the problem is doing a production run of 2,000: it’s a really dumb number. It falls between technologies: It’s not cost effective to use injection moulding due to the tooling costs, but 3D printing or other low-volume manufacturing processes are similarly expensive. If we were to 3D print the casings, the cost per unit is exponentially higher than injection moulding, because it involves more manual labour, it’s much slower, and the materials themselves are way more expensive.

And then, the pre-orders failed.

After our Triggertrap Ada campaign closed, we received a barrage of emails from people who wanted to buy the product, but who had missed the Kickstarter project. We set up a mailing list where people were able to throw their names into the hat. Nearly 4,000 people did just that, and signed up to be notified when Triggertrap Ada would open up for pre-orders.

Getting from this point to where we needed to be turned out to be eye-wateringly expensive.

As soon as we finally started getting a better picture of what the costs would be, we started discussing pre-orders. The reason for doing pre-orders was twofold: If a large number of people pre-ordered, it would tell us that the higher price point wasn’t a problem, and that photographers were willing to spend the additional money for this awesome product. Internally we expected that at worst 20% of people who had signed up to the newsletter would pre-order, and at best 50% of people on the list would convert into sales.

When we opened up for pre-orders in late December, we got a spectacularly nasty surprise. Instead of falling into the 20–50% range, or an expected £220–500k ($350–800k) worth of pre-order sales, less than 1.5% of the people on our mailing list converted into sales, and another few dozen people who weren’t on the mailing list placed an order.

To us, this meant two things.

One: People didn’t want Ada at the higher price point, which means that we couldn’t sell them if we manufactured them. Two: We were relying on additional revenue to start our tooling and mass production process. Revenue that didn’t materialise.

The sum of all parts

Ultimately, it all conspired to be a perfect storm: Our R&D turned out to take six times longer than we had anticipated and cost five times more than we had budgeted for. The production cost per unit was three times higher, and the tooling costs were significantly higher than we had budgeted for. And the final kick in the groinal area: instead of getting a 20–50% uptake on our post-Kickstarter pre-orders, we got 1.5%.

Needless to day, things weren’t looking good.

As a last resort, we went and spoke to our bank to try to come up with a bridge loan. It wasn’t a particularly fruitful conversation: They had doubts in our ability to deliver the Ada sales we were aiming for, especially considering the pre-order failure. We turned to a series of investors to see whether we were able to convince them to have faith in what we were trying to do, but failed on that front, too. Or rather: The investors were very excited about Triggertrap as a company, but were less than convinced by Ada — especially when they’d taken a look at the numbers.

With all our backup options exhausted, we continued doing in-depth scenario planning, but to no avail. In our rose-tinted, raspberry-fragranced, truffle-flavoured best-case scenario, where everything on the Ada project goes 100% to plan; where people fall in love with Ada and started pre-ordering it like there’s no tomorrow; where our distribution sales went through the roof; and where we did six consecutive months of record-breaking sales through distribution, via Amazon, and in the Triggertrap shop— we were still screwed. Put differently: If we try to manufacture Ada, Triggertrap will be bankrupt come May.

And that was the best case scenario.

I spent days going through this every-which-way, and came to the conclusion we most wanted to avoid: We had to abort the Ada project. We got so goddamn close, but there was no way we’d be able to pull off the manufacturing phase.

Now what?

It’s hard to describe the profoundly visceral reaction I went through as it dawned on me what was about to happen. To me, Kickstarter backers aren’t just customers. They’re our friends. They are mavens. They represent our most passionate, most ardent and most enthusiastic customers. The ones who promote us, and keep cheering us on when the going gets tough.

But… Triggertrap is a going concern; We have hundreds of thousands of customers around the world, and more than a million photographs are taken with Triggertrap’s Mobile products every month. If we commit to delivering Triggertrap Ada, there’s an extremely good chance that the company won’t survive. If that happens, we don’t just let down our Kickstarter backers; We also let down the six-figure number of customers we have around the world, the Triggertrap staff lose their jobs, and it all grinds to a halt. That simply cannot happen on my watch.

And so we only have one option left: Refund the remainder of the money we raised from Kickstarter to our Kickstarter backers, and double down on Triggertrap Mobile.

What have we learned: 6 expensive lessons

We’re in a very painful place at the moment — deciding to cancel Ada is one of the toughest decisions we’ve made in Triggertrap history. But we’re not going to hide from the fall-out, and as soon as we realised that things were looking ugly, we started digging into the reasons for why this happened, and what we’d need to change to avoid anything like this happening again.

One of the test shots of Triggertrap Ada: The moment we first captured a .22 pellet coming out of an air rifle.

Lesson 1: Fail faster.

I’m a big believer in ‘failing fast’, and if there’s one thing we failed to do above everything else in this project, it is just that. It might sound weird that ‘failing to fail’ is a problem, but in my mind, that’s exactly the case. There were quite a few points throughout the Triggertrap Ada project where we should have taken stock and pulled the plug earlier, or at least taken action when we realised things were moving in the wrong direction.

If we had been more critical of our software partners and inspected things more closely throughout the process, we would have switched software agency much earlier. If we had been across the BOM cost more carefully, we would have discovered that the product wasn’t as viable as a commercial product longer ago.

If we had failed earlier, we would have had enough of a buffer to re-plan and do things differently.

Or, if we had discovered we did have to cancel the project earlier, we would have been able to refund more of the money to our Kickstarter backers.

Lesson 2: Don’t let money mask the problem.

When we received the money from Kickstarter (minus their cut, the payment processor’s fees, and taxes), we had more money in our bank account than we ever had before. That sounds like a luxury, of course, but with that much money in the bank, we lost sight of some of the problems. We never said that explicitly, but I feel there was a notion that we would be able to throw more money at any problem that arose.

Of course, this wasn’t the case: It was always going to be very expensive to bring Triggertrap Ada to market. Losing a sense of frugality in the product development phase of the project is ultimately what caused us to lose our safety buffer.

Lesson 3: Tighter project management.

I mentioned this in my previous post as well, but one of the big shortcomings we had in this project was a really basic project management fail: We failed to manage the resources we had available to us (money, time) and if we’d known the full implications of having to change the microprocessor we had originally chosen, for example, we would have taken another path.

Lesson 4: Avoid scope creep.

This is the one I really punish myself for every day, not least because it’s such an obvious mistake. And yet, we fell into the trap. Scope creep is anathema to getting a product out the door, and yet, we fell into that trap really early on, when we decided to change the microprocessor.

The assumption was that changing the microprocessor would be straightforward, and that we would be able to get the UI we had designed. Realistically, the correct answer would have been “We would love a better UI, but our budget doesn’t stretch to re-doing the electronics and software from scratch, so we’ll have to live with a slightly worse UI than planned” rather than “Let’s write a blank cheque to the electronics guys to do major open-heart surgery on our electronics design.” Hindsight: it’s a bitch.

Lesson 5: Get the right skills.

We thought we had all the skills we needed to deliver this project. We were incredibly wrong. As soon as the Kickstarter money hit our account, we should have hired an experienced hardware product manager.

Lesson 6: Don’t be naïve.

Towards the end of the project, we engaged an extremely experienced hardware project manager, both to discuss how things were looking, and to see if we could salvage the project.

To kick it off, I figured I’d ask him how we should have run this project. The challenge we set him: “If you have £300k to develop a consumer electronics product, how would you go about it?” He looked me straight in the eye, blinked twice, and said “I wouldn’t. Not with a budget of under £1m.”

I recently spoke with another well-known photography hardware manufacturer, who estimate that to bring a single product to market, they’ll spend upwards of $30m — and that’s before they’ve mass manufactured a single item. I guess the takeaway from this is that we’ve been seriously burned. Sure, we made a lot of mistakes along the way, and there’s quite a few examples of Kickstarter projects who’ve successfully launched consumer electronics products… But the sheer amount of R&D that goes into a single product is staggering, and thinking that we’d be able to do this on our own was profoundly naive. A healthy dose of realism and scepticism — and taking professional advice earlier — would have gone a long way.

So… That’s it, then?

Yes, that’s it. I failed. We failed. It feels horrible, and it’s the end of Ada. But not the end of Triggertrap.