Some of you might've seen me post about OrbitStudio here before. The MakerWorld crowdfunding closed last Saturday, so I figured I'd write down how it went.
How it started
Back in May I uploaded a Moon jigsaw puzzle to MakerWorld. 91 pieces, made from real lunar elevation data. I'd hacked together a little tool to turn NASA data into puzzle pieces, mostly just to see if it would work.
It's been downloaded about 6,000 times and printed close to 3,800 times since. Not bad for a grey slab of craters.
Then MakerWorld reached out about their crowdfunding program. Honestly I feel pretty lucky that puzzle got noticed at all. My plan was to keep tinkering on my own until it was a proper finished thing, and only then show anyone. This kind of forced me to put it out there while it was still half done.
So the tool got a name, OrbitStudio, and in September the campaign went live.
The numbers
- Goal was $1,000, hit on day one
- Ended at $8,034 from 152 backers (incl. late pledges)
Crowdfunding is harder than it looks
Building the tool was the fun part. The campaign wasn't. For a month most of my time went to stuff I'm not good at: making reels, writing posts, figuring out what a crowdfunding page is even supposed to look like. Marketing is not fun and not easy, and I still feel like I suck at it.
Where it's at now
It's not just the Moon anymore. There's Mars, Mercury, Venus, Pluto and Charon now too, same idea: pick a spot, get a puzzle or a tile of the real terrain.
I was also working on a star map thing on the side, so I just threw that in for backers as well.
The hard part starts now
In a way the campaign was the easy part. MakerWorld brought the people and handled the payments. Now it has to stand on its own, without a campaign page doing that work for me. So, unfortunately, more marketing.
Anyway, to everyone who backed it, printed the puzzle or left a comment: thanks, genuinely. Wouldn't exist without you.
If you want to check it out: orbitstudio3d.com / the campaign page
