Final days of the Kickstarter: www.kickstarte... Why do some products succeed when others fail? That's always a fun question for entrepreneurs to figure out.
I'll explain the appeal. 40k has a lot of peripherals that don't match the aesthetic, primarily coloured dice. If a set of dice did match the aesthetic of a table, concrete dice on a city table for example, they would risk blending in and being hard to read/find. This product 1: Helps keep the table clean 2: Looks great on the table by itself 3: keeps dice accessible even as they are contained its all the aesthetic benefits of keeping your dice in their cube/bag, while keeping them more accessible than if they were just in a big pile. the secret is : 4: It has a cool simple mechanical function which activates my neurons. Its pure luxury- nobody needs this. However it looks like a straight upgrade on the current tabletop experience, regardless if your priority is slapping fistfuls of dice into it or pulling them out in neat orderly rows As an aside, I played 40k recently and used a flat topped building to place all my datacards and army rules on and that worked so well to elevate all my crap off the table, now I'm considering building something for purpose .
When you were talking about the fact the mechanism it uses has existed before you're correct, though I will say his is very elegant solution to the issue. When I backed the product I got curious about the idea of it so I went digging and was able to find a few solutions people have made over the years on things like cults but most were clunky. I also found a marble channeling system for a marble track that was very close to this design (hopper, In this case I think it was a half dozen channels, and the bottom stop bar was droppable). But no one likely saw the wheel and immediately thought "I'm going to attach a rope to it and lift boxes." to make the pully.
These would also be awesome for Battletech players where we roll dice for every missile we launch and it gets crazy when you you're using a mech with multiple LRM 20 launchers.... much quieter and more compact than our traditional rattle boxes.
Version 2 - make it double high, and when you press on the top one, five dice kick out of the hopper and auto roll. 20 attack rolls? Tap it four times.
This would be pretty hard to make work well without using springs. It's certainly doable, but I don't think it's as simple as just 3D printing components and gluing or fitting them together.
Thing that didn't work: someone at work implemented a framework for a complex process, which was supposed to make that process super convenient, fast, and easy to give to the customer to run on their own. The problem was that they implemented a Touring-complete framework, which instantly got about as expansive, as the process itself, covering almost all options available, with inherent complexity. This wasn't good for several reasons: steep learning curve in the product, need to maintain and further develop it, outdated in months due to dedicated houses developing something like it, or better, when we weren't really ready to be a dev house in that same genre, devs in company not adopting it, time required to implement at customer, original devs who knew it leaving, etc. Thing that worked: we implemented a stripped-down version of the process on rails, with a lot of constraints, based on existing and well-anchored components, with us just putting them together into a product, which had answers to the usual issues in each of these components, where it was fast and sensible to do. Customizability was there, but it was more like an open door, rather than a sandbox - if you want to customize, plug your customization in here and obey this standard - the rest isn't our problem. 90% of the usage was the simple use case, where the customer just obeyed the rails and implemented their own process through the framework - like a 100 uses, successful in the first month, with just the basic help from us, really easy to explain to customers' own techs, really easy to explain it to our own devs, huge bang for the buck. Not only that, but the huge custom projects we use to build from scratch, now used these simple standardised components and halved the dev time. Customized projects also went well, because people already knew the base product, and were having correct ideas about where it can go and how to get there. The difference between the two products: the second one we built, because it felt good to use. It just felt good, for us, for the customers, for everyone involved. I'm sure that there's a KPI in there somewhere, which could explain why one worked, when the other one didn't, but it really boils down to just instantly usable vs a chore.
Yeah 100% the hidden succuss is something that just happens and can happen to anyone... The trick I've found is learning to ride it and spot it so you can make it happen... Which recently for me it's my Nerf blaster content something I now realize I should have always done... But man do my veiwers love that content... But yeah I had no idea it would be so popular with my veiwers and I thought I'd tapped out of catgories.
"I'll show you what they look like when they're closed!" you said at the beginning of this video. Erm... you didn't show us what they look like when they are closed?
I think alot of FOMO mentality has been utilized recently. I hope that social experiences will be valued above all in the hobby space. Especially Wargaming. I'd pay money to go on a wargaming course with my kids and learn from the experts how to play. Or better yet, have someone turn up to teach us at home. That would be an interesting experience IMO.
I still don't understand the appeal of this product. I can easily just pick dice up from my dice tray after rolling them. This just seems so dumb and I don't understand who has a gun to every warhammer youtuber's heads advertising this lmao
I think that's part of the point that I was saying. I wouldn't have guessed that this would have done so well. Sure, I like it, but you're right, it's not hard to pick up and roll dice. And yet, it is so satisfying to use. More than you would think would be the case.
