Right - you're out in the back of beyond with a laser cutter and some graphic design skillz. The archetypal business model has been to run up a suitcase full of demo product, visit every toy and craft store within driving distance, consign a few, gift a few, sell a few, hit up the craft fairs, and spend the first two years driving around establishing relationships. Which, if you want to do it, is fun. If not? It's the life of a traveling salesman.

Or you toss it up on the as-seen-on-TV store.

I'm guessing your investment is an Epilog or a Glowforge and your materials costs include wood, stain and glue. Your monetization pathway was basically (1) puzzles (2) lamps (3) coasters (4) 3d topo maps and since you love puzzles, it was gonna be puzzles. 2 orders a day for laser-cut puzzles is excellent hobby-level sales - congratulations! That doesn't interfere with what you want to do with your life when you don't have to, and you're your own boss. And 800 puzzles is a year's worth of inventory in two weeks so again, congrats.

I'll level with you - I hate puzzles and I hate craft fairs. Frankly I'm not fond of wood so your entire market segment is one I avoid three times over. I'm dipping my toe in pens, which is absolutely 100% "dude monetizing a lathe through craft fairs" and all the suppliers know it. You can't browse Penn State Industries without seeing a survey of average costs for any given kit they sell. Sure - spend six minutes making a pen, spend $4 on the kit, sell it for $10 and you're at $36 an hour minus the time you spent under a pop-up. Or you throw them up on Etsy with custom engraving to pay off your glowforge while you're at it. Or you cut a video and throw it up on Kickstarter and front-load a year's worth of work. Yaaay six minute pens.

The problem is that everything becomes a six minute pen.

Let's say you want to sell pens. You can make the six minute ones, or you can sell the thousand dollar ones. There is no in-between except Montblanc because Cross was bought by Rubbermaid and they have no fucking idea what to do with pens. So you've got craft show pens, heinously expensive craft show pens, Montblanc, Cartier and Faberge. That entire missing middle segment? It was destroyed by Penn State Industries and their six minute pens. Know how many American watch brands there are? Seven, maybe eight. Know how many "American watch brands" there are on Kickstarter? Couple thousand. Dudes buying shit off of AliExpress, slapping parts together and maybe meeting their goal. The winners are the ones who rawk at marketing. MVMT was bought by Movado for fuckin' $100m. "MVMT - Bauhaus done Badly".

And that's my basic beef. Kickstarter, and the entire Kickstarter ecosystem, favors flashy garbage that doesn't work. Sure, use it for marketing because that's where it excels - you needn't have anything like a viable product to sell product. And since Kickstarter is where this stuff gets sold, your product will do better if it's flashy garbage.... to the detriment of not-flashy not-garbage.

Hollywood is now $200m blockbusters (which they're having to release via streaming services - talk about disruption) and "passion projects" made at a loss by kids whose relatives financed their educations and are now being asked to pony up on a microbudg feature no one will ever watch. Kickstarter is perfect for this: they save the kids from the embarrassing calls for money and centralize the begging bowl for 5%. They also allow you to set your "Uncle Phil" tier so that when your college buddies' measly $20 donations don't come through Phil can swoop in and get his "extra special thanks" title card for $5k. Neither you nor anyone you worked with on this will be in the entertainment industry in five years. Your relatives know that. If this is what it takes for Susie to feel like she followed her muse, well at least it's cheaper than treatment.

Apply that model to product development and marketing. Once upon a time you'd have to know where to get cheap laminate. You'd need to find out where puzzles were bought around you. You'd need to call up and form relationships with everyone within reasonable tourism distance, maybe go to a trade show or two, learn a thing or two about running a company, build a network of a dozen suppliers and two dozen vendors and try to place yourself in the middle based on your merits. Now? Now you surf the internet for the cheapest Chinese parts to be put together by the cheapest Mexican factory to be packaged by the cheapest Philippino packager to be distributed by On-Trac. Your supply chain is a hundred people you'll never meet for a thousand people with no brand loyalty who saw something on Facebook that pointed them to Cool Huntings or TOMO or whatever. Skymall without the Skymall.

one of the most backed projects in the history of Kickstarter

Project Kickstarter does not consider infringement

Do I have recommendations? No. Do I have lament? In spades. The entire ecosystem is toxic to craftsmen, toxic to small business and toxic to expertise. It's been happening since the dawn of Amazon and eBay but Kickstarter puts the grift and begging front and center and I hate it.