The race to the bottom continued this week as the Mota 3D Printer Kickstarter offered early supporters a 3D printer for only $99. But after quickly selling out of all 50 $99 printers the campaign was abruptly cancelled.
Just to clarify, in case you thought you read that wrong (or that I wrote it wrong), the Mota 3D Printer was being sold for under $100. Sadly that didn’t last for long, the first 50 went in a matter of hours, as did the next price point of $299. Then the bidding seemed to stall a little bit, and Mota cancelled the campaign and posted this letter:
The economics of crowdfunding are sometimes difficult to comprehend, and often times a crowd funded campaign can end up really hurting a business even if they successfully fund their project, or even extensively exceed it. If you set your goal too high, then you run the very real risk of not getting funded and all of your hard work being wasted. Set your goal too low, and you run the risk of not being able to deliver on what was promised. While all Kickstarters tend to offer discounts to early supporters, lately there seems to be a contest among 3D printer manufacturers to see how low they can sell their printer for. And Mota looked to be on track to sell a lot of 3D printers very, very inexpensively, and that may have been the problem.
Take a look at their original Kickstarter video:
The Mota 3D Printer wasn’t the best on the market but certainly had some very respectable attributes. With a 6.5in x 6.1in x 6.1in build platform, a .4mm print head and a 100 micron layer resolution its specs matched 3D printers on the market that were selling for several times the retail price, much less the early Kickstarter price. The cost of 3D printing technology has come down, but not down that low, not yet. Kevin Faro the co-founder of Mota clearly agrees according to his public letter, the key point being:
“I wish there were a way to offer truly high-quality, highly precise 3D printers at incredibly low prices. That would bring about the mass-market adoption that this technology so needs. The reality is, like any technology, it is expensive to develop and manufacture. At MOTA, our vision is to always bring you the best of what technology offers at the absolute minimum price possible. We don’t want to promise something that cannot be delivered, or whose quality is anywhere below outstanding, and the fact of the matter is that delivering this high standard of quality would cost a premium.”
The Micro 3D famously offered itself for $199 and managed to fund the $50,000 goal within the first eleven minutes and ultimately ended with over three and a half million dollars. The consumer version of the printer ended up costing about $349 and is still a pretty good deal. But almost doubling the original early adopter price means that the company most likely took a bit of a loss on the original kickstarter sales. It was a gamble that paid off, because any loss incurred by those original sales was easily made up by the windfall of orders that funded their project multiple times over.
Mota was looking to make the same gamble, but when you’re selling consumer electronics that are going to retail for over $500, for less than $100, that isn’t just a small loss, that is clearly going to be a very large loss. While the project was doing well and would most likely have been funded, it would probably not have been the windfall that the Micro 3D enjoyed and Mota was clearly counting on.
Honestly, the writing was on the wall. If the retail price was going to be $500 – although I suspect that it would have been closer to $600 – then selling 50 of them at 1/5th retail is just a massive financial risk and one that looked like it wasn’t going to pay off.
Mota has a background in producing well-received quality consumer electronics, so I think this would have been a solid entry in the family of low cost 3D printers, even at $500 or $600. Thus their reputation was at stake as well as the financial risks. So, I certainly hope Mota manages to relaunch with more realistic price points in the future.
