Anatomy of a $5M Week

There is a thread in here where he stated that they are now willing to sell the Pro now without the $500 air filter.

Thanks for the heads up! Iā€™ve requested they remove the air filter. I feel much better about venting outside.

I just issued my order for the basic just a couple of days ago and am excited. I realized thereā€™s a strong possibility of a lengthy wait seeing at the time the fund was $7.5M. Now, thatā€™s at least 3000 or more machines and if you were only planning 50 by Q4 2015, itā€™ll be at least 12 months for mine. Understanding you already have a factory set up ready to go but didnā€™t anticipate so much excitement from your customers. I donā€™t think many of us want to wait 2 years now that I see $9.4M. Do you think after the pre-orders end an idea of the timeline for each bucketed period of purchase?

I congratulate Glowforge for the successful funding!

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Hey, @dan:
Congratulations on the incredible late surge that is happening now! As of right now (7:25am PDT on 10/22), the total has gone up over $5MM in the past 72 hours, 2.5MM of which came in since yesterday morning! At the current pace, you will end up at or near $23MM by tomorrow night!
I am curious (and imagine others are as well) as to whether the relative numbers for each version (23%,29%,48%) have stayed consistent since the first week, and how popular the pro without filter option has become.

Pro is gaining! About 55% last I checked.

The goal was for only $100K because they needed that much to go into production. Heard in a video, I think it was a video, where Dan expected about $5 million. So they expected all along thousands of orders.

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$100k was the number that wouldnā€™t have us scrap our plans, cancel the campaign, and go back to the drawing board.

$5M was my dearest wish. I was forecasting $2M-$4M.

Surprise! : )

Fortunately our production plans scale well; the hard part is getting the line up and running with the quality that we demand.

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@dan Amazing campaign, well done.
Youā€™ll get a lot of upgrades if you announce that niggly passthrough slot will be designed to handle 1/2" material instead of being limited to 1/4"ā€¦ That limitation is a mystery to me.

Plastics arenā€™t changing now.

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Sounds to me like there isnā€™t any chance at all that this is heading back to the drawing board. Still a pretty interesting and I know now this is cliche, a revolution in this field. Iā€™m frantically gathering design ideas so I can hit the ground running, keeping the 1/4 inch materials in mind.
I wish I could have a new (insert your favorite vehicle here) with a larger (fill in your favorite feature). Well you might have to shop around for that and not have the factory stop progress to fill that need on a vehicle by vehicle basis because frankly we all have different desires, needs, and etc. That said, Iā€™m all for letting this team get on with it and go to the floor for manufacture. Iā€™m beyond excited to get that email asking where my ship is going.

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one thing om confused about i did take the plunge and contributed on the 50% off discount preorder. if im not mistake in one one the artcles i readt the item is actully going to be 20% higher than the pre order price. How is this 50% off ?? am i mistaken can someone clarify this please. thank you

As the units havenā€™t shipped yet theyā€™re still giving a discount for pre-orders. Just not the huge discount we had for the first 30 days of preorders. I suspect full retail prices take effect once units start shipping.

Itā€™s 50% off the final MSRP when the product is released in retail settings. They are raising the pre-order prices 20% after the 30 day crowdfunding campaign ends but before it goes into full release.

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Once these machines go into retail the MSRP price will likely be the price listed on the GF website as once you are into retail you have overhead costs and distribution costs involved. That does not mean that every unit will sell for MSRP. I just bought a Tablet with a MSRP of 1299 for 799. The next day the retailer put it ā€˜on saleā€™ for 999. If it helps you understand, it is like a game - sometimes the retailers win and sometimes they lose. Regardless the price after the initial funding is over will still be an absolute steal. Even at the MSRP price you canā€™t touch this much tech for under 10k. Enjoy the experience.

Ok, if that slot size limit is just about the plastics / tooling / under-promise over-deliver endeavor. Iā€™ll just laser cut mine a bit bigger (Iā€™m only joking if it doesnā€™t workā€¦)

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@Dan What were the deadline numbers sold of each machine?
Hereā€™s my guess:
GF - 3304
GFP - 4411

@dan looking forward to the anatomy of a $27.5Million month post.

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I only just heard about this machine a week ago (week of 11/2/15) and believe that the prices were even lower than they were today when I plungedā€¦But the videos kept saying that the preorder pricing was all finished so I went ahead. I obviously got a better deal than waiting for later, but not the 50% off I was hoping for. Canā€™t start complaining now I supposeā€¦and hope there will not be a reason for it. Canā€™t sleep for the millions (about 28) of ideas running through my headā€¦ just like everyone else here.

The MSRP price is a number that Glowforge projected might be a full retail price once third parties started to sell the units. If I remember correctly at some point GF would go to a dealer type model. Future retail pricing is likely TBD. So 50% off is not yet a real world discount. When was the last time anyone on the planet bought a mattress at full MSRP? Even so, the current price is probably lower than future pricing.