Shipped! They were very quick at turning around the depanelizing of the other 92 orders and getting these in the post.
Obviously nothing huge in terms of news until I get these and try to reflow but I’m still here.
In other news DCrainmaker has an update on the stages powermeter. It seems they’ve dialled it in a bit. Honestly, while I think it’s as good in terms of accuracy it seems it’s holding up very well to scrutiny by several seasoned riders of the meter. For two stain gauge pairs and what I’ve proven to be 30 dollars of circuit boards on what I estimate to be a 30 dollar crank arm (I’ve sourced SRAM Rival’s for approximately $100 CAD + shipping) so these are 600 dollars for R&D / lights on / profit. In my world profit is really just R&D money.
This leads me to make comment on what I’ve seen in the industry in terms of pricing. While powermeters are getting more popular, all one has to do is spend 10 minutes searching craigslist / kijiji / etc to find that locally they are rare. So rare that I’ve seen someone in Alberta want 1500 for the SPIDER from a Quarq S975. Locally in Ontario it’s only recently that I’ve seen up to 4 Quarq units available and 2 – 3 SRM.
While looking for a test unit I spent some time and eventually got one reasonably priced which I plan on selling come Sept. These aren’t high volume products currently. This leads me to potential pricing structures, motivated by a person who emailed me asking me straight out “why do I [you] think power meters are so expensive”. I paused, and it felt like an epiphany. It’s not the parts, it’s the people!
I plan on posting soon about what it really costs, based on what I’ve learned today, to build and Sell a powermeter, and not take a loss. It’s harder than one thinks and I’m sure not everyone who were successful on being funded on Kickstarter or Indigogo have thought on this. I’ve read about a few who had no idea how to scale production from tens to hundreds, and were bunt (sometimes repeatedly) on the way. This has been the reason why you aren’t allowed to just show a 3D rendering of a product anymore for Kickstarter. Too many people who haven’t deliver or were months to over a year away.
Stay tuned and look forward to my post this week going to be called, “Good, Cheap, and Fast – Pick two”