When will customers receive this keyboard?

A primer on manufacturing

Every Kickstarter project people shared with me ran over schedule. For instance, this “Flux Keyboard” raised ~$3,804,630 and planned to ship in Dec 2023. It seems like they are just now getting units to people >3 years over schedule and the comments from customers are pretty interesting.

I would rather promise a less ambitious timeline and finish on time. There is a lot that goes into manufacturing so in this post I’ll break down what I know based on actual estimates I’ve received from manufacturers.

Then we’ll use this for a reasonable estimate for when the keyboards will arrive in your hands.

The Manufacturing Process

There are industry standard terms for hardware engineering project phases (e.g. EVT, DVT, PVT, MP). I’ll explain everything without using jargon for this post.

On a high level, the goal of manufacturing is to build a pipeline that can produce a product efficiently at scale. A large part of this is making molds which cost a lot up front but reduce the cost per unit at volume.

Molds are machined metal blocks you can inject liquid plastic in between. This helps us create parts at high volume and consistency for mass production.

Therefore, a simple way to think of this project is terms of the molds we’ll need and how they will be used. Here are the major phases:

1. Before molds - Here we develop the design and prove the engineering is feasible. We also do some early thinking about obvious adjustments to make the design easier to manufacture.

   • We’ve done this work already and created samples that confirm our designs, firmware, and hardware.

2. Trial mold and sample production - These molds are expected to have many issues but will let us produce some early samples. We will fix problems and optimize the molds in this step.

   • Manufacturer estimate = ~2.5 months

3. Mold iterations - Then we iterate on the molds (usually 2-3 times). The manufacturer will produce samples doing a trial production run. Each time, we’ll identify issues in the design, reliability, and quality of the samples. Then we update the molds until we’re satisfied.

   • Manufacturer estimate = ~20 days per iteration

   • I expect at least 3-4 iterations given quality will be what should differentiate our product (otherwise I’d just keep using the Kinesis)

   • Also, I am sure something unexpected will come up here. Otherwise, why would all those other hardware Kickstarters projects ship late? Therefore I think it’s safe to add a month of buffer here.

   • Therefore, I’d expect this process to take ~4 months (assuming 4 iterations)

4. Complete mold production run - Once the molds are done, the manufacturer will produce a “golden sample” demonstrating the final product. When we sign off on that, they will begin mass production.

   • Manufacturer estimate = ~2 months

Then there’s fulfillment and shipping which I expect to add a month. Also to begin the process we’ll need to secure funding from Kickstarter now which will take another month.

Given all this, I expect the following timeline:

• Mid-March 2026 - Kickstarter Campaign

• Mid-April 2026 - Trial Molds & Initial Samples

• July 2026 - Mold Iterations & Quality Refinement

• Nov 2026 - Golden Sample & Mass Production

• Jan 2027 - Fulfillment & Shipping

• Feb 2027 - People receive their orders

I’d like for the first batch to arrive by the holidays but also don’t want to over promise. There must be a good reason why it is so common for hardware projects to run over their timelines. Until we resolve more ambiguity, we’re going to target shipping by early next year based on the above rationale.

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The next steps are to finish up the Kickstarter page and launch there so we can kick off the trial mold production. There will be a limited number of discounts and I plan to let people know who are subscribed here first so you can grab one.

Also, I will share regular updates and interesting findings along the way here. As an ex-software engineer, it’s been fascinating learning about how physical products are built at scale. I’ll take you along with me as we build.

Thanks for reading,
Ryan Peterman