Manufacturing Opportunities – Inventor uses crowdfunding to finance projects

 Some of the best lessons learned come the hardest.
Santa Clarita Valley native and entrepreneur Tom Beckett knows this well.
He loved and lost with his last project, a Kickstarter campaign that netted him and a partner $80,000 to develop a brainstorm he and a friend had back in 2015 2014.
They wanted to create cheap desktop CNC machines, a smaller-scale CNC machine, or Computer Numerical Control routers, that would allow people to prototype things with wood or other soft materials develop their own manufacturing capabilities.
They succeeded, to a degree that they didn’t quite anticipate, Beckett said, which taught them lessons about their price point, how to value their own work, how to leverage success etc.
“We made sold that machine one for $200, and people kinda lost their minds about it,” said Beckett referring to the feedback and enthusiasm he received from his Kickstarter social media campaign to fund the project.
“On Kickstarter, we said with $10,000 we could do it, and we raised $80,000,” Beckett said.
One of the biggest learning lessons for Beckett was the fact that he had set his price cost too low, but like make many first-time proprietors, he was also unaware of what he didn’t know, and the contingencies for which he should have been planning.
After deciding to complete only one production run, and running out of the small savings he was sustaining himself on, he decided he was better off walking away — even though it meant losing nearly every penny he’d put into the project.  Beckett, who was not too long removed from UC Santa Cruz classrooms, realized he had a lot to learn, and dedicated himself to exploring the potential for his future projects.
“In that time afterwards, I consumed listened to all the podcasts, articles, and videos I could and I wanted learn more about crowdfunding,” Beckett said. “I wanted to help more people with that. I know there are a lot of people sitting in their garages or dorm rooms but don’t have the financial means or know-how to go it alone and make it happen.”
So Beckett’s hard knocks education led him to two new opportunities: He became one of the organizers of SCV Startup Weekend SCV, which provides entrepreneurs opportunity, guidance, 54 hours and a team of like-minded individuals who are also seeking some of the same answers Tom was and continues to as a potential small-business owner.
The second opportunity is Maslow, an iteration of his first product and business that he’s working on with the same co-founder and another friend.  It’s another CNC machine that allows people to prototype and create things out of wood on a substantially larger work area.  For example, you could slide in a 4 by 8 foot sheet of plywood, and the machine can cut precise and continuous items using digital files.
His new company, Maslow CNC, is in its nascent stage after it garnered more than $50,000 in crowdsource crowdsourced funds, and has applications for hobbyists, woodworkers, tinkerers, set designers and engineers, Beckett said.
Beckett used his experience from his previous crowdsourcing crowdfunding campaign and CNC business experience to create what he thinks will be a more sustainable plan this time around.
The early returns look promising for him, with the Maslow effort only starting Oct. 25 and already surpassing its fundraising goal in the first three hours, as well as approaching six times its funding goal in fewer than two weeks.
Right now, these are passion projects for Beckett, who also works full time for a biotech startup company, and is simultaneously planning his next Startup Weekend, currently in Northern California.
Beckett sees more realistic potential in the he Maslow project has even more potential than his previous project, with the benefits he’s been able to take from experience and other entrepreneurs’ lessons.
“My next goal would be to go full-time with this entrepreneurial effort,” Beckett said. “I would like to make the leap again but this time in a far more realistic and calculated fashion. I think I’m close.”

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