Comments on our kickstarter and company.

This post is taken from the comments section of a news article about our throttle kickstarter on FSElite. I though I’d post it here as my ramblings may give a bit of insight into our thinking. Remember that the context here is addressing comments so it may seem a bit disjointed!

This is the original page https://fselite.net/content/further-updates-on-the-fulcrum-throttle-kickstarter/

Note that this ended up far longer than I intended!

I don’t tend to get involved with comments on the internet because people have their options and generally don’t want to be swayed. This also may come across as me being defensive of my company but every comment made here has an element of validity so I wanted to address them and shed a bit of light on the decisions we made. Everything here that has been commented on has already been considered and weighed up, sometimes obsessively so. Every decision you see is the result of reasons and not through ignorance, laziness or greed.

Forget comparing us to Thrustmaster, they are massive and have been going for over 30 years and early on their products were plastic and not that great. Honeycomb use a more US style of start up model with a bigger initial budget and third party Chinese manufacturers to build and ship their product. This has not been without problems.

Our decision to sell via our website is partly due to our pricing. You would be staggered at the margin asked for by some of the prominent European and US distributors. This model only works if you can ship thousands of cheaper to produce products. You cannot produce something as high quality as our yoke and then give away 30% or more without raising the price unless you are making tons of them. You would also be surprised how little margin there is in these when not making thousands of them at a time.

As a small company that is still trying to expand we have a choice, raise the price hugely and use distributors or try and keep it more affordable which is what I said I wanted to do at Cosford in 2018. As an unknown we couldn’t come in and say here buy the best yoke, by the way it’s £800 even if that is cheaper than the nearest competition. Market research said that most enthusiasts would go for it at the price we sold it at. Smaller margin but it gets us out there and we can slowly build our reputation in quality products and customer service. This is something that other manufacturers seem to be overlooking according to comments seen in some forums.

We (me) decided to self fund yoke development early on before starting the company. I didn’t want to owe people a product and then fail to deliver it. We are expanding, exported to 48 countries and have a long way still to go. The first 2 years of production were also messed up with covid but the bills still had to be paid (say goodbye to capital reserves!).

Metal and plastic builds are worlds apart in feel and movement. It is not just about how rugged it is or how long it will last. There is a feel in the movement and resistance that a plastic product simply cannot replicate. Not everyone appreciates this and so will settle for more functions and less realism in feel and movement. To each their own.
Also I don’t know of any controller manufacturer that sells every part as a spare. The only ones we have sold so far are when users have managed to break the tops of the yoke switches by dropping them! But everything can be replaced if need be.

I appreciate that our throttle doesn’t look finished, that is because it isn’t. It is all early prototype shots. The comment regarding renders, I sort of agree, I wish we could, but when the kickstarter was submitted with all our high quality renders it was rejected as it is against kickstarter rules. We were only allowed to submit cad that clearly looked like it was a cad drawing or photos of early prototypes. The pictures FSElite are showing are from the kickstarter page which does take away a bit of their context. You should have seen early yokes by the way!

Regarding the build, a bit shoddy is fair, as none of it is final and a good chunk of it is thinner metal and plastic than production or it is 3D printed for proof of concept.
Presenting it like this is likely my mistake for thinking that people would look at the text, see renders on our website and understand that kickstarter is for launching products that are yet to be developed fully and not a shop of finished products. This is how kickstarter used to be but more recently it seems less so. If the kickstarter fails then we will look at moving from prototype to production on our own

I don’t expect anyone to agree with anything I’ve said and this is not a woe is us sympathy attempt. We are where we are through a combination of necessary decisions and worldwide events. We don’t have a huge budget, lots of marketing, make huge margins or have a huge team of staff. We do make awesome controls, offer excellent quality, realism and fidelity and give great customer service.
With regard to exposure, this takes time and money. We have multiple reviews coming up with big publications which should help our exposure. Thanks for all the comments on our kickstarter.
Chris.