Like, actual stuff.
This can be risky territory, since making a physical product often requires a big upfront investment, and the smallest setback can wipe out profits. But inventors are getting around the hurdles — in part by using the Web to find backers and buyers.
They are also thinking small, as in smaller products and accessories that require less capital and are relatively easy to make and distribute.
Dave Petrillo and David Jackson, for example, friends and mechanical engineers from Pennington, N.J., had an idea for bean-shaped steel shells that go into a cup of coffee and quickly cool it to a drinkable temperature, then keep it warm longer. The shells contain a heat-absorbing gel.
The two men spent nine months fine-tuning the design for the beans, which they called Coffee Joulies. Then they scraped together $3,000 and built 100 prototypes by hand in Mr. Petrillo’s parents’ basement.
Making the first batch “was harder than we originally thought,” Mr. Petrillo said, so they began hunting for a way to speed the process. They found one in an unlikely place: a video clip on YouTube featuring a silverware factory in upstate New York. Making the handles of knives turned out to be similar to making Joulies.
Then, like a growing number of other inventors and designers in need of capital, the men turned to Kickstarter, a start-up in New York that lets people present a sales pitch for a creative project and ask others to put cash behind it. This allowed them to gauge the appeal of the project before sinking a lot of time and money into it.
“We thought about investors and design competitions, but when we saw Kickstarter we decided to go for it,” Mr. Petrillo said. They created a three-minute video to demonstrate their product and said that anyone who gave them $40 would get five Coffee Joulies. They hoped to raise $9,500, but within a few weeks they have raised $177,000, and the total is still rising.
Yancey Strickler, one of the founders of Kickstarter, said the company originally thought the site would attract more one-time projects and experiments, like plans to record an album or make a documentary film. But he said Kickstarter had been pleasantly surprised to see homespun gadgets and inventions bubble up in popularity.
“We didn’t realize we would move in this direction, but these projects are ingenious and clever and we want all of them to work,” he said.
Mr. Strickler pointed to one of the first gadget-focused projects on Kickstarter to gain significant momentum, the TikTok, which turns an iPod Nano into a wristwatch. Its creators raised nearly $1 million.
“I think people really value having a good story to tell about how they got that watch,” he said.
Tom Gerhardt and Dan Provost, designers living in New York, came up with an accessory for the iPhone 4 called the Glif, which acts as a kind of kickstand or mount for the phone. The project was so successful on Kickstarter — more than 5,000 people placed an order — that the two decided to form a company and use the site to start a second project, the Cosmonaut, a marker-shaped stylus for the iPad. That project has attracted more than 3,000 backers.
“We didn’t have any experience with bringing a commercial product to market,” Mr. Provost said. “But we are approaching a new method of product development.”
Technology specialists say the interest in projects like these is part of a cultural shift, in which shoppers are increasingly looking for a more intimate connection to the creators and the sources of the things they buy, reflected in the surging interest in farmers’ markets and local clothing designers.
“People are becoming more cognizant about where their things are made and are starting to expect the same information transparency about where everything they buy is from,” said Rachel Botsman, co-author of the book “What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption.”
“They are looking for smaller suppliers they trust,” she added.
The makers of the Coffee Joulies and the Cosmonaut had another selling point: they could boast that their products were made in the United States. They found recession-battered American factories that were willing to work with newer producers and make products in smaller runs.
The Coffee Joulies are made at Sherrill Manufacturing in Sherrill, N.Y., whose work force has dwindled to 15 from a peak of 160 in the 1990s, according to its president, Matthew Roberts. It stopped making silverware last summer and now rents space to small industrial businesses.
Mr. Roberts said his company had agreed to cover half the cost — about $10,000 — of the custom stamping tools to produce the Joulies, with the understanding that the product’s creators would pay the money back once their company was off the ground.
“We haven’t had a lot of experience with things like this,” he said. “But we’re looking for business. We’re fighting to turn around.”
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