Spintronics: Build mechanical circuits

Batteries charged to 1,227%
almost 3 years ago – Thu, Jun 03, 2021 at 01:49:03 AM

Friends,

We’ve reached over $900,000! It’s absolutely incredible. The next milestone is sure a big one. Thanks again to all of you for putting your faith in our project. Like a diode, you’ve helped this project move decidedly in one direction: forward.

One unexpected thing we’re finding is that without as many issues to clarify in the campaign, there haven't been as many reasons to send updates. We have volumes to tell you about the project and our progress in manufacturing and I’m, like, really excited to do it after the Kickstarter. For the rest of the campaign, we'll be more intentional about sending updates about other sorts of interesting things happening now. 

Kickstarter Edition of Spintronics

With the project funding going so well, we’re thinking hard about ways to make the Kickstarter edition of Spintronics even more special. We decided not to have stretch goals for this campaign, in large part because the project is already unusually complicated, both for us and for the factory, and we don’t want to promise more than we can deliver. That said, I’m excited about our new ideas for the Kickstarter edition, and I’m going to do my very best to finish as many of them as possible as quickly as possible and cram them in before production begins. Let's just say, one-way or another, there will be fun surprises when you open your games. :)

Reaching People

At the moment, we’re absorbed in finding ways to reach as many people as possible to let them know about Spintronics. I thought in this update I’d give you a window into part of what we’re doing with that and something interesting we learned.

To give some context, our little company has grown from two people in our 2017 Kickstarter for Turing Tumble (Alyssa and me) to nine. Of those nine, one person (Jennifer) works full time on advertising and another (Kelly) spends part of her time on it. Online advertising is what allowed our little business to continue on and grow after the 2017 Kickstarter. In the past, small businesses had no affordable way to reach large numbers of people to tell them about their products, so they had to go through resellers, depending on them to put their product in front of people.

For us, selling to resellers proved difficult: generally, resellers want educational products that are low cost and instantly recognizable. Things like baking soda volcanoes, crystal growing kits, and slime making kits. Turing Tumble was a hard sell. Still, some retailers saw the value of Turing Tumble and sold it successfully in their stores. Indeed, we found some truly excellent retail partners, but most didn't want to take the chance. If we depended on those sales alone to support our business, Turing Tumble would be a hobby business and Spintronics would not exist.

Well, one evening in January 2018, I was messing around with online advertising and I finally got it to work. And not just to work, but to work well. Even though online ads can be annoying at times, they give small businesses an incredible reach and they’re fantastic for our type of product. We can show video and educate people about Turing Tumble. We continue to do all of our advertising in-house and we’ve gotten good at it. Jennifer and Kelly are far better at it than I ever was.

All that to say that when we launched this Kickstarter for Spintronics, we were excited to try out our new advertising chops to notify way more people about our campaign than we could in our last Kickstarter. We got everything ready and launched ads the first day. Yet even though the Kickstarter campaign has gone extremely well, interestingly, the ads have had only limited effectiveness. That's not at all what we expected - why would that be? Eventually we figured it out. We discovered it’s just because…well…most people aren’t like you. It’s an unusual person who is willing to take a chance and support a project they believe in at its early stages. Kickstarter projects are mostly supported by people who have already backed other Kickstarter projects. For example, take a look at some of the top projects on Kickstarter right now:

The Witcher: Old World - only 16% are new backers who have never supported a Kickstarter before

The Misen Oven Steel – 17.6% are new backers

Orbidice – 13.4% are new backers

If ads worked well for Kickstarter projects, I'd expect to see a much larger fraction of new backers on projects that advertise. Our big discovery this week is that ads can help during a Kickstarter campaign, but only to a very limited audience. They are no silver bullet.

In our current project, Spintronics, so far we have 21% new backers. That means 79% of you have supported a Kickstarter project before. So again, I just want to thank each of you for supporting our project, and it's cool that many of you are supporting other projects on Kickstarter, too! You’re making projects possible that wouldn’t otherwise have a chance. Our first Kickstarter backers set Turing Tumble in motion and now you are launching Spintronics like a rocket. We have other plans to expand our reach in the last two weeks of the campaign and we'll see how well they work. Do you have any ideas to reach more people who would be interested in Spintronics? We'd love to hear them.

And finally, if you are on social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter) and would be willing to share about Spintronics, we will be running a giveaway tomorrow (June 3) to continue to spread the word. We will post a video of Spintronics in action and you will be able to comment on our post and share/retweet. We appreciate your help!

With gratitude,

Paul and the team at Turing Tumble

What do you plan to do with Spintronics?
almost 3 years ago – Wed, May 26, 2021 at 03:39:14 AM

This is Paul, the creator of Spintronics and Turing Tumble. It might not be a shock to learn that I’m an introverted person: I regularly explore the many facets of awkwardness and I secretly enjoyed being locked down last year. Nevertheless, when I meet someone who tells me that they backed our Kickstarter project, I feel like we’re instant friends and I want to give them a hug right then and there. Now you are one of the over 5,000 backers of Spintronics and I can’t come close to expressing how grateful I am to you. I hope you don’t mind if I address you as “friends” from here on. So…

Friends,

It has been extremely fun to read your comments and messages. You are unusually smart, creative people and you have some fantastic ideas: specific circuits you want to build, new parts you want to make, modifications to existing parts, and classes you’re going to teach. You also really like diodes.

I like diodes, too, the way they let current flow in only one direction. In fact, I even designed a spintronic diode a while back. It works perfectly and makes a satisfying clicky sound as it turns. Here’s an old 3D model of it:

 A while back, I was streamlining things and I removed the diode because a transistor and a junction can be set up to do the same thing. (There are some puzzles that let you figure out how that works in Act Two.) I thought I was being soooo clever, but maybe I was a bit hasty. At this point, adding diodes back into Act One or Act Two would delay things quite a lot, but we’ll be sure to make diodes available separately after we fulfill these Kickstarter orders.

All this talk about diodes got me wondering, what do you plan to do with Spintronics? Is there a specific circuit you want to build? Is there a certain concept you’re hoping to understand better? Do you want to use the spintronic circuits for some other purpose that we haven’t even considered? We would love to know, and maybe we can make it serve your purpose even better.

Thanks for everything,

Paul and the team at Turing Tumble

An unbelievable day - THANK YOU!!!
almost 3 years ago – Mon, May 24, 2021 at 03:12:08 PM

Wow, we are COMPLETELY floored!! We sincerely thank you all for making this an incredible day. Four years ago, in our Kickstarter for Turing Tumble, $404,071 was pledged by the end of the campaign. It's a number that's burned into our memories, not only because it was far more than we expected, but because it marked the beginning of this new little business. Now, in less than a day, together you pledged over $480,000 for Spintronics. Unbelievable!

We're excited to have you with us for rest of this journey. In the coming updates, we'll share the current state of the project and what's happening with videos, pictures, and stories. We love hearing from you, so feel free to reach out.

THANK YOU for making this happen,

Paul, Alyssa, and the team at Turing Tumble