Business Plan

Published on 2017-07-23 in PewPew FeatherWing.

The first step is to get the PewPew Lite featherwing to work properly, write the example games for it, and write the tutorial explaining how each one of them works. This part only requires time on my part, no special funding or resources are necessary. This should be done until the end of the year.

Once that is done, the next step is to start producing the boards and selling them on Tindie, at the same time reaching out to potential distributors. This is also the time to start running workshops, improving the documentation based on the feedback from the early users, and finding ways to outsource the assembly of the boards.

If that is successful, use the funds and experience gained from that to finish the PewPew (not Lite) board and to keep growing the community (at this point probably hired help will be necessary). Cooperate with teachers and writers to prepare lesson plans and other materials, record video tutorials, etc. With larger number of PewPew board, it should be possible to keep their price similar to the PewPew Lite.

If PewPew Lite featherwing is not successful, stop its production, and work on a PewPew D1 Mini version, which would work with much cheaper Chinese boards. Again, start selling those on Tindie, but this time the goal is to get other manufacturers to clone them, and not the distributors to sell them. Instead of preparing lessons, work on making the documentation appeal to the maker community, encourage modding and emphasize the use of those boards outside of education and games, as controllers for robots and IoT devices.

If any of those two plans works, start working on a third version of the PewPew board, this time with a TFT screen and an STM32 processor for handling it, with a tile and sprite engine and built-in example assets. Keep it compatible with the previous platforms, making all the old games work on it, but provide additional functions. Write an emulator on a PC that will allow easier debugging, and will let people try the games even without the device. Maintain a repository of games, including both the example games and 3rd party contributions (require open licenses on those). The games for older platform can use graphics based on popular themes (maybe get licenses from movies etc.).