- Document
- MR-BRF-0009
- Issued
- Read
- 2 min
Q1 2026
Core-01 meets the public with more than $100,000 raised on Kickstarter; the hard lessons of paid acquisition and campaign pacing; and the production ramp across a supply chain built new for this product.
Live
On January 20, the Core-01 system went live. By the time the thirty-day campaign closed, we had secured more than $100,000 in pledges.
The numbers mattered, but the configuration data mattered more. Our thesis was that people didn’t want a pre-packed kit; they wanted a modular architecture they could scale across vehicles, packs and homes. Watching backers build out full systems, pairing the Core-01 panel with the Hydra, Sentry and Fury packs, proved that the system was legible. If I ran it back tomorrow, I would simplify the entry tiers on day one. Choice is a feature in a product line; in a crowdfunding checkout flow, too much choice is friction.
What hurt
Nobody talks enough about the trough in the middle of a thirty-day campaign. Momentum on day one is earned in the months prior; momentum on day fifteen has to be bought and fought for.
Three lessons came at full price. First, cold ad traffic does not convert on a multi-part hardware system in a single click. If a prospect hasn’t seen the system three times before launch, you are paying for education, not conversion. Second, tier architecture must be dead simple on mobile. Every extra minute a backer spends calculating bundle math costs conversions. Third, creative fatigue is real. You need twice as many cut-downs and static proof points ready before the launch button is pressed, because building assets mid-flight splits your focus right when operations demand it.
The ramp ahead
A campaign is a starting gun, not a finish line. The real work is the ramp now underway.
Core-01 is built from materials and processes we had never run before, so the supply chain beneath it is entirely new: heat-sealed Mylar, a rigid HDPE panel, five sealed modules, and partners across five countries. Every SKU carries its own stack of critical manufacturing decisions, from material and tolerance to finish and test, and each one has to hold at volume. Lead times on technical textiles don’t care about campaign timelines. The next quarter will be spent on the ground in Asia: walking factory floors, auditing sample rooms, and turning a validated prototype into repeatable mass production.
Until next time, onwards, Michael