Dear fellow bitcoiners,
About a year ago (!) I proposed a wifi hotspot that runs on a raspberry pi that accepts bitcoins for payment.
I am at a juncture at this project as I'm getting to a dev-release product "real soon now" (It helps that I have a few others pushing it along now as well) and the dilemma I face is this - how to get it out in the way that suits the community the best. Here are my options (with the relevant pros and cons) and I'd like your feedback.
1) Bootstrap off sales of the unit when it's ready. ie. keep working evenings and weekends (I have a day job) until it is ready. The pros are that the the unit will be ready for sale when it's ready and therefore no expectations, no let down etc etc. The downside is that this could take another few months. Also I will have no idea on how popular the thing will be, so it could be months of work for very little return.
2) Put up pre-sale orders. This will help gauge interest, but if I get just a minimum of orders, I'd have to keep working on the day job to pay the bills, feed the kids etc etc and I risk losing reputation from anybody who does pre-order that the device still won't be ready for a little while yet.
3) Crowd source the initial sales.... Similar to 2) above.
4) Seek the sale of some equity to an angel... So I have business plans etc etc ready .. but seeking finance is always a time consuming effort and perhaps I would be better off product development instead of this option.
All advice gratefully received. If you want to keep in touch with the project, I am running an email sign up list on the webpage here :
www.bitcoinwifi.net[1] ... There is also a link to a very dark and uninspiring demo video (new one in progress) and also some of the source code (the client unit will 100% GPL open source upon sale btw).
Am more than happy to discuss the business, tech etc behind the idea, but for now just seeing what the community thinks my best direction to go down is.
This is a crosspost that I put on reddit earlier -
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2j0uv3/bitcoin_wifi_what_to_do_next/I have also issued (as an experiment) a small number of tokens that would give the current holder lifetime access to bitcoinwifi.net access points as suggested by one poster. The token is called BTCWIFINETLIFE and can be seen here ->
https://blockscan.com/assetInfo.aspx?q=BTCWIFINETLIFE .
