I think if we would gather all the people who after the indiegogo campaign wrote a question to us about buying Sentry , the number of cases would be something like 3 times higher than the one which we got during the campaign.
Yes, we know the demand is high, especially after almost 100% positive reviews (long delivery time decreases this percentage), but we have to remember this is still a community project. It means, we (as a company) aren't doing it for living but we did it because you guys asked us to do it (and for fun of course
) and we did it in the way you wanted it. Now we have to finish sending all the cases we still have to send and we will wait for the feedback. When we will get it, we will have to analize what we did wrong and what should be improved in a retail version. We are part of this SFF community and i think we all should think how we can make this product better. When we will gather all of this helpful information from our supporters then we will decide if we can go with this product in a retail or the changes need to be so huge that we will need another crowdfunding campaign, because updates will make a Sentry 2.0. We do not know that yet.Please also remember to change the production from small manufacturing plan to mass production we need an order for something like 5000 or 10 000 units. We don't expect it to happen mostly because the current cost of manufacturing is very high and changing the technology would make it even higher at the start. Of course in the future the forms, molds and automatic machines would pay off themselves, but this is to big niche to think about this as reasonable action, because it would take years to happen. Right now we have to wait when every backer will receive his case and what will be his/their thoughts about the product he received.
At the end i have to say that currently we are observing an interesting situation: We are visiting many forums and in many conversations we read that something is worse than Sentry, something is better than Sentry, this is what is missing in Sentry or that is what you should do just like guys did in Sentry. At this moment we can't say if this is a good or bad thing, but it looks like Sentry become some kind of "standard" in this small form factor. We didn't expect that, mostly because we sold just a little over 1000 cases, but it is a thing which for sure is increasing the popularity of this case and of course the demand on it. We have to wait and observe what will happen
TL;DR
The demand is very high as for a niche product, but we're not sure if it is high enough to go into mass production. At this moment it is hard to say "what and when", because not everyone received their cases and we have to wait for the feedback which we need to make future improvements. We have to deliver every Sentry to the supporter from indiegogo campaign, and then we will be able to say something more.
