Funded in 49 minutes

MAKERphone 2.0 went live on Kickstarter on Thursday 10 September 2026 at 16:59 CEST. Forty-nine minutes later it was fully funded. I did not sit down once in that hour.

Thank you. Every one of you. You backed a phone that, at the moment you clicked the button, existed as a pile of parts and a promise from a company in Zagreb — and you funded it before the afternoon was out. That is not a small thing to hand someone. I do not take it lightly and I never have.

Where it stands

Kickstarter also made it a Project We Love, which their editorial team picks by hand. And the campaign is still running — it closes on 10 October, so there is a month of this left.

Nine years of the same people

Here is the part I actually want to write about. A campaign does not fund in forty-nine minutes because of a launch-day plan. It funds that fast because of who is already standing there when the doors open.

In 2017, 1,574 people backed a game console I had soldered together in my bedroom in Karlovac. In 2018, 2,154 people backed the first MAKERphone. A lot of those same people are in this campaign. I know, because I can see the backer numbers, and some of them are very low.

Nine years is a long time to keep showing up for a small company in Croatia. You have put our kits on kitchen tables, in classrooms, in makerspaces, and into the hands of kids who had never held a soldering iron before. Thousands of people have now built something with their own hands because one of you decided we were worth a punt. That is the whole reason CircuitMess exists, and it is not something I could have bought.

What happens next

The campaign runs until 10 October. After that, the fun part: parts on order, test jigs on the bench, a pilot run, and a lot of arguing about plastic tolerances. I will be writing about all of it here — the good bits and the interesting bits alike.

If you are already a backer: thank you, genuinely, from all of us in Zagreb. If you have been thinking about it, there is still a month on the clock and the campaign is right here.

Now let's go and build some phones.