Embedded - 44: Light Up Strikes Back

Episode Date: March 26, 2014

Josh Chan and Tarun Pondicherry, founders of Light Up (@Lightup or on Facebook), returned to the show. In episode 7, they were midway through their kickstarter, planning to make a product to teach electronics to elementary and middle school students. They've start shipping, even distributing, their MiniKits (other kits will ship soon!).  Elecia asks them if building their business and shipping the product went according to plan. 

Hello and welcome to Making Embedded Systems, the show for people who love gadgets. Today we will again be talking about lighting the fire of electronic discovery in your favorite nine-year-old. I'd like to welcome back Josh Chan and Tarun Bandecheri, the founders of LightUp, the amazing new electronics kit for middle school, even elementary school kids. Hi, Josh. Hi, Tarun. Thank you for coming back. Hi. Hi.

Thanks for having us again. We last talked on June, on episode seven, just as your Kickstarter for LightUp was happening. Yeah. And, Josh, you're the CEO of the the company right yeah still am still am and uh turn is what is your title uh president and cto okay great titles uh at the time at the kickstarter you raised 120k of your desired 50k yes how'd you manage that um i don't know i guess it was a little bit of luck and timing but certainly we did our best to get the word out during the campaign we got some good mentions on some prominent blogs and we just reached out to our friends and family of also

and yeah we were able to raise 120k in about, 40, 44 days was the length of our campaign. And for new listeners, what is LightUp? Well, LightUp is a learning platform to teach kids about electronics and programming. So we have these blocks that kids can use to build circuits, and they connect magnetically. And then we have a mobile app that works on iOS and Android that kids can use almost as an interactive tutor to learn as they're building circuits. And that app can do augmented reality, right?

Exactly. So we've worked on a lot of things, but a big feature I think that people really like about our app is the ability for kids to use it to take a picture of what they're building, and then we can use augmented reality to overlay, you know, it could be helpful guidance. It could even be an animation of something like the current flowing around the circuit right on top of the photo. Yeah, I remember you showed me when it wasn't working, it had this like red area that showed you what part was broken. And when it was working, it showed how the electrons moved around in a

circuit. Exactly. How does it compare it to other kits? Like, I guess Snap Circuits is probably the big one. So our goal with LightUp was to get away from the recipe book model that some of the other kits out there now use. So we didn't like the idea that you just follow instructions without necessarily understanding what the concepts are, and you don't have the freedom to make what you want to make so what we've done with light up is made it so the app can follow what you're building since it's able to recognize what the kids are building as they're building it and provide the guidance that they need to do what they want instead of being forced into a set of constraints by a set of predefined projects

so you brought the mini kit which looks so different than the kit you had last June, which was all prototypes and hand-built prototypes. So this kit is really small compared to what I remember from your Kickstarter plan. What does it contain? So yeah, this is our smallest kit, hence the name, and it contains, I guess you could say, six component blocks. So we have, I guess the listeners can't see them, but they're color-coded.

So we have a red block that's the battery. We have two output blocks, LED and a buzzer. And three input blocks, which are a button, a dimmer potentiometer, and a light sensor. And those are green. And then we have these wire blocks that you can use to connect things right here so i'm totally playing all that snapping your hair is me playing with it as i go along yeah i'll just i'll switch on the battery for you so that way you can be the adult supervision so so i put a battery i put a green uh switch and then a buzzer and then just a wire.

So this should work. In fact, when you push it, you get the buzzer. That's actually one of our early projects in our app. You can make almost like a Morse code transmitter. So you can tap out an SOS signal or something. Let's see. So the pot would make the buzzer be louder and softer? It tends to be a little more binary,

but there is a slight range you can try it with. It works better with the light, but I guess it's a little harder to show in a podcast with the potentiometer and the LED. To heck with the listeners. I just want to play with them. In that case. Okay, so now I have the pot, the resistor,

or the LED and the pot and the battery and the wire. And I keep doing things and nothing happens. It's not working. Well, you might want to try. Okay, so you just flipped it around. No, I had the LED backwards. Nice. So that's a learning opportunity in our eyes.

So if you had used the app for that, our app could kind of let you know that, oh, maybe try flipping the LED around and learning about things like polarity of certain components. And you can see you can dim it with a button. Yeah, it goes to just barely on to pretty bright. Right.

And that's how long it took me to reform a circuit. It was very, very quick and easy and fun because of the magnets. There's something fun about magnets. Yeah, we found it encourages kids to try things more often because they just snap together. You don't have time necessarily to really think about what you need to connect because we want people to just try and get that feedback instead of always wondering whether or not they should do something.

Yeah, and you've made it so that there isn't a way that I can blow up the LED or do massive damage to the battery or anything. Right, right. There's some protection stuff built in there to keep everyone safe. We'll hide those from the learners, but it is important. Yes, yeah. So are you shipping? Yeah, so this kit that you've been playing with, we are shipping now.

We sent all the mini kits out to our Kickstarter backers right before Christmas, actually. And we just launched this past Thursday on Makershed. So we're really excited. That was our first kind of retail partner selling it. And we're kind of in the process of finding more places to sell it now, including our own website. Which is lightup.io. Yes. Okay. That will be in the process of finding more places to sell it now, including our own website. Which is lightup.io. Yes.

That will be in the show notes, just in case you want it right this second, lightup.io. Unfortunately, I think since we last spoke, we've gotten a little bit more visible on the search results. So now when you search lightup or circuits, you're more likely to find us even on the Google page. How did you get hooked up with Makershed? In many different ways, I guess, but, um, I would say the biggest thing was, um, last May we were, we, we participated in a pitch competition

at the hardware innovation workshop, which was, uh, the week before Maker Faire, I believe. And that really, I think brought us to the attention of a lot of people at Maker Faire, the people that run Maker Media, which is the, you know, the guys that run Maker Faire. Um, Faire. We actually won that pitch competition, which really helped a lot because that was right at the start of our Kickstarter campaign. Since then, we've chatted many times with Dale Doherty, who runs the whole show, as well as many people there and got connected with people that are on the retail side. They were very interested in stocking us, so once we were ready, we shipped several cartons to them to start selling so what other distribution channels are you looking at

so i mean since we're just coming off the i guess shipping our kickstarter we're still actively working on that but we're hoping that by the end of the year we should be available on say amazon and traditional hobby retailers and mostly, mostly online. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Those two are also probably going to be our two other early people we want to be available on.

So, so as you're kicking, shipping your Kickstarter units, where's mine? Well, uh, for you and other listeners, um,

we, we've responded to several people asking the same question on our campaign. Um, it, it's, it's hard to explain. I mean, we've learned a lot running this business.

The long story short is that you were one of the nice people that bought, I believe it was a junior or a pro kit, which has a couple more complex blocks than what we have available right now, including a microcontroller. The Arduino-ish block. Exactly, the Arduino-compatible microcontroller. And that is, you know, it's more

complex to produce, and we sort of decided that we could fulfill some of the Kickstarter orders by Christmas, and that was why we pushed ahead more complex to produce and we sort of decided that we could fulfill some of the kickstarter orders by christmas and that was why we pushed ahead and got this mini kit available um but the reason why the your kit is delayed and others and of our backers is really because we're working on fine tuning and getting ready for production those other blocks that you will be getting in your kit that require a little bit more attention um and there's also honestly uh you know when you're making a hardware product, you have to really manage carefully your supply chain.

And it turns out that certain components that... Like the microcontroller. Yeah, kind of important to have that at Mailchimp. And it turns out that they come and go in terms of availability. So we're behind the scenes working on that furiously to get it ready to... We might need to actually get them here and ship them,

which takes like eight weeks, basically, to actually um get them here and ship them which would which takes like eight weeks basically in order to procure them here and then get them all the way through to our manufacturer in china so we won't bore you with all the details it's all you know things that we're figuring out so manufacturing is definitely a challenge yes yeah yes uh are there other technical hurdles that you've had to deal with um Bringing up the minikit, I think one of the hurdles that we were really concerned about and down to the wire on was when we changed to a rechargeable battery. Which I think is a great idea. I'm glad you think it's worth the effort. You know, the circuitry around it had to change and then the battery supplier told us, hey,

like this might not be enough. You need to add this other layer of protection for our particular battery because we changed suppliers last minute since the original supplier for some reason was unable to give us the quantity we needed. And so then last minute, we're like, oh, okay, so now we need to redesign the PCB. And that thing kind of was a major technical hurdle getting this kit out. And it all snowballs. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I think the general lesson that we learned just from that specific case is that, yeah, things kind of cascade up and down the effects in terms of you change one part, you change one spec, and it can affect a lot of things. Even, for example, we added these clear covers, which you might remember from our previous

prototypes were just kind of exposed the PCB and the component. We wanted to pass certain safety regulations, and the clear cover helped a lot. But one side effect of that is that when you take a picture now, we have to be careful because there can be reflection or glare from that clear cover. And if the glare obscures the code, then it can be hard for the app to recognize

every single block. So even things like that, which I don't know if you call it a technical challenge, but something affects something else. In this case, the hardware affects the app's function even. I guess you try to partition everything off into its own little unit to get it moving forward and then you try to put them back together and you have to be very careful that you didn't overlook something that'll prevent them from getting

integrated well i i find that system integration is often where things just go go-bow-y. Yes. The box is pretty. It's kind of odd because, you know, a lot of people, you end up doing all of these electronics and then you ship it in, you know, the brown box. We almost did. Or the padded envelope. Yeah. But you actually did some design on the box.

Why? We wanted to be a consumer toy. So we felt it would be important to have a look that's attractive even before you necessarily know what's inside it. Did you go to any of the toy fairs, toy shows? We visited the first time, for the first time actually, just maybe about a month ago, we were in New York for the International Toy Fair.

The big one. The big one, yeah. What did you find? Who did you talk to? Has Mattel bought you yet? Well, they didn't let us into their booths. That doesn't surprise me. I don't know. We talked a lot about this.

It was amazing. I mean, so overwhelming. We were there with some friends. One big thing we learned is that the toy business is definitely a business. One funny detail I learned from the website is that no one under the age of 18 is allowed in the toy fair. That's just sad. It's interesting, but you do get the sense once you go there that it's very much serious business.

I'm not joking about this. The big companies, Lego, Mattel, Hasbro, they have giant pavilions that have literally bouncers in the door, like big burly guys wearing suits. They don't let you in unless you're a buyer for a retailer or a press member for obvious reasons. So, but you know, we met with quite a few, you know, people that were more like us, I would say, you know, startups, entrepreneurs, smaller manufacturers and toy makers. And we got a lot out of it. We didn't exhibit this year. We were just kind of getting a sense for what it's like to of it. We didn't exhibit this year. We were just kind of getting a sense for what it's like to be there.

It's really expensive to exhibit. I hear, yeah, I hear. It's like $80 to rent a chair, I heard, or something. I don't know. Nickel and dime. So you started Light Up, the whole idea as a class project. Was it the most educational thing you've ever done?

You mean for ourselves? Yeah. It's definitely up there. I learned a lot of skills that I never even dreamed of needing while doing this in terms of how do you interact with people to bring up a mass produced product and how do you form those relationships so that they actually understand what it is that you need to make as opposed to kind of when I was a student it was more like i have a design file i email the design file i get back a thing it was not this iterative process because there's only one of them and i didn't really need to change any standards or anything it was just all standard stuff whereas now i'm making so many of them there's a lot of custom aspects that need to be very well thought out.

And people really need to understand why you made the decisions because they might need to make their own decisions on your behalf. Do you mean some of manufacturing in China and the decisions they make because it's much cheaper to use no name brand resistors or solder that comes from unknown places, or other things? I mean, along those lines, but I think, yeah, sort of more generally, I think it was letting them use their expertise in knowing how to manufacture something, but still keeping our ideas present in the product. Kind of, you look at the design we have now versus what we had in the beginning, and some of the little things that they had to do they decided to use screws for example instead of the initial way that we tried to attach all the blocks together and that was one thing that they knew would be much better in terms of assembly and still preserve the idea of our product so having them understand that and not suggest something like oh why don't you injection mode, all the electronics in this opaque case was important because now they know what their constraints are.

Right. Yeah. Communicating the product ideals is difficult. Yeah. Because things will have to give for sure. It's just a matter of what can give and what you're really going to hold fast and say, we can't change this, even though it's going to increase the cost or increase the complexity, you know, and, you know, we realized, yeah, we can make some compromises. Maybe even that's not the right word. But you know, things that were maybe even arbitrary on our end, and they're said, Oh, if you just make this minor change, you can reduce the cost by x,

or you can make it that much easier to assemble or reduce the rate of defects. And we thought, that was already arbitrary choice anyway. So easy enough, you know, whereas other choices, you know, we will have to ax those because it's going to fundamentally change the nature of the product in a way that we wouldn't want it to. It sounds like you got hooked up with a really good manufacturer who was willing to teach you these things and not just let you fall on your face. Yeah, I think we were really fortunate in who we found. It came from our network of mentors and friends, so it wasn't like a random choice. No, you went through Hexcelerator, right?

Yes. Okay, and so did the choice come from that group, or was it just a wider group of... It's kind of a long story. It wasn't like an official... Hexcelerator doesn't have like an official factory or an official manufacturer, but it came from... At least one connection was a mentor of ours from Hexcelerator had used this contract manufacturer several times and his endorsement was kind of a very strong one, along with some other people we knew who

had also used the same manufacturer. So you kind of gather enough evidence to say, well, if all these people are using these guys, there's probably a good chance that they're reputable and reliable. It is a community about networking. Definitely. Both the engineering side and the manufacturing side. So that is very cool. We've made a lot of friends on this journey.

You both, well, I remember, Tarun, you have a double E degree. Josh, you too? No, I studied education. Right, right. Oh, that brings up one question. Was any of the pedagogy that you were pushing for lost along the way? Are you a little sad about any technical decisions you had to compromise on?

I think there's a... Well, I wouldn't say like it's entirely lost. Pushed off to the future. Yeah, sometimes that's an optimistic way to put it. But like maybe one general class of things that we've thought about is like, you know, we had our prototypes that were made with these kind of components that were available to, you know, hot, like you could buy at Radio Shack or buy at Jameco, you know, up in Belmont. And we went to China and, you know, we found that it's better if you use smaller components and ones that are

surface mount, SMD components. They're cheaper and you can put them on a reel and just automatically place them. So maybe from a pedagogical standpoint, one thing, like if you look at the LED block we have now, it has this smaller rectangular LED as opposed to the more maybe recognizable through hole LED that people, you know, you tend to see with the dome, you know, shaped top. So I don't know if it's exactly just a pedagogical thing, but certainly, you know, decisions like that, like should we use a big component that will maybe cost more or be harder to assemble versus a small one that might be a little bit more disconnected from people

because it's harder to see, but something that is easier to justify in our bill of materials in terms of costs. Yeah, I remember you wanted to use the bigger LEDs because the idea was you could build all of this. I mean, you built the kit using the snap, the magnetics. Yes. And then you could see the same components building it with a solderless breadboard or

with solder or whatever with wires right right um and that is harder with the surface mount resistors yeah and i suppose it's a little harder to recognize that this is the same thing you buy at radioshack but it is a lot cheaper right yeah especially in mass production yeah and in terms of what we did to try to allay that, part of it is that when you build a circuit, you still build it in a loop. You still connect it the way that you would on a breadboard. And honestly, we even had these discussions, like historically people have used solderless breadboards

and used through-hole components because those are what's available, but maybe there is a need for someone, maybe us, to be one of the people that starts to introduce you know how smd components look because honestly if you go to you know the way things are made now engineering like outside of hobbyist circles you don't see very much use of these kind of traditional looking components pretty much everyone is using these smd components and you know on on these pc. So who knows? Maybe we're even making a change for the better

in getting some kids introduced to how these look. Certainly if you open up an electronic device now, you're much more likely to see these components than the older style. That's true. If you were to investigate, you wouldn't see the old style. So this is, maybe it's not such a big compromise,

but I could see how it was tough. It pained us. Yeah, it was tough. So yes, compromises have been made, and that's something we've learned that, but when we make a choice, it's always for, we hope, a good reason. And it's not only about cost. I mean, sometimes we make choices that weren't about cost,

but for other things, like for safety reasons. Like we want kids to be able to use this safely, so we're going to make certain changes to the physical design for that reason. What are you rated for for age? These are too small for toddlers because they're choke hazards. Well, these are actually big enough not to be choking hazards. So that was one decision that we had to make. It's slightly larger than that small part cylinder really i yeah i we we have a little on my desk at home a small part cylinder

for other reasons educational reasons we aren't marketing it to that age group like to toddlers because there's other reasons like you know the app we have what we want to teach with it but we did kind of make a conscious choice to kind of overshoot and not just make something that just kind of barely squeaked by the safety standards. We actually, if you remember, these are bigger blocks than the other ones you saw. We added the covers, so now there's no exposed solder or PCB. Now the only thing that's exposed is plastic and the metal caps. So all these choices, some people may recognize for why we chose them, but if not, it's great.

But internally, we can tell you we did it for safety reasons, essentially. Yeah. And it turns out that these are, these wires, which are our smallest blocks, um, are according to the CPSC, not considered choking hazards. Um, so in the future, if we were to make a kit that were more, you know, useful for that age group, we could sell this design, um, to a younger audience. So Darren, you finished a double E degree. What kind? I finished my master's. At Stanford.

And then you started this business right away. How much of your double E degree are you using right now? Honestly, I think a lot of my background was in computer architecture and on the software side. So I used a lot of that in developing the app since there's some algorithms for image processing and analysis that I learned. In terms of the actual electronics, I think what we're doing is somewhat basic. Well, you're trying to teach it. Right.

Yeah. So a lot of what I used for that, I think I just kind of knew from playing around with stuff. And then a lot of the manufacturing side of things, you just, you don't learn that doing a BE degree. It's just not, it's not, you learn more theoretical things generally. So. Yeah. Manufacturing is usually taught by the sink or swim method. Yeah. Which you're swimming, so pretty good. So you wrote a lot of the app. Is it iOS and Android or just one or the other? It's both. We're using a framework that lets us kind of do both

with just writing most of it in JavaScript and then having some... I won't go into technical details, I guess. You can. Okay, well, I mean, we're using... All the image processing is done in C++ on the native side, and then that plugs into both Android and iOS, and then the UI is mostly JavaScript running on top of a library. And did you write all of that?

We wrote most of it. We or you and Josh? I wrote most of it. Yeah, I'm an aspiring programmer, but I just go do these online lessons now and then. I'm not qualified to write this app. The image detection we're using is an open source library. So that helped a little bit. Although we wrote most of that.

But the algorithm is kind of the same. And did you hire anyone else to help you with any of this? We haven't hired anyone yet. But this summer we're hoping to hire a couple of interns, mostly on the software side. And how much did you have to learn from Android and iOS? Did you already know some of that or was this a from scratch, let's learn how to create apps? So I had a little bit of experience with Android. So that was pretty familiar to me. And my cousin actually runs a mobile app development company. and so he helped us port some of that to iOS.

And the shell of that kind of is able to just accept this JavaScript UI, which is easier for me to write. That's more Android-y than Java. It just runs on both, so it's fine, basically. But it's interesting because our first app we made was for Android because Taryn was familiar with that. And in some ways, we sent out a survey to our Kickstarter backers and something like 60 or 70% of them are iOS. And I kind of give them a hard time for it

because I feel that if anything, companies tend to do an iOS version only or for a while, and then they make an Android one if people complain. But from the start, because it's not hard enough already, we've been doing both Android and iOS, and in some ways I had to convince him that we really do need an iOS thing. And he's been, to his credit, learning a lot of it as we go. He doesn't even have a Mac,

and you can only do iOS development on a Mac. That's the most annoying thing. Yeah, so he always pops in. He's like, can I use your computer? But he doesn't know how to do the simplest things, like open an app or something something so I have to show him where to get to Xcode. It's been fun.

It's challenging to support both but we do want to support both Android and iOS. I see you are supporting the iOS. My iPhone. Yes, my new iPhone. What was the best and worst parts of app development?

I think the best part of app development is you can always push out updates and react to customer feedback pretty quickly. So we realized, for example, that it was hard for some people to take the picture and detect all the codes because they didn't know if certain things had glare or not. So we were now working on very quickly pushing out an update where as you're taking the picture, it just highlights the blocks as it finds them. So we can do that in software, which is something we could never have done in hardware. Like you can't just push out an update

and expect the hardware to change itself. So I think that's one of the best parts. I think that's why hardware engineers make fun of software engineers because we can change things later. Yeah, it's pretty convenient. I don't know what the worst part is, but it's definitely... Maybe like so many devices. Yeah, exactly.

It's challenging sometimes to support all of these insane devices on the Android side because you have no idea what camera it has or what kind of thresholding it's going to do or how fast it'll run. So we kind of made a conscious decision to only officially support a certain set of devices, which 70% of people or 80% of people that we have on our Kickstarter list have. Given your limited resources, that makes sense. And I feel like we're doing a pretty admirable job because I see some really big companies that you would think would have the resources,

but they don't even have an app for the iPad or an app for Android. If they can't do it, it seems like no small feat that we're able to support both. Certainly, as you mentioned, the interns we're hoping to hire and eventual full-times, we are honing in on our weak spots. Maybe an iOS app developer, someone that really has that deep experience that could be more efficient at working on our iOS app versus Tru know, versus true and trying to learn as he goes, you know, for some of these things. You raised nearly 2.5x of what you asked for on Kickstarter. How would this have been different if you had only raised that 50k? Could you have done it? Do you think you would have failed? How would it have been different? I think we could have done it, but it wouldn't have been the same product that you see now.

So some of the decisions that we made, for example, you notice that each clear cover has a unique shape based on the component. And that has an upfront cost because now for each mold, we need to, for each cover, we need a new mold. And that's something that we were able to do thanks to having a little bit of, I guess, extra capital that we can invest up front. If we had 50K, I think we would have to make a few more compromises, but it would have still been the product we had in mind. It just wouldn't have been, I guess, maybe as polished.

It would have been closer to probably what you saw in Kickstarter in terms of being more prototype than consumer product. It's a spectrum, I guess. But the extra funds, there's a lot of, as you mentioned, the tooling. Those are all capital costs that you pay for once and then you can pump out hundreds of thousands

of the same identical thing once you've made the tool. But upfront for us, that's tens of thousands of dollars that with only 50K would have pretty much wiped out that. But with $120K, it allowed us to pay for those. Have you sought additional funding? Are you doing the VC circuit as well? We're on the verge of that. We're polishing our pitch deck right now. We've pitched before, but at the time, we were flush with the Kickstarter money and felt pretty confident.

Now we're at the point where we realize with the Kickstarter money and felt pretty confident. Now we're at the point where we realize that the Kickstarter money has got us very far. We've done our best to stretch that, but we would like more funds to hire interns, hire software app developers. We are just now starting to talk to Angel Investors. If anyone out there is in that business, we're definitely interested in speaking with angel, interested in investors. Well, and now you're shipping, so you're in a much stronger position to talk to investors.

You may not have positive cash flow yet, but you have cash flow, which is a big step. Yeah. It also, I think, helped us better understand exactly what it is, the product that we want to make, and now we're kind of pretty sure, like, this is what we're doing. This is how we want to do it. Which going into the Kickstarter, I think we had a general idea, but we definitely didn't have users test the exact version of the product

that it is that we want to scale up. We had prototypes and things changed. Well, they were good prototypes, but things do change. Exactly. Especially your prototypes, when I saw saw them had been to a few things and you could start you could see that they had worn right right and with the plastic and the metal these aren't going to wear very easily exactly what what advice would you give for people who want to use kickstarter i think one thing is don't underestimate everything that happens after Kickstarter, because once you hit your goal, you're going to be really happy.

And, you know, we kind of were really happy and celebrated for a week, I guess. But then you realize, you know, that's just the beginning of it. Just the beginning. I just slept for a week. Yeah. And then, you know, you need to really make sure that you have your plan together on every step that you're going to do afterward. Maybe not every step, but the general idea of how you're actually going to make this thing happen. And if we hadn't had that, then I think we would have been in a much more difficult position. And thanks to Accelerator, we had a good idea. Okay, we might use these people. This is our basic manufacturable design. This is what it's going to cost.

Not knowing that going into it could be a recipe for disaster. What about you, Josh? Do you have advice for people thinking about doing a Kickstarter? Yeah, it's funny. I've actually spoken to a friend who's starting her Kickstarter soon, so she asked me the same question. I think don't underestimate sort of what you can do pre-campaign to kind of increase the chance of success as the campaign,

like when it starts and after. And by that I mean, um, you know, building up your mailing list, um, reaching out to reporters or bloggers that would be interested in writing about you maybe on the day that your campaign launches or during the

campaign. Or in the few weeks prior. That's, uh, when we talk about the podcast and people ask, are we going to monetize it? And I'm like, yeah, sponsors are hard.

I don't want to bother. One of the things we've talked about is if we ever do a Kickstarter, having listeners means that the month before we can start talking about it and tell people where should we advertise, get some advice from listeners and whatnot. So definitely the, the preamble, that first 48 hours and, uh, and keeping the momentum

as best you can. Yeah. That's exactly the process we had was, you know, you get this initial spike just from launching, which is great. Um, and then it kind of lulls, you know, there's this like little in the middle and then you do your best to keep the momentum and then kind of usually picks up near the end of your campaign as the procrastinators kind of file in and maybe back you if they're interested. So, but you're right. You did have some really good press from Engadget and all the maker folks. You really did manage to get that part started. Yeah. Honestly, maybe to pull back the curtain a bit, a lot of that I would say was some element of luck or serendipity.

I don't know what you would call it. I think we did our best to present it at as many venues as we could. And it turned out that we just ended up seeing kind of the same reporters over and over again, which we maybe helped contribute to. Oh, definitely. And they saw the campaign and they're like, okay, I met these guys. So once again, I don't know what you would call that.

Some element of our doing, some element of just timing. But for example, the TechCrunch article, we have been talking about, oh, we should contact someone at TechCrunch. And then one morning I woke up and I got a LinkedIn message saying,

congrats on the TechCrunch article. And then I think I texted Drew and like, did you talk to someone from TechCrunch? And it just turns out that one of the editors there, John Biggs, decided to write about us. He never contacted us. He never did any indication.

It just happened, and we got a fair amount of traffic from that. But it's kind of funny. And we're like, I guess we can check that off our to-do list, even though we didn't do anything to make it happen. It still counts. Yeah, so maybe it's better I didn't reveal it. But certainly, if you're lucky, maybe you get some of that. But there's a lot you can do on your own.

We were very rushed getting the campaign out the door, so we didn't do as much of this groundwork as we could have maybe, or I would have wanted to, but if you have the luxury of some additional time, I would spend the first month or two before you're going to launch a campaign just doing these outreach emails or phone calls to reporters, bloggers, and maybe getting them interested, giving them a preview of what's going to launch on this date.

And I think that would, if we could do it again, maybe that's what we do differently. But of course, you know, we're happy with how things turned out. I think also don't discount your friends and your personal networks. And it's definitely in the first few hours, it was like we just posted on our Facebook and emailed everyone that we knew. And the support from that helped the initial momentum, which kind of propelled, I guess, the rest of the other people who we didn't know so well. But it looked like it was going to be a high trajectory, successful campaign. And I think that means a lot. Yeah, I sometimes am a little shy about contacting, you know, the guy I worked with like five years ago.

And I kind of know him. I know his wife's name, but I don't remember his kid's name. Sort of that level of acquaintance. But those people often end up being very willing to support you. In part, quid pro quo, you know, assuming you will support them sometime in the future. But sometimes just because hearing what your old coworkers and friends are doing is fun. So yeah, personal network, people get shy about using it,

but as long as you're not spamming them every week, I think you're okay. I read a study showing the correlation between, I think if you have like a thousand or more Facebook friends, there's like a much higher chance of a campaign success than if you have a lower friend count or something. So there's definitely... Oh, we're hosed.

I'm not sure Facebook is. Yeah. Or that's one example, yeah. And what advice would you give yourselves if you could tunnel back through the podcast and give advice to you in June? I guess you already answered that a little bit with don't slack off.

Just because you get your kickstarter numbers you're not done you aren't even started really but what what pieces of advice would have been really helpful then i think thinking back one thing that i kind of wish we might have done is be more active in raising our second round of funding like right after kickstarter um because we knew we would do it eventually um but i guess it's a different different time since you're already doing kickstarter you're in promotion fundraising mode it's kind of easy to just go in and do it and now it's kind of a reboot into that mode yeah yeah but shipping helps so much with that that's kind of it's not it's not a direct thing

but it's just something that i wish i thought more seriously about whether or not we decided to take that avenue and with just the two of you it would have been hard to be in fundraising for a long time yeah i mean a part of me says well you should do fundraising all the time but you also should sleep occasionally yeah what about hackcelerator would you recommend that as a the best thing since sliced bread or was it one of many paths that probably are just as good i guess it's hard for us to say since we don't fully understand the other paths but from accelerate alone helped us a great deal um josh and i had never been to china before that so it just opened our eyes to,

hey, this is how someone actually screws that thing onto this product that I use every day. We just learned different processes of manufacturing and then, I guess, felt comfortable with doing that kind of work. And the network from Accelerator helped us in many areas, like press, knowing which manufacturers we might want to use and giving us advice in how to ship and distribute and do all of the other things involved since they've done it before. And we made some great friends in the Hexcelerator program, the companies alongside us as well. We all have similar issues.

We're sometimes in a very similar stage, so we're able to feed off of each other and understand like what things we could do to get get get ourselves to the next stage ah yes the people to commiserate with and you know the one person who managed to solve this problem and can help everybody through yeah right yeah we still email out to the mailing list and i mean there's general in broad strokes like just commiserating those very specific things like multiple teams including us are using this atmel 32U4 chip. And then one thread on Facebook is like, why are there no more chips on the market? It's going to affect all of us.

So sometimes it's even that specific. Like, do you know anyone that has these chips for sale? Is there a broker out there hoarding them? Just give me his name, please. Yeah, exactly. What happens next after after the kickstarter orders so our vision i think by the end of this year is we want a 10 year old kid to be able to build like a nest thermostat in 10 minutes with light up and understand how to make a connected device which so that's what we're working towards

oh and you actually have one that's awesome i noticed that earlier so you know we we think that maybe you know not a thermostat necessarily but we want kids to be able to build internet connected things and understand how the world that we're going to live in 10 years from now is going to work so something yet just to briefly say we i think we've left it in our garage but we have a microcontroller block the prototype of it and we're the way that we want to make that vision possible is basically i didn't really touch on it earlier but you know not just teaching kids about electronic circuits, but about programming and being able to

manipulate the circuits to do what they wanted to do. So really our vision is that we already have this mobile app that right now works with this augmented reality mode, but we're thinking, why not make that also the portal by which kids can learn programming? So they can be, if you're familiar with these kind of drag and drop programming interfaces.

I think, yeah, Lego Mindstorms was one of the first ones that I really, and LabVIEW is like that, but we don't like to talk about that. Yeah, there's Scratch, there's a Lego Mindstorms, which came out of an MIT project at the Media Lab. So it's all integrated, the history of these. But we want to kind of be part of that. To what Tarun just said, you can have an app where kids can just be dragging and dropping these commands into some program, press a button, send it wirelessly to their project

over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, and then have this working circuit that is using all the same blocks that they were using to learn about circuits earlier on. So it could still be using the light sensor or temperature sensor. But, you know, as you said, you can make like a thermostat or you can make something that is an alarm for your room that sends you an email or a text when it gets triggered so it's almost like the next generation of the projects that i built when i was a kid you know like the using foil to arm my room door so my sister couldn't get in without me noticing things like that so you're gonna need a bluetooth module you're gonna need or a wi-fi module an 802 11 wiFi module. I think you need both, really. Both.

Let's see. Maybe you can help us with it. An LCD module would be kind of cool. And yeah, there are a couple of modules. We'll make you a special set. That's what we're doing. Actually, some of your kids came with blanks, right? Yeah. We called it the DIY block.

And that one, I guess, maybe it's more, it's like a cool little thing we found in China, actually. It's like a spring terminal, so you can just press the spring down and then push a two-terminal component or something in, and then you can kind of make your own block with your own component. I can imagine doing, I mean, I just have all these ideas for components. It doesn't take long before I want to, you know, you have a buzzer. I seem to recall you had a motory thing.

Yes. Yeah, we have a motor. That'll be in your kit. Yeah. And that will, but does the motor connect to a wheel that's bigger than the module? Yeah. Or, well, it has a little gear on the top of the shaft. So we have a little foam thing,

but you could definitely couple it with something else. I'm giving up on the Nest and going for the robotic little butler pretty soon. Oh, wow. That'll be cool. Yeah, it's possible. RTC, do you have an RTC module yet? A real-time clock?

No, although you could probably put firmware onto that. I mean, the 32U4 is a pretty powerful chip. It's not, I mean, real. I'm not sure if it would be able to do something that's like a real-time clock, but you can get pretty close to it. If you heat it up, it will, and let it get cool. So if you keep it somewhere where the temperature changes,

it'll lose minutes a day, and you don't want that. So yeah, add real-time clock to my list of modules. My kit is going to be so expensive. We know where to send the bill. Exactly. Have you guys made any money yet? Lost a lot? Gone into debt? Or is this just too implied a question you don't want to answer we can answer it yeah i mean we haven't i guess you know the kits are priced so that we're not

taking a loss on each kit so that's a good thing good planning yes in terms of i guess our company you know we're doing fundraising so that we can invest i guess in the next set of stuff so we can tool a lot of things, which if we did right the second without raising funding first, we'd definitely go into debt. Yeah. And we started to use, you know, some credit lines that are available to us, whether it's like a business credit card or something just to help with some payments. But certainly I think that the Kickstarter funds, when we got them, allowed us to not kind of do that, you know, entrepreneur thing where it's like you mortgage your house or like we don't have a house to mortgage. Yeah, exactly. We're, you know, we didn't have us to not do that entrepreneur thing where it's like, you mortgage your house.

I don't have a house to mortgage. We didn't have to do that sort of extreme thing. You guys are recent graduates. We have loans to pay, actually. We're not so deep into it that we're just sinking. We're fortunate. Kickstarter, the existence of a platform like Kickstarter

gave us the impetus to produce this kit that you see before you without going to deep debt the way people might have had to do in previous eras. That said, though, as you said, the fundraising is what's going to let us. We don't want to be a company that just survives on the revenue alone because I think that will lead to a certain growth trajectory that isn't very steep. And it's kind of like the money trickles in and then it takes a while to collect it from the and it plateaus and then how do you how do you get out of business if you can't grow it's very difficult yeah so the fundraising is a way for us to you know jumpstart that you know we hope and also you know negotiating payment terms both with our suppliers and then with our retailers because there's a thing about you know when you have to pay for the production and then

there's when you get the money from the orders and neither of those are instant there's always some lag to it like they call it net 30 which would be 30 days or net 60 60 days so you've got to manage that carefully so you don't kind of run out of money without realizing it yeah and but you're shipping and that helps so cool and when so you said about eight weeks if you could buy the chips now and ship them over, do you have a, when should we ask you next for the Kickstarter units? We're going to be actually sending out a Kickstarter update, I guess, in the next couple of days, once we get all of the details from our suppliers on exactly what, what's going to happen. So we, we kind of were relying on one supplier who's like, I don't have any. And then

now we've contacted a few more. So hopefully, fingers crossed, one of them has it and we don't have to delay too much. But we'll see. Yeah, stay tuned on, of course, our Twitter and Facebook and also the official Kickstarter update channel will be where we publish that update. Okay. And with the future, with the growth, certainly there are a lot of software things because teaching how to program, going to a blocks method of programming, although the Arduino interface is really nice too. Are you looking at making different blocks and more and expanding the whole line or are you kind of focusing on the software options we do want to expand what's possible with the hardware but at the same time i guess we're also focusing on expanding what's possible to the software with the software and i think right now

we have more confidence or not more confidence i guess but we're a little bit further along in the hardware since we put all of our resources into developing the hardware for the past six months or so. And so I think we want to get the software to be kind of in the same state and then push forward on both of them. Cool. Well, thank you for sharing your product

and startup wisdom. I'm not anxiously awaiting my kit, but I will be looking for that update. Perfect. Josh, any last thoughts before we head back to our normal lives? Any last thoughts? Well, I don't know.

I just think it's really cool that we got to be at episode seven of the same podcast and now you're talking to us again. So maybe listeners that remember that can see our growth. If anyone wants to contact us directly or through Alicia, feel free.

I mean, we're happy to do things like this. Try to share the lessons we learned because we hope, you know, we do feel that like, for example, you asked us about the path we took with Haxcelerator and at the time Haxcelerator and maybe one other incubator were the only options we had as a hardware startup. And that was only a year and a half ago.

And now I think there's like seven or eight hardware startup accelerators. Especially in the Bay Area. Yeah, the Bay Area maybe has four or five of those that are like in San Francisco or the South Bay. So there's more paths that are available now. And I think that that's a sign that we maybe were on the earlier edge of this movement, but it's kind of growing with Maker Faire and with the Maker movement and 3D printing and Internet of Things.

All these are things that we're really excited about and we're hoping that other people can maybe follow in our footsteps. A big reason why we like doing this with you is that we get to share our story. We're not very good at blogging or stuff, so this is kind of a rare case where we actually can open up and talk about the process. We learn so much doing this.

Well, I've really enjoyed having you, and maybe in a year or maybe in six months when you announce your next product, we will get together again. If your listeners aren't tired of us. What about you, Tarun? Any last thoughts? Can't say anything specific comes to mind,

but like Josh said, we're happy to be able to share our experience since it's something that we wish we could do more. But sometimes we're so buried in product development that we don't spend time on that. Cool. Well, talking to people can be fun. I have to say that that's true for me. So cool. My guests this week have been Josh Chan and Tarun Pondicherry, the founders of Light Up. If you want to get your own kit after I get mine, go to Makershed for the mini kit or

to lightup.io directly and sign up. If you have questions or comments for Josh and Tarun, feel free to contact them via lightup.io or their Twitter handle. What's that? It's also lightup. Oh, that's so... Yeah, easy. Or you can hit the contact link on embedded.fm.

I'm happy to forward things along. Let's see. What else? Thank you for listening. And if you like the show, write a review, please. And thank you to Christopher White for getting the three mics set up working again. It's always a little bit of an adventure and a joke or something. Oh, Yates, William Butler Yates. He said, education is not

the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.