They should open source and publish whatever they've done to this point.
STEP files are a bit lame. SolidWorks files are much more useful since minor changes will likely need to be made depending on how it is manufactured.
The bit i don't get is that if you have a genuinely commercially viable idea, why do you need crowd funding, and if it isn't commercially viable, how is it going to work just because it is crowd funded??
I've faced exactly that problem... demonstrated the first level of disclosure (and sometimes working prototypes) to 'interested' corporate parties - sometimes very substantial multi-nationals - and as soon as their legal / risk management people see it - I get a photocopied letter back that says -
"We do not accept or entertain unsolicited offers of intellectual property"
- i.e. we don't want to know what we don't know - in case we may have already been thinking about it already - but we don't know, so we can't look at what you're doing in case it overlaps what we may or may not be doing.
I think you missed the part where... I offer to present under an NDA etc - a working hardware prototype (or in the case of software a functional POC) for them to review as relevant/suitable to ...
buy outright
licence
take equity
... we never get to the offers, as they have no idea of the product capability!
The weirdest case I had was a multi-national auto component supplier actually went most of the way with me (almost a year of presentation, negotiation etc) and eventually they hit the same barrier! The car manufacturers wouldn't accept their presentation unless the car co had expressed a need for such a product development beforehand! it's just their protocol?!
I think you missed the part where... I offer to present under an NDA etc - a working hardware prototype (or in the case of software a functional POC) for them to review as relevant/suitable to ...
buy outright
licence
take equity
... we never get to the offers, as they have no idea of the product capability!
The weirdest case I had was a multi-national auto component supplier actually went most of the way with me (almost a year of presentation, negotiation etc) and eventually they hit the same barrier! The car manufacturers wouldn't accept their presentation unless the car co had expressed a need for such a product development beforehand! it's just their protocol?!
The weirdest case I had was a multi-national auto component supplier actually went most of the way with me (almost a year of presentation, negotiation etc) and eventually they hit the same barrier!
The developer of the failed Trigger Trap product was on a podcast explaining the whole saga and why it failed:
http://thisweekinphoto.com/triggertrap-saga-itl-07/
The developer of the failed Trigger Trap product was on a podcast explaining the whole saga and why it failed:
http://thisweekinphoto.com/triggertrap-saga-itl-07/Listening to that, it seems the fundamental problem was they had no in-house electronics people, and were relying entirely on a subcontractor who were either incompetent, or were cynically taking advantage of being given a woefully inadequate specification.
Both Triggertrap and ourselves were thrown a few curve balls during the development of Ada, the benefits of Kickstarter meant that Triggertrap could keep in contact with their customer base directly, but this did mean a change in dynamics. Triggertrap had a set of extremely complex specifications and expectations from their customers, so the race was certainly on to smooth any bumps in the road which appeared along the route to getting The Ada into its backer’s hands.
AFAICS the product was basically little more than a flexible timer with a few simple interfaces, and its own UI.
How they got to a $100 BOM and 1% of their intended battery life is beyond me.
It wasn't mentioned if they'd made good on their earlier promise to open-source everything.
Regardless of the actual detail - any company going into something like this without in-house electronics expertise, even if only to keep specs under control and realistic, is taking a colossal risk.
Considering how much they've watsed, hiring an engineer would have been small change.
Lesson 5: Get the right skills.
We thought we had all the skills we needed to deliver this project. We were incredibly wrong. As soon as the Kickstarter money hit our account, we should have hired an experienced hardware product manager.
Lesson 6: Don’t be naïve.
Towards the end of the project, we engaged an extremely experienced hardware project manager, both to discuss how things were looking, and to see if we could salvage the project.
To kick it off, I figured I’d ask him how we should have run this project. The challenge we set him: “If you have £300k to develop a consumer electronics product, how would you go about it?” He looked me straight in the eye, blinked twice, and said “I wouldn’t. Not with a budget of under £1m.”
In my experience, having in-house engineers is not necessarily an advantage, if you don't have the right management skills. It is easy for bad managers to indulge in feature creep, and the engineer usually feels obliged to accommodate, rather than say "no way, that was not in the original spec".
I did actually work for a start-up as the sole engineer (the rest marketing/management), and it was pretty hopeless. Requirements changing every day, no spec of any sort, completely ridiculous expectations of cost and timescale.