Hexy will be swarming by the hudreds … soon
Most college graduates celebrate by buying a new car or a computer; Joe Schlesinger bought a giant laser cutter. He used the tool to design a low-cost robot named “Hexy” with the aim of making robotics education more affordable for elementary and middle school students, and raised over $168,267 to produce the programmable robot platform on Kickstarter.
What differentiates Hexy from other crowdfunding “successes” is that Schlesinger is actually going to ship on schedule. According to a paper by a University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School professor 75 percent of Kickstarter projects ship with a delay and several high-profile backers have pointed out serious delays in projects they’ve backed.
How did Schlesinger buck the odds and actually meet his deadline? He relied on a technique called “design for manufacturing.” “Most people design a cool product and then try to figure out how to make a thousand of them,” Schlesinger says. “I looked for parts that I could get by the thousand and built a product around them.”
Hexy is the first educational robot from ArcBotics, a Somerville, Massachusetts, robotics company.
Schlesinger, overwhelmed by the success of his first project, quit his day job as a firmware engineer at APC, and started a company to pursue his passion. He shared some of his Kickstarter wisdom with Wired Design.
Design for Simplicity - The key to making Hexy affordable (At $250, it’s five to 10 times less expensive than other educational hexapod kits) and shipping on time was in stripping down the design. Schlesinger’s goal was to give would-be roboticists a low-cost platform that they could program to navigate obstacle courses, dance, etc. All other functionality was stripped away to make sure it was as accessible to as many people as possible.
Schlesinger automated the manufacturing process as much as possible. “Hexy is designed to be built on the laser cutter. I could have cheated a lot on the design if I’d decided to drill holes on the sides of pieces. When you’re making one thing, it’s easy, but if I had to drill a thousand holes it would have taken a ton of time. Now all I have to do is push buttons on my laser cutter.”
Design for scale - Schlesinger had identified all the parts and factories he was going to work with before he started collecting money. “All the stuff you need to do afterward should be figured out before you finish,” he says. “I identified the supply chain early and put money down to evaluate samples before I promoted the design. A lot of the preparation I did was trying to figure out how to get 10, 100, or 1,000 of something.”
Treat it like a job - Schlesinger says the success of the project was more than he expected and had to hire a team. He now employs a full-time engineer, an assistant, and a network of freelance designers, accountants, and logistics support. This team is actively fulfilling the Kickstarter pledges, but is also driving new sales through the ArcBotics website and trying to secure retail distribution. Trying to manage a complex Kickstarter with a full-time job is unrealistic.
Befriend fellow hackers - Schlessinger benefited greatly by developing Hexy in hackerspaces. He says “because the product I was doing targeted hobbyists it was great for market research.” He also credits his hacker space, Artisan’s Asylum, for giving him flexibility and says, “Being able to expand your workspace rapidly is important. It’s really hard to start out with a couple hundred square feet anywhere other than a hackerspace; you have to spend thoudands of dollars per month to get space anywhere else.” More important than the space are the people. Schlesinger says “it’s also great to have a talent pool of people you ask for advice or feedback from.”
Leverage your backers - Backers have gone beyond funding to support the project in other ways. Schlesinger says, “the thing I expected the least was community support — people asking to build Android apps for Hexy, people offering to do graphics.” He ended up hiring the person who did his graphic design work from the pool of Kickstarter backers. Dollars are just one component of the value that crowdfunding provides.
Hexy was designed for DIY DFM.
It hasn’t been a totally smooth process for Schlesinger. Like almost every Kickstarter project, Hexy has hit some snags: a plastic supplier that had turned orders in a couple of days, suddenly took a month; and an electronics supplier flaked, delaying some parts. But because Schlesinger had so many other efficiencies built into his process, he was undaunted. “You should do as much as possible beforehand so you have as much free time as possible to deal with screw-ups.”
With six fingers crossed, Hexy should be crawling to Kickstarter backers starting in September.
