“It still works!”: As two friends accidentally made a 3d revolution, inventing a doodler
The magic wand for drawing in 3Doodler space appeared as a result of the trivial failure of a 3D printer, but it became a hit. In 2013, the project raised $ 2 million at Kickstarter, and since then more than 70,000 people have bought a pretty device.
Now the project team wants to create a powerful creative community around Dudler, whose members together would come up with useful and effective ways to apply it.
At the invitation of MadRobots, Daniel Cowan, director of marketing for WobbleWorks, behind the production of pens, recently visited Moscow to take part in RIF + CIB 2014. We used this opportunity to ask him about the history of 3Doodler.
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This is, after all, a true tale of crowdfunding and a real success story. It is the case when Kickstarter allowed people to make their dreams come true: he gave initiative guys a chance to create their own international business, completely change their lives and start something really significant - and they managed to not miss this chance.
The future founding fathers of WobbleWorks Max Boog and Peter Dilworth in the middle of the two thousandth worked together in Hong Kong in WowWee - a company known for its toy robots. Pete - a graduate of the prestigious MIT Leg Laboratory and MIT Media Lab - was the engineer-inventor, and Max was responsible for the production process and the practical implementation of high technologies.
In friendly conversations, it often came up that both of them want to go on an independent voyage, realize their creative ambitions to the fullest extent, and make independent consumer electronics. In 2010, Max and Peter created in Boston WobbleWorks. At the start of the money spent only from private funds. The amount of this amount in the company does not disclose. “It was not very big due to the fact that Pete and Max used only their own concepts and ideas,” explains Daniel, who joined the team in 2012.
He already had the experience of his own navigation: he managed to work as a corporate lawyer, and later founded two small IT companies and even wrote several fairly successful applications. One of them - Last Night Never Happened: The Morning After App (“Last night never happened: new morning app”) deleted all the owner’s entries from his Facebook and Twitter pages the previous night. True, after a couple of months, Facebook closed access to the part of the API that the application used.
The first time after the launch of WobbleWorks, Max and Peter focused on inventive work and often prototyped ideas that came to their mind on a 3D printer. As a rule, these were electronic toys and robots.
“Once our 3D UP printer! “I went haywire in the process of printing the next layout for Peter,” says Daniel. - There was a hole in the finished layout, and Peter wanted to take the head of the printer in order to manually fill the gap. It was at that moment that he had the idea of a 3Ddoodler. ”
As a result, Max and Peter quickly disassembled the printer and tried to unscrew a small pen from its parts. The first modification of the gadget barely worked and was a printing head with a lever screwed to it to extrude plastic. But Pete and Max were happy: "It still works!".
“We quickly realized that in order for the plastic to harden faster and allow it to create stable thermal structures in the air, it must be cooled,” recalls Daniel. - Next was hard work to improve the prototype, we have long thought out the cooling mechanism. When we finally got it, we exclaimed: “Wow! Something can really come out of this thing. ” A few months, the inventors brought to mind the technology. Gadget made the most compact and easy to use. With this modification, and went to the "Kickstar". "
Crowdfunding gave talented engineers of our time a chance to implement almost any technical ideas. The guys from WobbleWorks used this feature to the maximum. To attract attention, in parallel with the campaign on “Kickstarter”, WobbleWorks launched a project with designers and jewelers of the international online fair Etsy, who experimented with the device and laid out their work.
Later, in an interview, Max talked about how it feels like to engage in crowdfunding - and achieve some success: “You will have a lot of publicity on you. Get ready for it as carefully as possible. You will receive tons of emails. My girlfriend even took a two-week vacation from work to help us cope with the shaft of sent emails. It was important for us to respond to every interested person. ”
Initially, WobbleWorks wanted to collect only 30 thousand dollars, obviously not waving anything great. But in the end, the project financed more than 26,000 backers, and the total fee exceeded $ 2 million.
The launch of the project heralded the start of a new era in WobbleWorks. From a startup that was engaged in the development of technical ideas and licensing, it was urgent to expand to a full-fledged production company with product development, distribution and logistics. Inexperienced people most likely would have broken their teeth on this task - many projects on Kickstarter failed, not because they could not raise money, but because they had collected a lot, but could not cope with scaling.
“Of course, we understood that we had invented a really cool thing, but the amount collected on Kickstarter hit us. We did not expect such a response at all. Those 30 thousand dollars that we wanted to collect initially would barely cover the price of the necessary equipment and tools, so we would work at a loss. Despite this, we really wanted the world to get a 3Doodler, ”Max recalled in an interview with Makezine .
A few months before the launch of the campaign on Kickstarter, the founders went to Hong Kong to look for a factory that would be engaged in the production of pens. Max’s experience was especially useful here. By the time of launching his own project, he managed to work for several years as the production director of Chinese startup Handy Robotics, where he established contacts with high-tech factories from Hong Kong and South Korea. As a result, we managed to find a factory that agreed to work with small orders, but in the event of which she was ready to quickly increase production volumes.
“It is very useful to know the language - I began to learn Mandarin Chinese in high school, I continued to study it in college, and then I lived in Hong Kong for four years,” Max said in the same interview. - The first few months I was sitting in a factory without bells, but this is the price I’m willing to pay for our 3Doodler to reach buyers. I am more than happy to do this. ” Continuing presence at work brought its benefits - Max worked side by side with the engineers and the quality control service, this helped reduce the time to manufacture the product.
Do not let the rest of the team. It turned out to be the most difficult to establish a stable logistics system and send out the first 25 thousand doodlers to backers living all over the world. “At this critical moment it became clear that there are people in our team with all the necessary knowledge and competencies to ensure stable work. It was a well-chosen team that saved the situation then, ”says Daniel. In total, there are ten people working at WobbleWorks.
“Scaling up a business is always difficult, but we were prepared enough to cope with this task. Success at Kickstarter brought us enough money to build a company, hire the right people and be independent from outside investors. This is a real luxury, but we also work tirelessly, ”sums up Daniel.
However, some geeks, even with all their love for gadgets, were skeptical from the very beginning and called the doodler "a toy with which it will be interesting to tinker fifteen minutes, not more." Is it so?
“I understand this skepticism, and from the very beginning we did a serious outreach,” says Daniel. “Actually, there are plenty of opportunities for the useful use of the device: this is the field of education, design, gardening, art, architecture, choreography, construction, jewelry ... Look at our communities on Twitter and Facebook - the imagination and skill of the owners of the borders do not know.”
There really is something to see. For example, one backer device was required in order to paint pipes in his basement with plastic, thereby turning them into an object of art.
Separate pride for the developers of the doodler is the opportunity to train blind and visually impaired people by creating special tactile objects with it. “As far as medicine is concerned, we also have achievements in this area,” says Daniel. - Now they are starting to use our pen to work on medical prostheses. We are discussing other possibilities for using the device in medicine with leading experts from the USA. ”
What next? At the annual CES WobbleWorks, they announced their plans to create a holder platform for the pen that would greatly facilitate the work on large objects. Also announced plans to create a series of interchangeable nozzles and silicone molds DoodleBlocks in the form of numbers, stars and letters. They can be poured plastic and create perfectly smooth objects.
“We keep in touch with the majority of people who bought the device, and thanks to this feedback we have accumulated a lot of information about his work and suggestions for possible upgrades,” says Daniel. “Now our goal is to create a vibrant living creative community around Dudler, whose members could create and share ideas together. Therefore, we begin cooperation with all new and new artists and designers around the world. "
But the company is not going to focus on the doodler alone, he promises: "We still have a lot of nontrivial ideas."
If you want to join the growing community of happy users of 3doodler , welcome to our store MadRobots - doodler is still in stock. And if you have already become the owner of this device, we will be glad to learn about your experience of using it - tell us in the comments how you managed to apply it.
First generation 3Doodler in Madrobots
3Doodler 2.0 in Madrobots
Now the project team wants to create a powerful creative community around Dudler, whose members together would come up with useful and effective ways to apply it.
At the invitation of MadRobots, Daniel Cowan, director of marketing for WobbleWorks, behind the production of pens, recently visited Moscow to take part in RIF + CIB 2014. We used this opportunity to ask him about the history of 3Doodler.
')
This is, after all, a true tale of crowdfunding and a real success story. It is the case when Kickstarter allowed people to make their dreams come true: he gave initiative guys a chance to create their own international business, completely change their lives and start something really significant - and they managed to not miss this chance.
Hole in the model
The future founding fathers of WobbleWorks Max Boog and Peter Dilworth in the middle of the two thousandth worked together in Hong Kong in WowWee - a company known for its toy robots. Pete - a graduate of the prestigious MIT Leg Laboratory and MIT Media Lab - was the engineer-inventor, and Max was responsible for the production process and the practical implementation of high technologies.
In friendly conversations, it often came up that both of them want to go on an independent voyage, realize their creative ambitions to the fullest extent, and make independent consumer electronics. In 2010, Max and Peter created in Boston WobbleWorks. At the start of the money spent only from private funds. The amount of this amount in the company does not disclose. “It was not very big due to the fact that Pete and Max used only their own concepts and ideas,” explains Daniel, who joined the team in 2012.
He already had the experience of his own navigation: he managed to work as a corporate lawyer, and later founded two small IT companies and even wrote several fairly successful applications. One of them - Last Night Never Happened: The Morning After App (“Last night never happened: new morning app”) deleted all the owner’s entries from his Facebook and Twitter pages the previous night. True, after a couple of months, Facebook closed access to the part of the API that the application used.
The first time after the launch of WobbleWorks, Max and Peter focused on inventive work and often prototyped ideas that came to their mind on a 3D printer. As a rule, these were electronic toys and robots.
“Once our 3D UP printer! “I went haywire in the process of printing the next layout for Peter,” says Daniel. - There was a hole in the finished layout, and Peter wanted to take the head of the printer in order to manually fill the gap. It was at that moment that he had the idea of a 3Ddoodler. ”
As a result, Max and Peter quickly disassembled the printer and tried to unscrew a small pen from its parts. The first modification of the gadget barely worked and was a printing head with a lever screwed to it to extrude plastic. But Pete and Max were happy: "It still works!".
SHAFT MALE
“We quickly realized that in order for the plastic to harden faster and allow it to create stable thermal structures in the air, it must be cooled,” recalls Daniel. - Next was hard work to improve the prototype, we have long thought out the cooling mechanism. When we finally got it, we exclaimed: “Wow! Something can really come out of this thing. ” A few months, the inventors brought to mind the technology. Gadget made the most compact and easy to use. With this modification, and went to the "Kickstar". "
Crowdfunding gave talented engineers of our time a chance to implement almost any technical ideas. The guys from WobbleWorks used this feature to the maximum. To attract attention, in parallel with the campaign on “Kickstarter”, WobbleWorks launched a project with designers and jewelers of the international online fair Etsy, who experimented with the device and laid out their work.
Later, in an interview, Max talked about how it feels like to engage in crowdfunding - and achieve some success: “You will have a lot of publicity on you. Get ready for it as carefully as possible. You will receive tons of emails. My girlfriend even took a two-week vacation from work to help us cope with the shaft of sent emails. It was important for us to respond to every interested person. ”
Initially, WobbleWorks wanted to collect only 30 thousand dollars, obviously not waving anything great. But in the end, the project financed more than 26,000 backers, and the total fee exceeded $ 2 million.
EACH BACKER - ON DUDLER!
The launch of the project heralded the start of a new era in WobbleWorks. From a startup that was engaged in the development of technical ideas and licensing, it was urgent to expand to a full-fledged production company with product development, distribution and logistics. Inexperienced people most likely would have broken their teeth on this task - many projects on Kickstarter failed, not because they could not raise money, but because they had collected a lot, but could not cope with scaling.
“Of course, we understood that we had invented a really cool thing, but the amount collected on Kickstarter hit us. We did not expect such a response at all. Those 30 thousand dollars that we wanted to collect initially would barely cover the price of the necessary equipment and tools, so we would work at a loss. Despite this, we really wanted the world to get a 3Doodler, ”Max recalled in an interview with Makezine .
A few months before the launch of the campaign on Kickstarter, the founders went to Hong Kong to look for a factory that would be engaged in the production of pens. Max’s experience was especially useful here. By the time of launching his own project, he managed to work for several years as the production director of Chinese startup Handy Robotics, where he established contacts with high-tech factories from Hong Kong and South Korea. As a result, we managed to find a factory that agreed to work with small orders, but in the event of which she was ready to quickly increase production volumes.
“It is very useful to know the language - I began to learn Mandarin Chinese in high school, I continued to study it in college, and then I lived in Hong Kong for four years,” Max said in the same interview. - The first few months I was sitting in a factory without bells, but this is the price I’m willing to pay for our 3Doodler to reach buyers. I am more than happy to do this. ” Continuing presence at work brought its benefits - Max worked side by side with the engineers and the quality control service, this helped reduce the time to manufacture the product.
Do not let the rest of the team. It turned out to be the most difficult to establish a stable logistics system and send out the first 25 thousand doodlers to backers living all over the world. “At this critical moment it became clear that there are people in our team with all the necessary knowledge and competencies to ensure stable work. It was a well-chosen team that saved the situation then, ”says Daniel. In total, there are ten people working at WobbleWorks.
“Scaling up a business is always difficult, but we were prepared enough to cope with this task. Success at Kickstarter brought us enough money to build a company, hire the right people and be independent from outside investors. This is a real luxury, but we also work tirelessly, ”sums up Daniel.
SYMPHONY OF WATER DRAIN PIPES
However, some geeks, even with all their love for gadgets, were skeptical from the very beginning and called the doodler "a toy with which it will be interesting to tinker fifteen minutes, not more." Is it so?
“I understand this skepticism, and from the very beginning we did a serious outreach,” says Daniel. “Actually, there are plenty of opportunities for the useful use of the device: this is the field of education, design, gardening, art, architecture, choreography, construction, jewelry ... Look at our communities on Twitter and Facebook - the imagination and skill of the owners of the borders do not know.”
There really is something to see. For example, one backer device was required in order to paint pipes in his basement with plastic, thereby turning them into an object of art.
Separate pride for the developers of the doodler is the opportunity to train blind and visually impaired people by creating special tactile objects with it. “As far as medicine is concerned, we also have achievements in this area,” says Daniel. - Now they are starting to use our pen to work on medical prostheses. We are discussing other possibilities for using the device in medicine with leading experts from the USA. ”
STARS, LETTERS AND REPLACEABLE ADJUSTMENTS
What next? At the annual CES WobbleWorks, they announced their plans to create a holder platform for the pen that would greatly facilitate the work on large objects. Also announced plans to create a series of interchangeable nozzles and silicone molds DoodleBlocks in the form of numbers, stars and letters. They can be poured plastic and create perfectly smooth objects.
“We keep in touch with the majority of people who bought the device, and thanks to this feedback we have accumulated a lot of information about his work and suggestions for possible upgrades,” says Daniel. “Now our goal is to create a vibrant living creative community around Dudler, whose members could create and share ideas together. Therefore, we begin cooperation with all new and new artists and designers around the world. "
But the company is not going to focus on the doodler alone, he promises: "We still have a lot of nontrivial ideas."
If you want to join the growing community of happy users of 3doodler , welcome to our store MadRobots - doodler is still in stock. And if you have already become the owner of this device, we will be glad to learn about your experience of using it - tell us in the comments how you managed to apply it.
First generation 3Doodler in Madrobots
3Doodler 2.0 in Madrobots
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/226581/
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