I thought you might enjoy hearing from Dave Cohen,

who's a founder at Petronics.

Dave and his co-founders at Petronics are working to

develop an entirely new class of robots for the home.

Small, nimble, autonomous devices that can navigate their way through the home,

performing a wide variety of tasks and

staying out of people's way when they're not in use.

Their first product is Mousr which is

a robotic mouse that can interact with and entertain your cat.

Dave and his co-founders were Ph.D. students in

Electrical and Computer Engineering when they came up with the idea for Mousr.

They tested the concept through a Kickstarter campaign, raising over $100,000.

They've gone on to participate in an accelerator in Shenzhen China where they refined and

productized Mousr and they've raised $2.5 Million from institutional and angel investors.

I've asked Dave to speak with us,

specifically about the company's Kickstarter campaign.

So Dave, tell us about Petronics.

What are you trying to accomplish?

Yes, so Petronics is a home robotics company and our first product is

a little robotic mouse designed to play automated games of hide and seek with house cats.

Okay. So, how did you come up with that idea?

Yes, so, me and the other two co-founders,

we're all Ph.D. grad students in the same university lab,

and a lot of the work we were doing there was

on sensor algorithms for low-powered devices.

And I was testing a lot of my algorithms on my cat.

So, I was doing like wildlife monitoring applications

and doing proof of concept on my cat.

So, I was already sort of thinking about how to use sensors and cats together.

And so, we kind of brainstormed and thought man there's nothing

out there that can actually react meaningfully to a cat and engage and play with it.

I mean, that would be a really useful product if it existed because cats don't

get enough energy and automated toys just aren't cutting it right now.

So how did you make the decision that you really wanted to take the leap?

Because you really did take a leap and start this company.

Yes, so it started as the idea and we had a little bit of know how.

So, you know got together and said let's build a prototype.

And so we built a prototype,

kind of saw that it worked on cats.

The idea was sound.

At the same time, we were doing the University of Illinois Cozad competition, to kind

of vet out the business side of it and see is this a reasonable business model as well.

And then we got accepted to an accelerator program in Shenzhen,

China to learn about manufacturing.

And it was just this really unique opportunity that we were given at

a very early stage in the company and we all kind

of said hey we're going to really regret it if we don't take a shot on this.

So we went out to China for four months to learn how to prototype and

learn the manufacturing ecosystem and build up the original version of the hardware.

Okay. So you put together a Kickstarter campaign back beginning at the end of 2014,

I think, and tell me about your decision to do that.

Yes, so I mentioned HACKcelerator.

HACKcelerator is their premier hardware accelerators.

So they're the only one that has a real focus on

hardware companies and that's B to C, that's B to B, whatever.

But for their business to consumer companies,

they encourage them to crowdfund.

It's kind of their expertise is how to crowdfunding and get buzz around your products.

So they really encourage their companies to go that route,

and they have a lot of connections that make it easier for companies that go

through the program to transition into a Kickstarter campaign.

And in particular, they like to see all these accelerators have demo days.

And so they really like to kind of hoist up successes and say,

if you can launch a Kickstarter campaign at their demo day,

that really helps just like create buzz about us and create buzz about them.

And so that was kind of what we were pushing for.

All right, that makes sense.

So, a lot of people think about a Kickstarter and Indiegogo campaign

as a way to really raise money to help get a company off the ground.

But it can be a little bit more than that and

tell me what you were trying to accomplish with your campaign.

Yes, so we've only been alive as

a company for six months at that point, when we launched.

Which is really early on.

We didn't have manufacturers lined up.

We didn't have final design.

We didn't have algorithms written.

A lot of the development was left to do but.

So this is clearly a pretty high tech product.

It's an extremely high tech product and

it's really hard to play at times with the cats.

Something that we've learned very deeply over the past three years.

Okay.

Doing this. And we knew it was going to be a lot of work before we started,

and kind of our mentality was we wanted to use Kickstarter in the way that it started.

Which was we've got an idea, that's going to be hard.

Let's see if we can get people in the world,

who are passionate enough about this,

to donate and help us make it a reality.

That's kind of the old school Kickstarter model.

The new school Kickstarter model is let me put

up a very polished product that's three months from shipping,

you know spend $10,000 on a commercial for it and use it as a pre-order platform.

Right. So those are kind of the two ends of the spectrum and I want to see if anyone

cares about this before I spend years of my life doing nothing but developing it.

Well, there's a lot more competition for attention on Kickstarter nowadays as well.

Yes, there is. Definitely.

So, you'd ended up.

How did you do with your campaign?

We did well.

So, there are kind of rules of thumb with crowdfunding

that we were taught in the program that we know from talking to many,

many companies who have done it before.

Things like what day should you launch your campaign?

What should your goal size be?

Things like this that are sort of designed to optimize your total raise.

We did none of them because again,

we weren't optimizing for raising amount.

We were looking for validation.

So, rule number one we broke because we set a really high goal.

We said okay, basically, we don't want to do this if we can't get at least $100,000.

Okay.

So we set $100,000 goal and basically said if it doesn't get there,

maybe we will evaluate what could be better and try again later.

Or maybe we'll say this is not enough legs or whatever.

But we definitely don't want to set a $20,000 goal

and only hit it and then not have the resources to actually pull it off.

The other thing that we did rule we broke was

we put a really long timeline on the project.

So a lot of people, when they're using a pre-order platform and

the pre-order type campaigns are the ones that you

see reaching a million dollar revenues, that kind of thing.

They're shipping in four months.

We were shipping in 18 months we said and that even got stretched from there.

So, all these things I think meant we left money on the table in a certain way.

But what it also meant is that the backers we cultivated were really along with us for

the ride and have been really patient with us and been cheering us along the whole way.

And so I think we got a really good group of people,

even though we may have been able to go bigger.

I think it was the right thing for us to do,

so we ended up with $117,000, which to us validated that it was worth it,

because we spent zero dollars on the campaign.

Well, I want to follow up a little bit on what you did after the campaign,

but let's talk now before the campaign first.

What materials did you really have to put together to make this work?

I've seen your video.

Tell us about really the content that you had in your Kickstarter campaign.

Yes, so it was kind of a balancing act, right?

We wanted to be honest about how we presented the stage of development.

We also wanted to be polished enough,

to give people confidence that we could deliver something.

So, it's a lot of just looking at what other people do.

You obviously need a good video.

We chose to do our video in-house and really try to highlight our personality as much as

possible as opposed to spending 10 or $20,000 for another company to shoot our video.

And I know a lot of campaigns are really well-produced.

They do, yes they do.

And a lot of campaigns spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on advertising,

just to get the word out, so we did none of that.

Basically, our marketing was make a well-designed page.

They say work on your campaign at least two months before you plan to launch.

We were working on it three weeks before we launched.

We were shooting the video in airports like on the way to our demo day and like.

We're very much a deadline driven team and it came down to the wire.

So we kind of put everything together in

the final weeks before launch which is I would say not recommended.

But if that's the way your team works,

that's what gets results.

As far as getting the word out,

we had a modest email list,

had a few hundred people on it that we could blast on and say hey we're launching.

We had done some legwork to find reporters and

journalists and things like that and say do you want to write about us?

So we had some articles come out around the campaign.

We didn't do any paid advertising and most of it was

organic growth from sharing, which is a really nice thing about what we're doing.

So if you look at an average Kickstarter campaign,

especially a hardware product,

you'll see this growth.

So they all do the same thing.

They try to get a huge waiting list of people who are interested in the product.

So you get first day attraction.

And then so you get first day spike,

huge level off, and then maybe a last day spike.

So, it really doesn't matter how long you do your campaign,

it's always going to look like that.

It's always going to be at the beginning and the end.

Ours was linear, basically, the whole way.

Like we kept growing because it was

our email list was weaker than most, at the beginning.

So we got a little bit of something.

But then our video was just turned out to resonate with people, really compelling.

It got shared over and over and over again.

So people kept coming basically from start to end.

And that's not common.

Okay, so now at the time you were still at the University?

So basically, when we made the decision to do the accelerator in China,

two of us, Michael and I, took a leave of absence from the program.

Okay.

And David Jun had just finished his Ph.D. So he was done anyway

And it was the success of the Kickstarter campaign that helped you make

the decision that you really wanted to jump into

this company full time, and really make that.

The next priority for you.

Yeah. Once we took $100,000 from real people,

like, it's no longer a hobby, you know?

Okay.

You can't do two things at once so we jumped in full time, more than full time.

All right. So it has, you know,

it's been a while since your campaign and you've gone and you've raised

a significant amount of venture capital and angel capital since then.

Yeah.

How did the Kickstarter campaign contribute to your success in that?

Yeah, so, the Kickstarter campaign gave us enough funds to live modestly and develop.

Okay.

And so, we don't come from a robotics background.

We come from what's called a signal processing background, which utilizes

a lot of the same theory but the specifics and the details are a lot different.

So, a lot of that time was just spent becoming experts on how to do robotics.

And throughout that process,

we got an NSF SBIR grant which pulled in another $200,000 to the company,

that was used purely for development.

And we got a lot of insights

about what other people were doing and what other people weren't doing.

And we kind of discovered this niche of

small autonomous robots and kind of discovered that,

hey, there could be something to this way beyond a cat toy.

Right.

And that's kind of what spawned out.

So, cat toy became our market entry to

this grander vision of small robots that can do a lot of different things.

And so, that Kickstarter success combined with NSF funding,

and a solid vision.

Broader vision.

A broad vision that we were able to convince people, hey,

this is actually going to happen,

and we're going to be the ones to pull it off.

That all led to a pretty good seed round, yeah.

Okay. So now, you're just getting ready to actually ship your products,

your pre-ordered products to your Kickstarter donors.

Yeah.

How have you communicated with that donor group since then? Since the campaign?

Yeah, so, we try to keep them up to speed on what we're doing at least once a month.

So, we'll send out an update with what we've been working on,

the challenges, the successes,

keeping them posted on where we're at,

when we see this thing coming together.

Right.

It was a lot harder when we were developing, because there were

a lot of roads we went down that ended up being dead ends.

Sure.

And so they saw all that development,

and they saw, you know,

us make things that aren't going to the product.

But I think, because again,

I said we were careful about cultivating a community of people.

It was all interesting to them. And they all see that

really at heart we're just trying to entertain cats,

and that's what they care about and that's what we care about.

Right.

So, we've been honest with them.

Of course, there are some people that,

you know, get antsy to.

Where's, where's my Mousr?

Where's my Mousr? My cat's waiting.

But overall, they're cheering us on.

And especially now, everyone's getting really juiced because we're making the big steps.

We've started manufacturing, we're

putting down the money for the tools, and all this kind of stuff so.

Some of your customers aren't going to be kittens anymore, I guess.

They're not, they're definitely not going to be kittens but

hopefully this thing is good enough to entertain cats of all ages.

Okay, so I want to ask you just really a couple more questions.

The first one is if you were doing it over,

and maybe as a corollary question,

but if you were doing this over now,

what would you do differently in your crowdfunding Kickstarter campaign?

And have you ever thought about doing another one?

Yeah. Good questions. There's been,

you know, Kickstarter has been hard because of this,

there's a management you have to do with your backers and

the communication and there's a balance

between being fully honest and transparent and also giving

them confidence that you're doing the right things, right?

And a lot of times that can feel like a distraction

to what you should be doing which is building the product.

Okay.

Now, I think that's just the name of the game.

If we were going back doing it over from scratch,

I don't think we would have been able to build this company the way

we did or at all without doing it when we did it.

Okay.

But I think a lot of that was because of how complex the product is.

So, maybe what I would've have done is not build such a complex product as a V1.

You know, I think if we had not come right out of

school and we had maybe had some savings that we could

have funded ourselves on for a while or,

you know, whatever, friends and family around it first, just doing it like that,

the ideal time for us to launch this thing is right now.

Because it didn't look like this at Kickstarter.

Right.

If you go back and look at, nothing like this.

So, now we have a very solid understanding of what it looks like,

exactly what it's going to do,

exactly the price point,

exactly the delivery and this is

the stage where we could do more of the pre-order type campaign.

Okay.

So, I think if we do it again,

it will be more that style.

Okay. And so, last question,

you know, where are you going now?

You're getting ready to ship Mousr.

Um, you know, we're all very excited about Mousr as

a product and even as a business on its own.

But you've got other ideas for the technology platform you're developing.

Yeah. So, I mentioned the NSF funding.

That came in phase one and we're now applying to a phase two and that's all

about building technology on

this platform to do more sophisticated and interesting things.

Right.

So, navigating unknown, unstructured environments in an intelligent way, building maps,

doing monitoring so you could do security,

eldercare, you know, public safety,

those kind of applications.

So, I think we would add a camera and more intelligence to a platform like this.

There's a lot of ways it could go and we're really excited about that.

So, in the short term,

we're focused on making Mousr a success but we're also pushing this technology forward.

Well, that sounds great. Thanks very much.

Yeah. Thanks.

Interview with Dave Cohen, Petronics

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