Developing new hardware products requires a healthy dose of humility. There are always risks along the journey from design to manufacturing. Knowing this, we have built a team of experienced developers and designers who understand the complexity of manufacturing. To further mitigate risk, we consciously partnered with proven - and scalable - manufacturers in order to make sure our goals are feasible, manufacturable, and deliverable.
It was important to us not to approach the Kickstarter community with a half baked idea. So we waited, iterated, and validated all components of the product - all while in stealth mode over the past 3 years - to make sure that when the time was right, we would be able to deliver.
Because our leadership team has an engineering background, there is a deliberately scientific process to our development. Each design phase includes several rounds of validation with our partner manufacturers - always with eyes wide open to issues. For example, during our usability study with our beta community comprised of 20 U.S. households, we had an internal team solely dedicated to addressing any bugs or glitches in the prototypes.
One example of an external risk on the horizon: We've been working with the Alexa voice services team for a year and a half, but we still need to get final certification for our Alexa built-in technology. As a registered Alexa developer, we are confident we will, but it is not yet finalized.
We still have many challenges ahead of us. When we encounter them, we promise to enlist our tenacity, grit, and start-up mindset to overcome them - all while maintaining a level of transparency that we know the Kickstarter community deserves.
Learn about accountability on Kickstarter