Zach Supalla

So we basically ripped the guts out of our product and refactored it to make it

an easy development path for engineers building IoT products.

And then we relaunched it with a second Kickstarter campaign in 2013.

And that was for a development kit, like a Wi-Fi development kit, Arduino-y kind of thing called the Spark Core.

And that launched in May 2013 with a $10,000 goal on Kickstarter, and we raised almost $600,000.

So we really realized that we had scratched an itch, and that put us on the path that we're on today.

Yeah.

So my dad is deaf and my mom has always complained that she was hearing.

She's always complained that she can't get a hold of my dad because he has a cell phone that she texts him on and he doesn't keep it in his pocket.

So

you know, he can't hear the ring, so there's no way for her to communicate with him.

And so I was trying to make his lights flash when my mom sent him a text message.

Now, texting is obviously a wireless communication, so it's not like I have something I can jack into, so I needed to bring the lights online wirelessly.

And that's what inspired that first product.

So that's a really good question.

And that's something that we thought was really important to figure out when we did our Kickstarter campaign in the first place.

I look at a Kickstarter campaign or really any crowdfunding campaign as an experiment.

And so what we wanted to do is make sure that we really nailed the marketing of our first launch so that if it was unsuccessful, we couldn't blame it on poor marketing.

we did that we actually did a great job with marketing we got tons of coverage we were in wired we were in fast company and despite that we didn't hit our goal so we came out really confident that it was actually pure product market fit that this just wasn't a good product we surveyed our customers and we realized the big problem was that it was too expensive i think it was 60 bucks per light bulb that you'd connect and 60 bucks is a reasonable amount to pay

for a connected experience, but not when you actually need to connect a whole bunch of light bulbs.