The crowdfunding is a series of reports made to the "star products" of those who have successful crowdfunding, telling the story after the group's crowdfunding. What are these new hardware legions do now? Whether they succeed in transforming their polar products into mass consumer goods? Whether they have successfully developed from a team of hobbies into a benign company? We will restart a complete hardware entrepreneurial course through some columns.
Microduino is a mini version of Arduino development board, which is much smaller than Arduino. At the same time, the core and USB chip separation protocols are taken. When developers develop products, only core panels can be used to reduce development costs. Each board of Microduino has a lot of slots and pins. Users only need to put them up, and make up a hardware solution, build a development platform that meets the requirements from features and volume.
Teacher Zhang, the prototype designer of Microduino, started to contact Arduino in July 2012, deeply uses a lot of inconveniences in the use of Arduino, and sprouts the idea of designing a new open source hardware. In a very accidental situation, Wang Zhenshan saw MiCroduino prototypes designed by Teacher in the forum. I think this is a very fun product, and two people who have begun to do this project. In May 2013, they developed Microduino. In September, Microduino was on Kickstarter, and finally raised $ 135,000.
From crowdfunding now, more than half a year has passed, Microduino enriches the product line, and now the product is already compatible with more than 40 expansion modules. Microduino's main frequency is 16m, which belongs to the lower-end development board. The team intends to develop high-end development boards themselves. In the second half of the year, they will push the market and improve the entire product line.
Unlike other teams, Microduino members are basically part-time before, until they have officially fully established. It is also because of this reason, Microduino team has been relatively low, and domestic reports have rarely mentioned the name of Wang Zhenshan, which has been tied with Tiki. It's also 16 people who have been constantly growing in this half year.
Recently, Microduino and International Center Centre For Birds of Prey collaborate, a very interesting public welfare project "smart bird egg" is used to help protect vultures. This year is the 25th anniversary of the GameBoy's handheld game console, and Microduino team has also developed a handheld remote control Microduino Joypad, pay tribute to classic. The next month will also go to Kickstarter to launch crowd.
Kickstarter lets us find the direction
Wang Zhenshan said that Kickstarter is first a show, just like a stage of fast male super female election, is a very good display platform. As long as enough products, you can quickly play your own brand; Kickstarter is still a tribute, you can Fast verification market, see if there is anyone like this product, determine the direction of product development, to avoid closing the door. Of course, Kickstarter is still a good financing platform, who raised 130,000 US dollars, and finally got about 700,000 yuan, which was equivalent to getting a fund for financing and angel financing, and there was no need to send shares. It is also the success of Kickstarter, so that the team can do this, and can do very well.
We have not planned to make money in China.
MICRODUINO, overseas support users, US, British supporters account for 60%, including Israel, Lebanon, and Africa. Some people have purchased Microduino. The team's people joked, now it is estimated that no one in the Antarctica has bought their products. The reason why foreign users is more, on the one hand, because foreign open source communities have been mature, on the one hand, the knowledge of foreign knowledge products is relatively strong. Arduino officially priced $ 30, while Microduino's price is almost 50% -80% of Arduino.
Domestic intellectual property awareness is weak, there are many cottage products, and the minimum of Pirated Arduino is only 30 yuan, so Microduino is not strong in domestic prices. In China, Microduino maintains developers through QQ groups, communities, forums, they will organize activities from time to time, providing users with free development boards to help users develop. Wang Zhenshan said that they did not plan to make money in China, or mainly in cultivating markets and users.
Be
No community, no source
It is not an easy task from a pole team to a normal operation. Many teams went to crowdfunding just to take a piece of money, Microduino has a long-term plan, and they want to make a career. There is a sentence in the open source hardware field, "no community, no source". For open source hardware, the construction of the community is like the after-sales service of the commodity. In the past six months, Microduino has been solid promoting the construction of the community.
For more than half a year, they did a detailed MICRoduino's Wikipedia. I took a closer look, there were a total of 407 articles, 1028 new files uploaded and 3370 revisions, and all of them were comparison, users can find themselves. What you need. At the same time, they also did 200 articles of Microduino tutorial. 3 full-time employees have been hired, updated Microduino text, pictures, source procedures, videos in various forums.
Previously, Microduino has been doing content construction in other domestic and foreign open source community forums. They will go online this month to go online. In order to avoid making foreign parts, they will also hire specialized people to maintain. Wang Zhanshan said, although the progress is very slow, they are very solid.
Why is open source hardware to live better?
Recently, I talked to a team of open source projects and development boards, although they don't have many mass consumer products "glamia", but in fact, these companies' operations and profitability are actually better.
Wang Zhenshan said that this type of project is relatively high for developers. It will not be mutually cottage, and participants will pay attention to maintaining the benign development of this market. This market seems to be imagined that the space is not as good as the mass consumer goods, so the market competition is still not too intense.
In addition, the life cycle of such items is also relatively long. From 2005, Arduino is now nearly 10 years, and vitality is still tenacious. Ordinary mass consumer goods are basically a life cycle of 6-18 months.
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