Back to the Future Day has come and gone, but here’s one 2015 reality no ’80s sci-fi movie could’ve predicted: a robot that instantly paints your nails.

Two months ago, Preemadonna co-founders Pree Walia and Casey Schulz took the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF to debut their invention: a sleek, mint-colored robot that prints emojis, photos, and custom art selected from your smart phone directly onto your nails.

Before an audience of Silicon Valley investors and competing start-up teams, Schulz printed the TechCrunch logo onto one nail and a photo of her dog Callie on another as Walia narrated on-mic how their device, dubbed the Nailbot, works.

Users select an image through the mobile app. The picture is sent via Bluetooth to the Nailbot’s thermal inkjet printer, which paints the design onto the nail (primed beforehand with a layer of white polish).

When Reddit user Inspirationail shared a link to the TechCrunch presentation with Reddit’s Geek community, we reached out to the co-founders to see if their robot could handle some original art from the Upvoted design team.

CEO Pree Walia, 32, gamely accepted our challenge, filming herself printing Reddit’s alien mascot Snoo onto one of her nails:

(Reddit Laqueristas, are you seeing this?!)

Walia is quick to point out that her robot handles more than just Snoo heads.

It can print detailed photographs directly from your camera roll—which, for the Nailbot’s target demographic of teens and tweens, means pictures of “your besties.”

Walia notes that a single cartridge can last for about 5,000 full-color applications, so even if your best bestie turns into your worst frenemesis, you can erase ’em and replace ’em in seconds. (This could encourage some users to express their passive-aggressiveness by creating a whole nail-friendship hierarchy—elevating best besties to the thumbs and indices and relegating lesser friends to the pinkies—but then that’s not really the robot’s fault, is it?)

Building off of the positive buzz generated by Preemadonna’s success at TechCrunch, the company launched a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo last night to take pre-orders of the device—which will retail for $199 and begin shipping late next year.

We are building this company for other girls. Otherwise, we would’ve given up a long, long time ago. Pree Walia, CEO of Preemadonna

But Walia isn’t simply selling a robot. In order to gain the trust of her target audience (and their parents), she’s selling an idea that may be just as important as the device itself: that a nail-painting robot can inspire its primarily young and female consumers to pursue classes and careers in tech.

It’s a shrewd sales pitch that also serves as an earnest mission statement.

The Political Bug

Unlike most of her Silicon Valley peers, Walia originally didn’t come from a tech background, and despite her company’s focus on nail art, she’s new to the beauty industry as well.

Her first passion was politics—working for a series of Democratic campaigns in rural Arizona, Washington, D.C., and California.

“I worked on a lot of losing campaigns,” she says with a laugh.

As a staffer, Walia handled fundraising, grassroots outreach, and even driving politicians to and from events.

“I think political campaigns are very similar to start-ups,” Walia explains. While start-ups try to sell products, “the product in politics is [an] ideology.”

Walia’s final political job—as an advisor for Steve Westly’s 2006 California gubernatorial run—brought her to Silicon Valley.

“A Turning Point in a Woman’s Life”

“Everyone wants to know what that a-ha moment was,” says Walia. Although she insists the idea for the Nailbot was the result of a long series of iterations, a bit of prying reveals one transformative moment behind the invention.

In the summer of 2012 (“I called it my ‘Summer of Fun’,” she interjects), Walia was nearing her 30th birthday and began to take stock of her life. “It sounds a little cliché, but it’s kind of a turning point in a woman’s life,” she says.

“I think a lot of girls can relate. You’re like, ‘Well, my friends are getting married. I’m not on that track … What do I want in this next decade of my life?’”

On the invitation of a business school friend who was getting married in Spain, Walia traveled to Barcelona. After she landed, she wanted to get a manicure in preparation for the ceremony.

“It took me two days to book an appointment,” she says. “Also, it was really expensive.”

Her frustration with Spain’s salons came at a time when she spotted an early tech trend in the beauty industry. “I started seeing all of these LED dryers hit the market,” she explains. “You use gel nail polish, and you stick your hand into this dryer and it dries your nails.”

After discovering that at-home drying kits retailed from $69 to $250, Walia noticed an obvious opportunity in the beauty device market: “[An LED device] dries your nail—but why couldn’t that device just paint your nail?”

Thus the Nailbot was born. But it was far from built.

“It was an idea,” Walia says. “Did I have a prototype? Nooo!”

Without knowing how to code or construct a functioning robot, she returned to what she knew best: politics—which had taught her how to raise money and build community quickly.

From Political Parties to Nail Parties

Splitting her efforts between recruiting and outreach, Walia assembled a team to bring her idea to fruition, led by Casey Schulz, a mechanical engineer who worked at NASA Ames. Walia describes Schulz as a “hacker MacGyver” who “likes to wear a tiara,” a natural fit with Preemadonna’s focus on high tech with a girly twist.

“I have these wacky ideas,” Walia explains, “and Casey can build them.”

As the new team created a series of prototypes for the Nailbot, Walia realized the need for user testing to improve the device. As a small start-up with a minimal budget, however, Preemadonna couldn’t afford traditional methods.

“I didn’t have money to spend on some fancy focus group and record it behind closed doors,” Walia explains.

Her solution? Nail parties.

Walia asked her former bosses who had daughters if they would host a gathering, leaving the invitation open to the girls’ classmates.

“It was like a slumber party,” she recalls. “And they just invited all of their girlfriends, ages 8 all the way up to 18. Some of the moms came, too.”

Over pizza and pop music (“We had Meghan Trainor singing in the background”), the girls tested prototypes of the Nailbot. They designed art, got robo-manicures, and offered Walia and Schulz unfiltered feedback on their device.

Among the suggestions that made their way into later versions of the device: a color change (from pink to mint), a motorized solution to the device’s finger-tracking (which previously required girls to move their fingers over a touch screen), and advice on how to incorporate social media into the app.

Initially, Walia and Schulz felt indebted to the parents for letting their kids help the company with product testing, so they decided to pay it forward by concluding each nail party with an educational Q&A.

“People let [us] into their homes, so we did an inspirational talk … [about] how I started a company, how I had this idea, how I recruited a team, and how other girls can do it too.”

While Walia focused on entrepreneurship, Schulz demystified the world of engineering.

As their educational sessions evolved, the pair realized that these nail parties could offer a mutually beneficial opportunity for both the company (which needed product testing) and the girls (who could learn from the co-founders’ experience). Soon, they formalized their outreach efforts into an Ambassadors program.

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“We really have something more magical than just ‘Here’s a beauty device,’” Walia explains. “It’s ‘Girls built this. You can learn how to build this.’”

At any given event, she and Schulz may hold a 3D printing workshop or break down how they developed the Nailbot from idea to prototype. “[Girls] can use Arduino to build … [our first] touch-screen printer,” Walia offers as an example, noting her plans to teach digital design through future Ambassadors programs.

30 Going on 13

Over the next 35 days, Preemadonna hopes to raise $150,000 for its crowdfunding campaign.

In the meantime, Walia is maintaining her focus on understanding her core demographic: Generation Z.

“I’m getting one with pre-teen culture,” she jokes.

The CEO wants to understand everything from her audience’s social media habits (“They’re not on Facebook. They’re on Snapchat and Instagram.”) to their favorite celebs, including Selena Gomez and Kendall and Kylie Jenner.

Her attitude is simple: “If that’s who [they] are looking up to, let me understand why.”

The future of Preemadonna may hinge on the reception of the yet-to-be-released first version of the Nailbot, but if it’s successful, Walia plans to extend their technology to nails of all ages.

“Down the road, we will be using a one-time-use applicator to paint your whole nail … like an espresso for nails controlled by your phone,” Walia shares. “That’s for an older demographic. That’s for a millennial girl that wants more of a professional experience.”

But that’s all in the future.

“It’s just like a political campaign,” she expounds. “We’re in the primary season. We’ve still got the general campaign. And then we have to get elected. We can talk about the full Nailbot when [we’re] in office.”