What I learned prototyping with no prototyping experience

It’s going to be ugly… and that’s ok.

I’d like to show you something that makes me quite embarrassed and uneasy, with my teeth tightly clenched and a flutter in my belly.

What is it, you ask?

It’s the very, very first visual representation of Blubel — a bicycle bell that helps you navigate through the city safely and quickly. It’s also my start-up and my proverbial baby.

Two years ago I had the idea for a device that would be driven by a community of cyclists. Think crowdsourced cycling routes suggested by real people biking out on the street. Even though I knew what I wanted, I wasn’t quite sure what it would look like (or how it would work).

But I decided to put it all down on paper anyways, do a little animation, and apply for some funding.

Needless to say we didn’t get that funding.

It was the first of many little fails that one experiences as an entrepreneur, but it was also a start of sorts for our prototyping journey.

From childish drawing to a hacked together V.1

Despite looking like a grade schooler’s drawing, my little animation captured the imagination of Alessio (now Blubel’s CTO) and he started work on the app that would power our bell’s navigation.

Not content to sit back, I decided that despite my lack of any previous experience building a product , I’d make our V1. With no funding, it was really our only choice.

So I got engrossed in Arduino.

I started out with an Inventor’s Kit — plugging in various LEDs and piezo buzzers to see how it might all come together as some sort of navigation interface.

I added more and more components, my family and friends thinking I had gone a little off the rails, until we had a very simple electronic prototype that could prove the initial Blubel concept.

The next step was to find something to house this in.

I could have had it 3D printed or designed by someone — but firstly I didn’t really know how to do that, and secondly, I didn’t want to commit to an aesthetic before being 100% sure about the functionality and features and how it would work with the app and the community.

Momentum is a powerful force, and it can be easy to get swept away with an idea once you start to see it come together. At this point I could have easily gone to a design studio to build Blubel for us. But I’m glad I didn’t.

Instead, we built this:

Yes, that’s a yoghurt pot.

The pot was big enough to store the Arduino. Round to replicate the ring of LEDs. And light enough to attach to the handlebars with a velcro strap.

Crude. But it was just what we needed at this point.

In comparison to the beautiful CAD models you see online, this one looked pretty appalling.

In practice too, it was a world away from the sophisticated testing versions you see.

The yoghurt pot would occasionally pop open, spilling its contents.

The buzzer inside, while effectively warning about upcoming turns, would startle other road users and attract many weird looks.

It wouldn’t sit all that well on the handlebars — spinning around like a top when you made any tight turn. Basically, it wasn’t anything like we had imagined.

But that was the power of it.

The whole process of putting things together, playing around, and testing functions really helped me to understand what it was I was trying to achieve.

If that first animation was the germ of the idea, actually getting my hands dirty was when this product came to life.

The real power of an MVP

And boy did we learn from it!

For a start our testers, while terrified by the contraption, were also super committed to work with us to improve it.

(I think it was partly feeling sorry for me, seeing my desperate-looking navigating pot and realising that this is how I spent my spare time.)

Also, because it looked so imperfect, they didn’t feel bad telling me what could be improved. In fact, it’s crude form meant it wasn’t hard to come up with suggestions of improving it and they felt encouraged to be able to contribute at such an early stage of the process.