How Does This Scale?

Our business model was about selling hardware. By reducing the complexity of creating hardware, our bet was that more people would create and buy. We would then wrap these creation tools in a marketplace, so creators could also sell their inventions to the masses.

In the earlier versions of our pitch deck, we focused a lot on empowerment. We were targeting software developers, as we believed we could offer them an entirely new outlet for their creative efforts. But this narrative wasn’t big enough. Investors want to hear a story about changing the world. Large ambitions, with a meaningful impact on the market, resulting in massive sales. We just didn’t tell a big enough story.

I also don’t think I properly emphasized the marketplace potential, as most investors got hung up on the number of potential creators. We looked at ourself as a diverse marketplace of mass-customized goods, but that potential (or at least as we articulate it) didn’t seem to resonate with investors.

We also heard concerns about the viability of scaling a bespoke hardware business. The manufacturing world is geared for mass-production, with profits coming from economies of scale. But we felt we could overcome this with standardized design & manufacturing tools, in distributed factories, using modular electronics. We saw huge potential in the long tail of things. But this was obviously unproven and we clearly didn’t do enough to reduce investor fear in our ability to pull this off.

We Were Too Early

1,600 people signup for our email newsletters, and each of them received a personal message from me. I gave them my email address and phone number, and invited them to chat if they had any questions. I heard from 100's of them, and many shared “the thing” they wanted to create. The problem is many of them simply weren’t feasible with the current technology. I suspect we could have eventually delivered on most of them, but not in the foreseeable future.

Furthermore, when I looked at the various prototypes we’d created, the quality simply wasn’t there yet. We were heavily using laser cutting as our means of fabrication, and while it allowed us to produce something close to our vision, it wasn’t good enough. What we really needed was a hybrid of laser cutting and 3D printing, but unfortuately 3D printing is still far too slow and expensive to be realistic. I have no doubts that 3D printing will play a huge role in the future of manufacturing, but it simply isn’t there yet.

So That’s It.

It’s been a fun ride to say the least. We’re still deciding what to do with everything we produced this past year. There’s a high likelihood Wattage will be reborn in another form sometime in the future, but we just don’t know yet.

I wanted to say thank you to those that supported us during this adventure:

Hot Pop for helping us design & create all of our physical prototypes

Cossette Lab for the office space, staff, and bagel Monday’s

Chris Tanner for the design help

Sam Dallyn for designing our logo

Jonas Naimark for creating this awesome animation

Heist for the design help

MakeWorks & Teehan+Lax for the office space in the early days

But the most thanks goes to our supporting wives, who consistently provided encouragement through all of the up’s & down’s. I wish this had turned out better than it did, but at least we’ll have actual paying jobs again! <cough>inquires welcome</cough>

So that’s it for now. If you’d like to reach us, you can find us on Twitter:

Andy MacDonald (@andymacd)

Brett Hagman (@BrettHagman)

Peter Nitsch (@peter_nitsch)

Jeremy Bell (@jeremybell)