Time to read: 9 min
每个初创公司都知道加速器，但是并不是每个初创公司都知道如何在加速器体验的线条之间阅读，以改变这些组织将这些组织提供为可行的新品牌的专业知识，资源和联系的黄金掘金。
In this week’s Spotlight we share the story ofPeeple, the smart caller ID for your front door, and the captivating journey its creators took from an egg-shaped idea to a product on the shelves of a top European retailer.
One Door Opens Another
“When one of my boys was 3, he just walked out the door,” recounts Chris Chuter, co-founder of Building 10, the company behind Peeple. “He only wanted to go to his grandma’s, but of course didn’t bother to tell me. That scared an idea into my head: to put something on my front door that would let me know when it’s opened—so I can keep track of my kids. And then there was this weekend hackathon thing here in Austin.”
Chris convinced his wife to give him 24 hours for the hackathon, the first prize of which was to go to Silicon Valley to pitch investors. In those 24 hours, he and David Genet, a friend he’d worked with “in the soul-crushing game industry,” put together their very first prototype of that “something”—a gadget they called “Peep” that had a camera, speaker, doorbell, reed switch, and a piezo sensor for knock detection. It was all held together with duct tape. They mounted it on one of Chris’ kids’ toys and on the software end, they wrote a simple one-screen app that displayed an image of the person on the screen while playing Paul McCartney’s “Let ‘Em In.”
Over and over again.
“We quickly learned that that’s really annoying,” laughs Chris.
Annoying or not, they won the hackathon. They began preparing their pitch to Silicon Valley investors—only to have the grand prize pulled out from under their feet a few months later when the organization experienced issues with their CEO.
But then Austin’s extremely popular tech/culture event South by Southwest (SXSW) rolled around. “SXSW was great,” says Chris. “They gave us a free table where we showed Peep to real people.” That started what would turn into a string of critical insights as the founders went through three accelerators and multiple prototypes.
At SXSW, says Chris, “Our biggest ah-ha moment was watching people’s faces when we compared our product to the idea of having a caller ID for your phone. They instantly got it. They’d say ‘oh, you mean like a caller ID for your door!’ People’s eyes physically change—they get bigger when they get it. That got us excited again. That’s a great feeling as an inventor… when you solve a problem real people can use.”
That, in a peephole-size nutshell, was the first, and in hindsight most critical, breakthrough for what would soon become the Peeple we know today: solving a problem real people can use.
But first the guys had to head west. North by northwest.
The Critical First Insights
克里斯分享道：“在我们参与其中的三个加速器中，高速公路1是第一个，也是迄今为止最具影响力的人。如果您是美国的硬件公司，那么这是唯一值得的加速器。”
In the four months Chris, David, and Building 10’s third co-founder, CTO Craig Sullender, spent at Highway1, they took their invention from just an idea to a real product.
You simply cannot envision all the variables you’ll come up against when turning an idea into a product
The hyper focus on hardware was what it made it so incredible,” explains Chris. “We iterated through a dozen prototypes and put it in people’s houses all over San Francisco. The field testing was critical, because we got real feedback. And that was great because I’m an engineer who likes people.”
Here is the string of insights from the Highway1 field test:
People are much more interested in screening visitors when they’re home and much less interested in knowing when they miss a delivery (which impacts functionality).Women seem to be much more interested in the product than men, whether they live alone or run a household (which then impacts the design).People are incredibly attached to their front doors. “It’s one of the things people usually love about their homes,” says Chris, “so we needed to respect that and make something that looks good and works well for their door. No one’s going to buy a new door for our product.”
门铃不像您想象的那样直观。克里斯认为大多数人会使用门铃，但是正如他所说，“人们仍然一直在敲门。敲门更自然，更自动。”这导致团队决定将传感器集中在敲门上，并使门铃传感功能成为附件功能。
Strategy and Long-term Thinking
Physical things take up space. They need real materials to be created, manufactured, and stored. They require shipping, not software “shipping” but real shipping as in actual, physical, wheels-on-the-ground or wings-in-the-air transportation from one place to another.
因此，克里斯说：“当您做一个身体上的事情时，您必须做出一些非常战略的长期决策。您必须决定是否要进行有限的跑步，并从车库或办公室打包，还是要制造100,000辆或更多单位。如果您走得很大，请不要期望履行车库的订单。你不能。”
It was Highway1 that taught the Peeple founders how to team up with bigger manufacturers.
“There are two ways you can make a product,” he says, “besides failure. You can get a bunch of backers funding you and then try to figure out how to make the thing you promised everyone in your garage. Or, you can learn how to partner with the large manufacturers to fulfill all the orders coming in, and turn the dial according to how demand fluctuates. But you have to be prepared to do it in your garage at first, because you will have issues and you will need to iterate.”
It’s Who You Work With
加速器不仅与3D打印机的空间和资源以及访问有关。他说：“加速器将您与合适的人联系起来，并为您节省时间来弄清楚谁用于签约或制造。”“您根本无法设想将想法变成产品时会遇到的所有变量。确实没有什么比真诚，有价值的建议更好的了。”
And for Chris, David, and Craig, that alone was worth its weight in startup gold.
Don’t send a survey with a hundred questions. Learn how to talk to customers and figure out what they want.
We had amazing mentors,” says Chris. “One said, ‘write down all your fears. All the things that are bad about this product.’ So we wrote down things like,our product is useless, no one’s going to want it. The mentor then said, ‘Okay. Get this into the hands of as many people as you can, NOW.’”
“The second mentor guided us through figuring out whether our product is improving people’s lives. They taught us that if you’re in someone’s house with your prototype, asking them for their time and input, that’s a privilege to be respected. Don’t send a survey with a hundred questions. Learn how to talk to customers and figure out what they want.”
The guys were also introduced to several industrial designers. The field tests told them loud and clear they needed to pay attention not just to the functionality and the very raison d’être of Peeple, but also its design, because they were creating an item that would become a very visible part of people’s everyday lives (think about how many times a day you walk through your front door).
“Because this is something people would see every day, we really had to spend the time and the money to make sure it’s aesthetically pleasing,” says Chris.
当一位设计师带着一系列设计组合回来时，他们发现了这一设计。具有半透明元素的漂亮圆形对象。“我们说，‘繁荣。’”
通过设计迭代
Isn’t it fascinating what the things we grow to know and love look like in their early phases?
In the case of “the peeple,” as Chris affectionately calls his invention, it wasn’t always round. It started out, like the proverbial chicken, as an egg.
It was early 2014, and Chris and David had hatched their first egg. “We used to be in games so we played off the “peep” concept,” grins Chris. “You know, chickens… eggs…”
这是一个3D打印的鸡蛋，可以容纳电子产品。鸡蛋＃2至4添加了外部传感器（芦苇开关/门开口，压电迷你蛋器传感器，门铃纽扣）和带有吸杯的机翼粘在窗户上以检测运动。鸡蛋＃5知道更好：它脱落了翅膀和外部传感器，因此可能是独立的鸡蛋。
材料,他们开始与通常的3 d-printed materials, although Chris really wanted wood. “I had a drill that could only cut circles, so that’s how the circular shape happened,” he says. For a while they worked with real hardwoods like ambrosia maple.
“The problem with wood,” explains Chris, “is that its natural grain and texture can really clash with front doors, which tend to be a single solid color.” So the wood had to go, in the interest of user appeal—and production scalability. ABS plastic won the day.
They even made a few square prototypes, cast from plastic and sporting a metal bracket to attach to the door, for the field tests. Several square prototypes later, once the electronics and LED were figured out, they went back to the circle and once again tested wood and plastic.
By the time Highway1 Demo Day rolled around, the Building 10 team had the acrylic Peeple that we’re now familiar with.
如何与顶级零售商合作
在Highway1的头部旋转经历之后，克里斯非正式地称其为“伦敦加速器”。由著名的英国零售商约翰·刘易斯（John Lewis）资助JLABis one part accelerator and one part competition.
As Chris explains, from a pool of several hundred applicants, they select just five—so getting accepted is a prize in itself. One out of the five teams gets to take home the very cozy sum of £100k (which Building 10 promptly did). But despite the tension of competition hanging in the air, “it was really friendly,” says Chris. When we ask why he thinks his team won, he says simply, “I think the fact that we knew our shit was what made us win. It all came together on pitch day. I’d gone to China to meet manufacturers and get quotes while my guys were building new hardware back in Austin. All the parts worked just right together, so by the time we demoed to the JLAB panel it was pretty much a finished product they could envision on their store shelves.”
Because this is something people would see every day, we really had to spend the time and the money to make sure it’s aesthetically pleasing
显然约翰路易斯高管看到远景响亮nd clear. Stuart Marks, the chairman of L Marks, which partners with John Lewis in JLAB, said in a statement that “Peeple impressed us with the potential of their product and relevance to John Lewis customers.”Accelerate Local, Scale Global
当然增加acc资金和零售交易elerator experience, but the real value, says Chris, lay in learning “what it takes to develop a product that retailers want.” But not just any retailer; a European [read: international reach] retailer.
“We really got to see what John Lewis valued and how they saw their company, and that affected the products they wanted in their stores. And because they’re in Europe, it gave us a great insight into whether our product was something we could take global and what it would take to do so.”
一旦您身后有一家大型海外零售商，以及与大型制造商进行谈判的专业知识，更不用说在您的腰带下进行了几轮资金，您就可以开始认真对待最初的梦想。
At this writing, Building 10 is a few weeks into its third accelerator program, the Austin, Texas-basedCapital Factory. Says Chris, “We’re using it primarily to establish ourselves in our home town. So far we’ve had great success in Silicon Valley and London, but none in Austin. Hopefully, Capital Factory will help change that.”
