Author: hsy505/Product Watcher
The cool robot Ai.Frame, which has just finished crowdfunding, has received 400% more than expected $200,000 support, what is the story of these two 89-year-old producers?
In 2011, when Hu Jiaqi signed up for the 11th Challenge Cup, he did not expect that his life would change.
At that time, Hu Jiaqi was a junior majoring in measurement, control, navigation and systems at Harbin Engineering University, and he and several small partners participated in the competition with the concept of a multi-rotor aircraft, although due to the idea of being too academic, too far from commercialization, and finally only won the third prize, but he gained a like-minded friend Sun Zebo, this peer of electrical engineering automation and Hu Jiaqi hit it off, and the development of open source robots became a common interest of the two.
After the Challenge Cup, Hu Jiaqi and Sun Zebo, who are still in their junior year, launched the development of the Ai.Frame Rex edition, a robot made of basswood laminates and acrylic materials, composed of 98 parts, and can be customized in 5 colors.
After graduation, in order to complete ai.frame, they chose to stay in the school's open laboratory for a year, and finally made an upgraded version of Ai.Frame Apollo, the torso contains 109 parts, the shell 12 parts, can be formulated into 24 color combinations. There are 3 modes of heavy equipment, mobile and long-range combat.
On June 29 this year, the Ai.Frame open source robot project quietly landed on Kickstarter. The Ai.Frame robot can complete more than 300 action postures such as running, crouching, shooting, and fighting. Players can control the robot's movements through gamepads, Android phones, PC control panels, and even use mechanical exoskeletons like those in Edge of Tomorrow, which simultaneously map arm movements to Ai.Frame through two robotic arms.
Within a month, Ai.Frame received $200,000 more support than expected by 400% and was ready to move from Shanghai to Shenzhen to run a commercial company.
Every year, there are all kinds of robot competitions and robot enthusiasts on the campus of the university, but most people's relationship with robots gradually ends after receiving awards or college graduation. Hu Jiaqi and Sun Zebo did not leave themselves regrets, with the help of crowdfunding, they continued to realize their robot dream that originated in the laboratory in a commercial way, how did the two geeks in 89 complete this leap?
<h2>A dream that connects the skies</h2>
We are the link in the sky of the future, delivering you whatever you want, no matter where you are in the world.
In 2013, Obama signed a bill requiring the FAA to commercialize civil aircraft in 2015, which Sun Zebo and Hu believe is a prelude to a booming civilian drone industry. They predict that the current speed of development of drones is similar to the speed of computer development in the past, and will reach the scale of trillions of dollars.
The Challenge Cup competition allowed them to gain experience in multi-rotor aircraft and immediately launched the 3-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle flying Linkall program.
The flying machine in the movie Terminator 3 became the vehicle for implanting their ideas, and they began to use their spare time to produce the first "verification machine" in the school's engineering training center in the fall of 2011, spending about a year to complete the overall production.
Linkall helped Sun Zebo and Hu Jiaqi promote their ideas, but they were not suitable for practical application. Sun Zebo and Hu Jiaqi positioned the development direction of the unmanned aerial vehicle project as designing a complete system. If you want to truly realize the delivery of goods, it is not enough to rely on an unmanned aerial vehicle, but what you really have to solve is how to plan the route, how to load and unload the goods, how to build the platform and other more ambitious problems.
<h2>Fantasy Lab</h2>
Harbin Engineering University provides an open laboratory for students who love research and innovation projects on campus, students can come and go at will, in order to cultivate students' hands-on ability, in order to cultivate students' hands-on ability, engineering training courses were opened in the first and second years of college, and the laboratory provided milling machines and CNC lathes and other processing equipment as complete as possible.
Unlike other graduates who are busy with their jobs, Sun Zebo and Hu Jiaqi did not choose to find a job immediately, but continued to stay in the school and work on their own unfinished projects. Such specialized knowledge as mechanical equipment and programming had to be done by self-study.
Fortunately, even if Sun Zebo's home in Guangdong has fewer restrictions, and the parents of Hu Jiaqi, a local, support their exploration of their own interests, the only worry is that it is best to solve the problem of survival by themselves.
The school's generous environment gives them the opportunity to contact more competitions again, and even provide guidance for their younger siblings, and when they travel with their graduate students, their lives are relatively relaxed, and they have not yet felt the pressure of life.
As the Ai.Frame project got better, they found that although the school provided equipment support, it had felt the limitations of school entrepreneurship: school teachers were more inclined to academic research, farther away from business practices, and the results obtained from the use of school resources were often shared with the school, and the idea of leaving the school finally paid attention to the mind.
<h2>Kickstarter crowdfunding strategy</h2>
In the hot summer of Shanghai, because of the green and colorful short skirts that make people forget the heat of the day, at this time, the two young people in Shanghai's Fengxian district have no time to estimate everything around them, and have just applied for a free office after passing the defense, but they hurriedly packed up the 3D printer and the miniature robot model and prepared to go south to the hotter Shenzhen.
Although Shanghai can get government support, but after all, hardware entrepreneurship requires a lot of parts resources, if in Shanghai, many components have to be purchased through Taobao, resulting in production speed 3 to 4 days later than I expected.
IDG Zheng Lan was obsessed with Ai.Frame and personally funded Ai.Frame's angel investment, accelerating the process of Sun Zebo and Hu Jiaqi going south.
Kickstarter isn't their first crowdfunding, after making a splash at makefaire's Maker Festival, ai.Frame Bot did a small crowdfunding on the Pozible platform in early 2014. In March last year, when Pozible entered China, Pozible's public relations deliberately found Sun Zebo and Hu Jiaqi as the first batch of stationed products, which can provide priority promotion resources, but unfortunately the last crowdfunding failed to succeed.
Sun Zebo (left) and Hu Jiaqi (right)
Sun Zebo and Hu Jiaqi concluded that Pozible was first used as a strange crowdfunding platform, user awareness is not enough, in addition, its online projects are partial to literature and art, Ai.Frame is unusual.
With the lessons of the past, before going online kickstarter, they deliberately found the online Kickstarter Shenzhen team UArm and Air! Air！ Listen to the opinions. Finally, a set of guidelines for Kickstarter promotional videos is summarized:
Using European and American actors: Since the audience of crowdfunding is mainly foreigners, European and American users are not tolerant of foreigners enough, try to avoid Asian faces, Sun Zebo and Hu Jiaqi appear in the entire video screen for less than 5 seconds.
Behave professionally: Ensure pronunciation standards and avoid inadvertent small movements. Reduce the special effects in the post, so that users feel that the product is real, not a rendering effect.
Founders should have their own style: For Europeans and Americans who advocate personal heroism, if the founder is funny and humorous and has his own story, it is easy to stand out in similar products.
Although the second crowdfunding was successful, Sun Zebo told Geek Park after the crowdfunding was over, and the misjudgment of the launch time made the result fail to meet their expectations. Because the jet lag was not taken into account, the project happened to be in the United States on weekend daytime, when most Americans would participate in outdoor activities, resulting in insufficient attention to the project.
Within 24 hours of going online, the project reached the target through natural growth, but the follow-up could not be maintained, they analyzed, the same batch of launched some unpopular projects of Kickstarter, resulting in Ai.Frame being ranked on the 3rd to 4th page of the display page, thus falling into the "Kickstarter dead loop" that is difficult to be concerned: there is no attention, so it is impossible to get financial support, there is no financial support, and the popularity of the project cannot be pushed back to the home page.
The 356 days from the university lab to Kickstarter are over, the aura of college students' entrepreneurship is gradually fading, and after finding an office in Shenzhen, the processing of follow-up orders, the development of future products and other issues will come to them. A new chapter begins.
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Original address: http://www.geekpark.net/read/view/209460
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