Robotics Founder. San Francisco.
Marrying robots with OTIS elevators.
Familiar Trap. Pattern Repeats.
Approach summarized!
01) One Robot Per Floor (Avoid Elevators)
Do whatever it takes to avoid elevator sagas. This will drag your deal like no other feature in your stack. It’s a startup project by itself. There are at least a dozen elevator vendors in the U.S.: KONE, OTIS, Schindler, Thyssenkrupp, Mitsubishi Electric, Fujitec America, Hyundai, AVT Beckett, Kleemann, and American Elevator Group. If you keep building custom solutions for each of these, you will erode your own runway. Defend elevator requests with “Not yet.” Low burn!
02) Negotiate — 50 Paid Sites
If your financial runway depends on this one deal that demands elevator integration, at least negotiate 50 paid sites. Four dozen deployments. Secure your runway. Then build a solution. Be brutally honest about the R&D burn rate associated with this project! We spent years on this and ran out of runway. You don’t have to repeat the same mistake.
03) Low-Burn MVP — Acrylic Pipes + Camera + Motor
If you need a solution to demonstrate to your client before they can sign a deal, get acrylic pipes from Home Depot. Build an L-shaped arm. Put cameras and force-measurement sensors at the tip. Motors on the other end. Have a robot operator teleop the robot every time it enters the elevator area and press the button remotely. That’s your elevator solution for elevator zones. That’s what we did to secure enterprise deals, and we were transparent with the client from day 01.
04) High Burn — Robot Arm
Run away from the elevator-robot arm combo unless you can dedicate at least $1M to this project, i.e., 10 months and 10 engineers at $100K + stock. That’s the bare minimum it will take to get a fully automated solution to work with ONE vendor. Be brutally honest here, or else don’t take this project. You are putting your client and your team at risk.
05) Pivot — Alternative Use Cases
Say “Not yet” to elevators. Propose alternative use cases that don’t require elevator integration, i.e., multi-floor navigation. Think environmental maps and air-quality monitoring for enterprises and senior care facilities. Think nuclear isotopic radiation mapping for pharma companies. Think gas leaks for chemical plants. Think air quality scans for cheese production plants. The world is your gym when it comes to alternative use cases. Clients are willing to pay for each of these!
More of these are covered in the book.
👉Decoding Robots: https://lnkd.in/gUyxkWhc
#Robot #Robotics Boring Sage