Underdressed at CES 2013 | Hacker News Reader

Underdressed at CES 2013

blog.doublerobotics.com

93 pointsjayliew32 comments

As an additional data point for startups: despite a few people ridiculing CES, it worked out great for us.

Accounting for flight, employee salary, hotel, food, etc. and the booth space (about $4,000 for that tiny booth), we're already ROI positive. Everything that continues to pour in after that is just pure profit (being scrappy helps!) We're glad we did it.

If you're "making something people want" and you do that 1 thing really really well, don't fret over the cosmetic details that other companies with deeper pockets can afford pay for. At least that was true for us at CES, North America's largest consumer electronics show.

On a final note, we'll reward you with a surprise gift (guess what it is!) if you give up your embedded firmware engineer friend to join us. We focus more on merit; the lack of paper qualification is not a problem :) jay@doublerobotics .com

Cool looking product.

Having done shows in the past, I know how much energy they can suck out of everyone, and cost. Good that it was such a success for you.

It was definitely exhausting, but also exhilarating :) Thanks!

I came here to ask "How much was it?" and here's the answer.. thanks! :) Conferences like CES seem to do very well for a reason and I suspect that's because they work, as you've found. If they can get away with charging $4000 for even such a small space, a lot of companies there must be getting a ton of value out of it :-)

Hi Peter, yes - it does work!

But just to elaborate further, I don't want to make it sound like if you cough out $4,000 and with just a bare-bones booth, you'll get the kind of attention we did at CES. I do think this $4,000 booth at CES is a good way to amplify existing "success" (loosely defined on purpose). There are definitely knock-off and undifferentiated products that didn't see as much success as we did.

Imho, it's a coin-toss if you don't already have some evidence to suggest that there is some "success" to amplify. CES wasn't a causation of success. But the right product compensated for a cheap bare booth.

==Thought blog home was the homepage, some of this still stands, fix blog template! Actually I've seen the product before, but didn't realise it from the blog!!==

IMO "Wheels for your iPad" sounds like a crappy toy (along the lines of the iArm).

Whilst the product may be a crappy toy (couldn't find a good image/video¹ on the website homepage) it seems like it's a robot, so perhaps "Make your iPad in to a robot?" with a subordinate line of "Double, your personal presence bot"???

Not slick yet but I think you need to work on some sort of change there.

I'm trying not to go off on one but the site looks super-bland too ...

[Perhaps if you know an IP lawyer that likes the lime-light you should challenge for the iRobot trademark on lack of distinctiveness to generate some press.]

- -

¹ I take it back, that's not a terrible image, it's not good by any stretch. Why not have a 800px cut-out right up the side of the homepage.

Perhaps if you know an IP lawyer that likes the lime-light you should challenge for the iRobot trademark on lack of distinctiveness to generate some press.

That is a terrible, terrible idea. Don't do that.

Tongue was firmly in cheek (ie it was jokey). You'd get some press though ...

You should link to your website in your blog's header.

[edit] Oh I see now that there is in fact a link that says "Go back to main site"... well what I meant is that the logo should link back to main site.

For those that are keyboard challenged?

No, for those who are using an iPad which is on wheels. It might roll away before you can finish typing the URL ;)

Yes, well, an iPad on wheels is an idiotic idea in the first place. I never get why people seem to think that it's so difficult to copy a URL. Entitled generation of hipsters who can't deal with a missing a tag. :)

What do you care about more: proving a point about how lazy readers are, or making it more likely that people will read your things?

Was that just added? There is a link at the top.

I agree. If click on an image that says "Double Robotics," I expect to go to the main site for Double Robotics, not its blog. The "Back to main site" link doesn't make sense to someone who arrived at the blog - going back to anything does not mean anything to me, because I started here. Many company blogs seem to have this behavior.

Thanks to you and cocoflunchy for the feedback; seems like a valid UX point to me. I'm still learning my way around this blogging platform software

In this case, I think the important question is, "What if a reader comes to our blog having never heard of us and our product(s) before?" This use case is, I think, more common that some assume, particularly when interesting blog posts get posted on forums like HN.

One area you may want to consider marketing this to: Funeral homes. A lot of times someone can't make it to a distant funeral either due to financial or health reasons. Imagine if the funeral home could rent access to these, as long as it wouldn't seem undignified. (I'm not too good of a judge of this).

Wedding receptions would be another possible market. Or, in general, see if you can focus on the rental market (i.e., an event thrower could rent a dozen for remote guests).

"Imagine if the funeral home could rent access to these, as long as it wouldn't seem undignified. (I'm not too good of a judge of this)."

No... it'd be fine, just hang a suit on it. If you rotate fast enough you could simulate hugging or patting people's back while they're hysterically crying. They won't even know the difference, and it will look totally normal and dignified...

During my grandfather's funeral, I was literally holding up an iPad (connected to Skype) throughout the proceedings, because some of my cousins couldn't make it to the funeral. It wasn't 'dignified' by a long shot, but it's the thought that counts, right?

This is actually a pretty good idea.

"David and I were at the booth for the first 2 days, then he had to cut his trip short and return to our office to help with our production process."

Why couldn't he just us a Double?

Probably can't afford them, not on a startup budget :)

The wifi and cell networks at CES are terrible. We ended up using Bluetooth for the demo.

help with production process also require arms. Not yet available ;)

Very inspirational.

It's a terrible feeling when you unpack a crappy little booth with those rented chairs and see all the really awesome booths of "real companies".

It's a feat of strength, no doubt.

Best of luck to you guys.

thanks Andrew! The upside is when we were getting ready to leave, all we had to do was roll up that 1 banner, and that was it. All the other fancy booths had to begin the long process of disassembling their schtuff.

Wow, I never would have thought of CES as a good place for a startup, but it looks like it worked great for you.

It sure did. Some people have a misconception that it's old-school (real-life face-to-face events?) and don't work. Definitely not true, so I'm glad we're able to share at least 1 data point as a counter-argument.

Naturally, the next progression is to get this system working for an Occulus Rift device. Because I would feel too constricted not being able to responsively look around as I do in real life. Fun to think about!

How do you stop it from being knocked over?

It self-balances, and it's made to recover from nudges, people bumping into it accidentally, the kind of thing you'd imagine in a normal real-life scenario.

The Segway... is back! Cool product!

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