SparqEE Blog

The serial entrepreneur in me is screaming “GET IT DONE” constantly, but my hare-brained personality needs to be a little more turtle-ish for this one.

It’s been just over a month since the Kickstarter successfully funded and it feels like an eternity – but that’s good! I think.  So much has happened, and mostly good things!  Some of it will be kept up in these posts (blog.sparqee.com) and others in the forums (forum.sparqee.com) since they may be technical pieces.  So what’s happened?

CELLv1.0: On to the fun stuff – the board!  All the final designs are done, the boards are here, the parts are here, the new paste is in, the masks are here, the certifications are lined up, now it’s build/test time!

Logistics: Logistics has actually been quite a time suck and is one of the most frustrating parts.  Making sure everyone gets what they expect, didn’t under or overpay and if they did, correct it.  Correcting credit-card processing errors, picking dev points, dealing with Kickstarter’s VERY limited console (BTW: for the survey Kickstarter gives you radio buttons or fill-ins, that’s it!  AND every field MUST be answered… not my fault people, just the nature of the beast.)

Distributor: Yep, I’m Hare-brained thinking that I’d have a big announcement for everyone already… it’s coming, but for a sneak peak, we’re working with a great distributor and really excited where things are headed.  Contracts are in the works.

You know how this post is called “Doing it right,” well, one bad thing about going with a distributor is that we have to do it right rather than quick.  For the longevity of this project, product, and thus company, there are some delays happening.  We put some “slop” into the schedule to provide for just these types of circumstances to deliver on time, but the wiggle room is slowly running out.  Once we get the contracts in place and solid quotes back from the distributor’s assembly house (It’s thrilling to be in the big house BTW) then we’ll be able to set a more definite timeline.

Don’t get me wrong, we’re still blazing forward and can see the finish line – it’s comin!

As always, we appreciate all the support of the community that helped push this project, product, and company to the next level.  We look forward to getting the product out ASAP and are fully focused on providing the best product we can!

-Chris

Southern California-based SparqEE debuts the first cellular dev board offered on Kickstarter, the SparqEE CELLv1.0, a tiny Cellular development board that gives makers, hackers, and developers worldwide wireless internet access wherever there’s a cell signal!

Although my favorite movie of all time is Iron Man #1 (yes, I do want to be Tony Stark, or Elon Musk… he’s close enough at this point), I don’t agree with one of his most memorable quotes – “Sometimes you gotta run before you can walk.”

Unfortunately, in real life, babies don’t hit the ground running.  As I’ve recently learned from Liam, it’s more of a progression from simply lifting their head, turning over, crawling, to eventually walking, and only much later is running in the mix.  This is true for most things really, well, any situation I can think of.

It’s true for SparqEE too.  We need to start working our way forward, from the ground up.  It’s not practical to expect to waltz into a VC’s office and be offered a $1M to work on your product… believe me, I’ve tried, it doesn’t work no matter how good your idea is.

If you want to be funded you’ve either got to 1) have past successes or 2) have somebody of HIGH reputation on your team.  The first is just a counter-intuitive chicken-egg scenario while the second is often impractical.

So how then?  Well, we’re going after #1, but we’re going to do it from the ground up – a Kickstarter project to get our initial financing and then explode forward from there.

The Journey begins August 20, 2013 at 11am!

-Chris