How product co-creation studio FirstBuild is changing the way new things are made • TechCrunch
Crowdfunding, crowdsourcing and small batch production to win
If you are Running R&D at a major equipment manufacturer, you have a challenge.
You usually make products in bulk with fairly slim margins. To offset the costs of development, tools, and marketing launch, you need to create and sell a large number of products. To make sure that’s possible, you’ll probably end up doing a bunch of user and market research to make sure you have the best chance of success with your products.
That makes sense, but the business model itself means that it’s hard to do anything really risky, which means that mainstream manufacturers rarely offer anything really innovative. new.
If there was a mushroom growing device, would more people regularly grow mushrooms at home? There’s only one way to find out: build one and try and sell it.
That’s where FirstBuild comes in. If you are a fan of small devices, you may have seen it opal nugget ice machine, the studio’s first major breakthrough; the Mella mushroom fruiting chamber; that is indoor pizza oven; or the smoker in the house of Arden. I spoke with André Zdanow, president of FirstBuild, to find out where these ideas come from and how the studio is working to try to replicate those successes.
“The most famous example is probably the Opal nugget ice maker. At first, it wasn’t really a product — it was a technology being worked on in the refrigeration division of GE Appliances,” said Zdanow, explaining that it turned out to be a bit confusing. They wanted to put “ice cubes” in the fridge but couldn’t figure out exactly what the size of the market for such a thing would be. “Getting technology into refrigerators is really complicated. In other words, it’s a really cool idea that engineers have been messing around with for years, but given the focus and economics of a billion-dollar company, it’s not something that they can focus on.”
The Opal ice machine was FirstBuild’s first commercial success. Image credits: First build
In a parallel universe, that technology would never see the light of day, but instead, engineers went to FirstBuild and wondered what would happen if they put the technology into a device. separately, instead of being put in a large refrigerator.
“We see a lot of people going to the store and buying this stone. They call it Sonic tape or hospital tape. We decided to develop a prototype and see if people wanted it to be just an ice machine,” explains Zdanow. That is the source of the success of the FirstBuild lab. “It started with rudimentary concepts that looked like an ice machine but had ice cubes inside. From there, it evolved through industrial design and eventually a $2.7 million crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter in 2015.
