Toastmasters Presentation - nolanhergert/EasyLED GitHub Wiki

Title

  • Awaken the Inventor Within

My Needs from the presentation

  • Does this fulfill an actual need or want? Will it just get thrown away like many other fads? Why are people excited about X? (automatic turning on of lights)
  • Will people actually pay money for this, or are they just wanting to encourage me without disappointing me?
  • I don't want the stress of (being late / disappointing) 10000 people asking for something
    • Simple, let someone else do the startup / kickstarter!
    • Release as open source
    • Make 10s of them.
  • Won't I end up with 10000 grill scrapers in my garage? Not if you build a prototype each time and iterate

Other people's worries?

An Elevator Pitch To Hobby "Makers"

  • Why should I continue to do this?

  • I want to focus on lasting, useful products. Then again, are products really designed for planned obsolescence?

  • If someone else makes the product I'm looking for, great! I'll move onto something else and I will have learned a lot in the process :-)

  • Do I have to make a ton of money? No!

    • Keeping it as a hobby early on is much less stress while you are working at your "day job" (which for me is even more fun, actually)

  • Cheap, fast, and easy to make populated PCBs. 3D print a case.

    • Join a local robotics club, maker space, or even a library and you can borrow their equipment ;)

  • Helps you appreciate how much work it takes to make a product you use. As well as allows you to repair it potentially!

    • Invention and making big risky things is really a labor of love. I already have a helmet that suits me, but a number of people said they wanted one but weren't able to make one! It's a beautiful thing to be able to lay down your life for someone else's enjoyment <and yours too, in a circuitous way>

  • Meeting people not like yourself is useful! I don't feel as much pressure to become someone that I'm not!

    • Entrepreneurs wanting to make it big, living just on the edge. Thinking about ideas all day while being unemployed / "can't stand a 9 to 5". For some their sole joy is watching the ad dollars come in from whatever content people want to see.
    • Learning another language well. "I couldn't get enough of Japanese culture / Korean dramas, I had to come here and learn their language and culture"

Who is the market?

  • People who don't know how to solder / silicone / do wiring and don't want to screw it up. In fact, that's actually most people (including technical people!)
  • Most bicycle equipment today is not built for off-angle visibility
  • Market size... I was surprised when an acquaintance of mine did a computer vision PCB (https://openmv.io/) and has sold thousands of them. A .. PCB (when phones or laptop suffice)?! For Computer Vision only?! Thousands?! We both went to Carnegie Mellon and there were only a few people in ECE that were maybe interested in this!
    • A thought experiment....Think of the public high schools in your area. The size of clubs and the activities people do. How many people would you need to randomly sample to find someone that matched your target market? Let's say conservatively 1 in 10000 for my niche helmet project. How many people would there be in the USA that would match? Guesses?

What is my competition?

  • The harder it is to make the item, the harder others will have to work to replicate your work!

“The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people. --Randy Pausch”