Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Launch Pad – GoPiGo Raspberry Pi Robot Kit”.
I’M from dexter industries – and this is the gopi – go raspberry, pi robot, so the founder, john dexter cole started the company a couple years ago with the brick pie, which kind of made the company get a lot of attention. The robotic space, but now about this time last year we launched the gopigo, which is an all-in-one raspberry, pi robot kit. So it’s makers and engineers and hobbyists all around the world that have really launched this product in the market and now there’s been over a thousand sold, but now we’re kind of taking this beyond the maker space itself. All that great feedback from engineers and makers has enabled us to take this into the education market. We found that a lot of teachers and professors were buying the gopigo to develop whole curriculums for their schools, around mathematics, physics, computer science, of course, electrical engineering, and they just love the way that doing something in the physical world taught these concepts.
And so i just joined the company about two months ago. I come from a supply chain and manufacturing background and spent the first 10 years of my career on the factory floor in asia, and what i saw i’m seeing first hand from that. Experience is how technology is really changing our world. Everything from the way we communicate to the way we set up a production line and one of the biggest barriers or challenges with global business is actually a lack of technical aptitude amongst business people. And so i have learned everything about production and factories by doing by being there on on the factory floor, i’m not an engineer by trade at all.
I have a chinese language and literature background. So when i came to dexter industries and found this little robot, it really helped me learn how to program. I’D been trying to do python, learn python the hard way really great program, but found it really really hard started with his robot and in a couple of weeks i was actually building programs activating and making this little guy move around the world, and that has taken Me much farther than a lot of the other means that i tried to learn about technology, so i joined in an effort to really help expand into this education market, build curriculums for schools for teachers and the ones that aren’t going to be aren’t going to have The time and the expertise to build curriculums themselves, so that’s really where we’re moving um and i am excited to hear questions from the judges and happy to share more um as they as they’re interested all right.
Great round of applause. All right judges feel free to ask your questions. Are you targeting parents as well as uh teachers? It’S a really great question.
So we are um. Sort of the next project is a kickstarter. That’S a 12-month subscription project, particularly aimed at our existing customers.
That already have it to help them build off of that um and then we’re taking that and building that as well into a curriculum for teachers right so working with the education market can be really challenging. Are you guys selling to districts to individual teachers? Maybe just describe what your your actual target is there yeah so so far we’ve been reaching teachers directly and we have over 50 teachers that have bought the gopigo on their own, with no sales and marketing effort at all. So we’ve just started this last a couple weeks ago we just went to our first conference of computer science teachers and we got over 50 teachers asking for trial kits, so we think up until now the company’s been run by the founder john, and we really haven’t Done any sales and marketing, so we believe, with just sort of the most basic effort of refining that experience and reaching out to these different groups. Another way is also through distributors, so we’re building relationships with a few education distributors that already have the footholds in different schools. So there you know with the interest in both computer science and robotics. It seems that there’s actually a lot of companies that are also targeting the education space and with robots uh with different types of products. So my question to you is: how do you really differentiate yourselves from all of the other products that are out there? How do you get that message out to the teachers yeah? So i think that there’s there’s sort of three key differences between dexter industries and a lot of the other companies on the market that are doing awesome stuff. We we know a lot of them. We’Re big cheerleaders alongside we support their projects and kickstarters too, but kind of the three things is one is all of our hardware.
Software and firmware is all open source. So what we’re seeing in the education market is teachers and professors really wanting to teach with that whole methodology, which we believe will drive innovation, so everything being open source allows us to um kind of fit into a different part of their curriculum than maybe, if they Were working with lego, mindstorm or some other proprietary system, it also allows us to start young and work all the way through education, as well as into their career, so they can use python and scratch and all different types of programming languages. So the second piece of it really is that, especially with the addition of me that has no technical background, we’re kind of stripping everything back down to the beginning and saying how do you hand this to someone that you know a kit that knows nothing and get Them started so having true step-by-step instructions for someone that doesn’t understand what an sd card image means right and actually explain it to them in layman’s terms, so we’re developing that capability and the third piece is really the supply chain.
So one of the biggest challenges we’ve seen with companies in this space is that even if they get really popular, the ability to deliver consistent, reliable high quality product you know is very challenging and – and that’s really why i came into the company – was to to lay That foundation – i just got back from china a couple days ago, so yeah great okay, great. Let’S give a round of applause for gopi. Go you .