Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Launch Pad – BoM Squad”.
Hi everybody um so, like our friend just said, I’m a building software to make it easier for entrepreneurs and contract manufacturers to work smoothly together to make more awesome stuff. So I want to do a quick poll of the audience. Is there anyone here representing contract menu contract manufacturer at all, raise your hand? Okay, I see a couple hands go up. Is there anyone here who’s manufacturing, a product? Okay, so how many of you guys find it actually like easy to work together? Not someone. Okay, I see some heads shaking ok, so there’s I think, a lot of interest in manufacturing here and there’s a good reason for it.
It’S a big industry and it’s growing steadily, but I think more interesting than the size of the growth of it is the sort of changes that it’s undergoing, so we’re actually really used to a paradigm where we see big organizations that are vertically integrated where the design And the engineering, the sales and the manufacturing are operating under basically the same marching orders, but increasingly what manufacturing is becoming is more of a distributed operation in which we’ve got maybe one organization doing the design, the engineering they own, the product, maybe they’re, getting help on The prototyping, then they start working with a contract manufacturer depending on how complicated your product is. You might be working with more than one. Maybe you have a sourcing guy who’s. Getting you a good deal on your components, and you have to make sure that all these people are talking with each other.
Your supplier has his supplies and your contract manufacturers are probably subcontracting certain parts of the manufacturing to their preferred suppliers. So it’s nice about this is that it makes manufacturing capabilities a lot more accessible to people like us and to a lot more creative people in the world, even to larger organizations that are maybe doing IOT products. For the first time. The bad news is every one of those little arrows is an opportunity for miscommunication, so the upshot of this is that this is a big source of why hardware is hard, and what we’re seeing now in the world is that about.
Eighty percent of crowdfunded hardware projects deliver late and, as notorious b.i.g, might have predicted the moreover fund. You are the more problems you’re going to run into, and delays, and that kind of thing, so we at fabula feel this pain. We’Ve been there, so we have my co-founder and I have most of our career experience in designing and developing collaborative software.
So that’s that’s our comfort zone, but we also spent the last couple of years designing crowdfunding and manufacturing a hardware product we spent over a year and China heavily involved in the manufacturing process. So this is what a lot of our day-to-day work looked like. This is our Bill of Materials, several varieties of it for several different suppliers and for ourselves.
So after this experience were actually really excited to build the kind of collaborative software tools that we wish we had. While we were working on our hardware project, so bomb squad is a cloud-based database. Centric build material manager that puts the collaboration between you and your contract manufacturer and your suppliers front and center. That is baked in that’s our primary consideration. So I’ll show you a quick video and try and basically talk through some of the features that we’re building in so for starters, you basically get a whole view of your product. You can look at the product, the bomb, the various components you can import.
What you already have, if you’ve got it, and we actually have defaults and templates to help you understand what it is that your manufacturer and supplier are expecting of you, because this is a big problem for first timers like we were, there are multiple different views for The different kinds of tasks that you might do with your bomb and you can create custom views. We also automatically spot the most common errors. These are the kinds of things that cost you a lot of trouble and a lot of money and that make your CM pretty unhappy and will automatically record the history of all the changes you can generate changelogs very easily and we have comments at all levels. So you can have an ongoing conversation with your collaborators and keep track of that really easily.
So this is the kind of total you want. It would have saved us a lot of time and a lot of trouble while we are working on this, and I think that this adds a lot of value for you, whether you’re, prototyping and basically trying to figure out your cost of goods before your Kickstarter or Whether you’re on your sixth manufacturing run working on tracking inventory with your factory, what I’m also really excited about is, I think that we can generate value for all the collaborators in this process, and i just want to say that i am super grateful for our contract Manufacturers last year for putting up with our rookie mistakes, and so I’m actually really invested in generating value for all people involved here so for the product creators, we’re aiming to save you a lot of time, help you avoid mistakes and, moreover, to provide you the kind Of guidance that you need to actually get through the manufacturing process, if you’re new to it for contract manufacturers, we’re hoping to make the quoting process easier by making sure that they get what they need error-free the first time and also to help kind of reconcile the Materials requirements with their parts, library or with their preferred suppliers, and if you’re, working on sourcing, we help you track. Your requests attract a man on components and eventually we’re hoping to make it possible to aggregate orders and take advantage of price breaks on electronic components which can save a ton of money around thirty percent on things, if you order them in batches of ten thousand. So with this also means, since we’re generating revenue for since we’re generating value for all parties, this gives us actually a diverse set of revenue streams so for entrepreneurs we’re looking at a freemium SAS model, we want to be able to offer something: that’s feature-rich, but actually Affordable a lot of the current solutions are either Excel, which is not well suited to the task or their heavy weight. Their heavy weight products intended for large businesses like a full ERP system for groups for contract manufacturers and suppliers, we’re looking at a transaction fee based on the complexity of the project that we’re helping with. So I want to back up a little bit and just sort of talk about the whole ecosystem and we’re playing in. So I think this move in it and a lot of people here is experiencing a lot of growth and a lot of really really cool stuff is happening because a few good tools have made it way easier to prototype and way easier to raise. And I think we, you know, we owe a lot to 3d printing.
We owe a lot to the crowdfunding platforms for helping us do our jobs and when we get to manufacturing things, get harder, because that kind of transparency and that kind of easily accessible help. Isn’T there, this is what we’re aiming to be and what we hope to be doing in the future is contributing, is really giving back and contributing to the growth in the health of this whole hardware ecosystem. So I wanted to introduce you also to the fibula team. So there’s me: I spent way too much time in school, studying human computer interaction. My co-founder Bruno has a master’s in computer science and he writes the most exquisite coat. I’Ve ever seen. Demetriou is our back-end PHP ninja and our new business development. Guy George is an NDA from McGill Amanda. It looks like a lovely team to wrap up alright, alright time for a few questions from our judges here: okay, unless there’s some critical information, but we got ta hit my screen, so we are opening up today for signups for our public beta.
So if you’re sick of Excel come check, us out sign up we’ll get you on this thing all right, one or two critical questions from the judges hear anything to help. You make up your minds on on what what’s score, to give a man here and and and the bomb squad product. So good question: do you think you guys are a feature in a full stack or our product on your own, a feature in a full stack? Oh okay, so, basically, our plan is that bomb management for us is a Minimum Viable Product, because you use the bomb at all these different phases of the manufacturing process.
It means that it gives us a foothold to help. You do sourcing, for example, or two or two actually involve like features for collaborating with your manufacturer, on testing right, for example, like giving you a hardware software module to put into your test. Jig do a dashboard for that, so that you can actually monitor. What’S going on so we’re starting with the bomb, because it’s an acute pain point, but this gives us a foothold to expand and sort of be your go-to for all all all of your manufacturing collaborations.
So that’s our bigger vision, um, as I have a question I’m like as someone who sold the manufacturers before. How do you get the old men to actually use this like it’s always a huge problem, I feel like startups yeah totally I can yeah and how usable? If the old men don’t want to do it, is it still usable to you even if they’re not? Could you cover that kind of whole area, okay, so um? Yes, so I think that we basically have to convince to parties, and we’ve actually been talking to manufacturers and we’re working on we’re sort of pushing forward on our first couple of partnerships – and I don’t want to anyway. I get get into too much detail over that. But basically, we show what we can do to the engineers who handle the quotes and they tell us everything. That’S a giant pain for them right now, and so part of that is that we get buy-in from the people that are actually handling this stuff directly.
And then we bump up the chain to the boss and demonstrate how much time they’re spending on each quote and how much time we’re able to save them by automating the error, checking and automating, reconciling with the parts library and it’s actually it’s a lot of hours Per quote: it costs a lot of money to quote someone who’s, not as organized as the large businesses that you could be working with all right. I think we’re gon na have to leave it at that Amanda. Thank you very much big round of applause for bomb squad, fab, you’ll, .