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Published by: 18:31, 06 May 2021

Robotics. Minimum Viable Product

By definition, an MVP is a Minimum Viable Product. Vitality is a strange term. I define MVP for myself as a minimum working product that at least someone already needs. 


mvp robotics robot

What is MVP


In software development, I understand this with all my guts. Because I have a lot of experience in software. But in such an area of technology as artificial muscles, I confess, I wandered pretty much before I realized. Now I will tell you about my doubts. Do not hesitate to scold me here, I will now write you very dubious conclusions. I myself still doubt them!


At first everything seemed amazingly simple to me. You start the production of muscles, you find a large customer, and you sell. He buys, pays money, and you both are happy to disperse.



It turned out that it doesn't work that way. None of the potential customers I found were as naive as I thought. They all wanted to release everything themselves, but they were ready to pay me for a license. Or not ready. Or were willing to promise, but not pay. Or were they ready to circumvent my patent in order to release, but already their own product. And buy me ice cream as a consolation.

As much as I liked the idea of such a simple MVP, neither the first muscles nor the license were such an MVP. 


Many of my acquaintances with business experience thought exactly the opposite. They imagined that a muscle is like a motor. You connect the battery to it, and it works. It was not so, it was necessary to do orchestration. Therefore, each sale would turn into a project in which you can get bogged down and forever remain a small dwarf startup. I clearly repeat myself, in the previous parts I already wrote about this.


What then? - I thought. Many people advised me to make a very simple mechanism in which the muscles would play to the fullest, and this mechanism should be much simpler than a robot. That's when I focused on the flying saucer. A flying saucer is just such a simple mechanism, as conceived, and was. Turned out not to be so easy.


 

The situation changed somewhat in the covid summer of 2020, when I roughly understood how to make solid muscles. A simpler MVP loomed in front of my eyes than a flying saucer, in which the material was torn apart by the applied power.


It's great when the leap from idea to product that users are willing to buy can be done for relatively little money. It's great when there is a category of users who need a product so much that they are willing to pay for the first, even if clumsy and unreliable version. And at an exorbitant price.


Here it is also necessary to explain that in the process of product development from MVP to large scale, continuity is important. For example, if a company decided to make Excel, and released a calculator as an MVP, such continuity is not visible. Although he and the other product are something for users to consider. 


MVP must stake out the platform and show the leadership of the company. And then you need to quickly and quickly develop the product in order to maintain this leadership temporarily, and have time to occupy a new platform before one of the competitors has time to think about it.  



Every next jump should be easy and in the natural direction of product development. With each next jump, the size of the business, or at least the size of the user audience, should increase. This is how it works in software. It is much more difficult to do this in hardware. Tesla is a good example. They released at first the Model S, and then, with the accumulated experience, released new models, and expanded their market. SpaceX is a good example. Again this Musk!


As for robotics, I don’t know such examples. There is an example with an iRobot vacuum cleaner, and an example with a Dyson vacuum cleaner, they have a good scale. But such vertical growth, like software companies, and jumping from the site to the site for a multiple zooming, I did not notice anyone.


But here there is still one moment - if after jumping to the next site the size of the business is multiple increases, then the cost of the company grows many times. And it attracts investors, and makes an attractive investment of the earliest investors!


If you look at Boston Dynamics, then the company with wonderful technologies after many years of work finally reached the MVP stage. She started selling Spot mini for $ 100 thousand. thing, and they say sold about hundreds already. By this time, many manufacturers will fall on its platform. China, Switzerland, Korea, there are even OpenSource projects, these are the same toothy and dangerous. And Boston Dynamics do not jump on the next platform and do not jump.


In the world of software, there are also examples of such heavy, clumsy monsters, comfortably settled on their site, and missed the onset of small competitors, more dynamic and nimble. Remember Sun, remember Oracle, but you never know them? In robotics, the lack of dynamics is precisely explained by the fact that a product already at the MVP stage, from a technological point of view, simply must be a heavy, clumsy monster. It can only be changed with a lot of money and a lot of effort.



A natural thought immediately comes to mind: can a robotic product be as simple as a rake?? And so that adding a little bit of complexity with each step increases the size of the pool of leads, and this step would not be worth the dramatic effort? 


In my opinion, yes, this can be. Robotics is already a very large field, and you can find different products that, in principle, can grow almost vertically, like Google or Facebook, only the product should be slick and great at the start, but for robots this is almost unrealistic.


It is necessary to sell an obvious service that sells well even without robots, but with a robot, even with the most crooked and unfinished one, it gets a significant advantage in the market, temporarily expands the boundaries of a niche, that is, it somehow addresses users' money that competitors cannot reach.



My idea was not to compete with robot manufacturers - it's a dispute over who has the thicker pocket. And to compete with some kind of service that already exists, has already been licked, is already provided by numerous competitors, but with the use of a robot or muscle technology, it can suddenly find a second wind.



Do not make a product that should be in the first version of already fantastic quality (such as a robot nurse, or a robot chef), and has passed countless number of certifications. And start selling a quality service, having the first NOT very high-quality product. Gradually improving it. Letting it grow. 


In biology, by the way, this happens. Symbiosis is called. Well and not only. A person, for example, is a very complex creature, but as a child he cannot do anything special. Even in its original infant version, the child brings joy to parents, but therefore grows up and harnessed to benefit humanity. Or harm, as luck would have it. You only need to linger on each site for a short time. Only such dynamics will give explosive growth.


I thought about the speed of iteration from one platform to another, how fast you can jump from the first product to the next, and decided that this ease of development and assembly gives a cardinal advantage in the speed and quality of such jumps. 



I will give an example of the Internet. Even before the hypertext protocol, it was possible to make corporate systems of the client-server type (as it was then called). And did! Banks did, big companies did. We hired a development team and spent a year doing functionality that a novice developer can do today in a couple of weeks. And then the Web appeared, a huge number of great products spilled into the market. 


Ideas were checked and tested on the fly. SCRUM, A / B testing appeared (this is a type of blind testing of vaccines, when one group has a vaccine-change and the other does not). Methods for UI / UX have appeared, people have learned to make billions from the growth of companies.



All of this has not yet been in robotics.


one. The product must be very complex right away to take the place of MVP

2. Product cannot iterate quickly

3. No one has a technology for rapid change with an already existing audience of users.

four. Assumptions are slow to validate and there is no mass of users to make statistically sound decisions

five. Escorting robots is a headache, it doesn't look like escorting internet products

6. The audience does not grow with any robot gradually, but with a gradual explosion, as it happens with successful Web projects.

7. There is no social dimension for robots. And it's actually so strange!

eight. There is no technology for combining robots.  It doesn't even matter.

nine. And there are ten more points that you cannot comprehend at once, and it is much more important to solve the first points than the remaining 10.


robotics mvp eiffel tower

You can take any robotics product and try on item by item from my list. And you will see how right I am. By the way, the picture shows the phased construction of the Eiffel Tower. So, in none of its stages was this tower MVP. Except for the last one, of course. And almost all hardware works like that! And I took the courage to change this situation. To grow something like a hardware google, no more, no less.


Original post here.


Previous publications on this topic:

Robotics. Muscle idea

Robotics. About the pipette and about the plane

Robotics. About self-assembly of robots

Robotics. About skin, joints and locomotion

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