
What would you do, Startup Win! reader, if you had a hot product but weak sales? That’s right, you’d look at pricing.īut Sphero had other issues to contend with. Four Kelsus developers started working feverishly against a new design that included more wow-factor animations and sound effects than most other work we do. We wanted to do our best, so we bent to the task. 2) Sphero spent the first two of those six months organizing a team on their side and hashing out requirements for the new apps.
#Sphero edu unblocked android#
That’s when I got the surprising and happy call from him about the potential Sphero acquisition.Īs soon as Sphero completed the acquisition, bringing Kelsus in as an app developer, two things happened: 1) Sphero told us they needed fully revamped iOS and Android apps six months later with no schedule wiggle room. The budget for this work wasn’t available, so Kelsus only did a little bit of work in those early days to make Specdrum’s Android app match their iOS app.įast forward a few months-we hadn’t really spoken with Steven since we couldn’t be of much help beyond that first project. In an email proposal, I said we could “make some decisions around a better more professional looking and usable UI/UX.”

The app didn’t have a professional looking design, but more importantly, the features-especially the ones that allowed for setting up virtual synthesizers-required knowledge of music theory and complex multi-finger gestures. Steven had singlehandedly built an iOS app that allowed users to configure rings, create virtual synthesizer and play loops.

The product was impressive, but it definitely wasn’t ready for a mass market.
#Sphero edu unblocked software#
With this bankroll, we expected they would have a reasonable budget for software development, but in our meeting we learned that most of it was already earmarked for manufacturing the kickstarter backers’ rings. Their Kickstarter campaign hauled in over $188,000 with nearly 2000 backers. Specdrums was several months old and a model of bootstrapping success. He already had a small team made mostly of interns and contractors tied to the University of Colorado’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship Initiative. at Galvanize, a coworking facility on Walnut St.

Steven and I first met in October, 2017 in Boulder Colo.
