You've generated massive buzz about a newfangled product, secured a surprising number of pre-orders and just launched it to the public. Now what?
Stephen Lake is about to find out.
The CEO and co-founder of Thalmic Labs is part of the group behind the Myo gesture control armband, which reads the electrical activity in your arm's muscles along with its movements so you can wirelessly control, say, a drone, a GoPro camera, iTunes songs or Netflix movies, among other apps in a beta market. Available today, after months of delays, the US$199/CAD$249 device worked well in our tests for navigating PowerPoint presentations-except for one software bug in a fist-related gesture that Lake says his team has since fixed.
Here, in a conversation that's been edited for clarity, Lake discusses how he's managed the run-up to a major product rollout, some of his riskier decisions and coming up with contingency plans if all that consumer buzz turns into a backlash:
Last we spoke, you discussed the importance or internally testing the product before releasing it to the public even though that caused a delay. How might that decision hurt or help you now?
That's essentially been a risk, particularly in the last six months we've really honed that in with a much more narrow focus on making that first experience you have with Myo-presentations-very polished. Some of the features we built in-both the pointer and digital zoom-came out of either testing or interviews.
We built a facility in our office for user testing with cameras and a one-way mirror. We tried out 30 different versions of those two features and learned a ton just from watching people get into a boardroom, go in our testing room and actually try and present with different gestures.
Some companies set a release date and struggle to meet that deadline. How did you know this was the right time to launch?
For much of the process there's that continuous cycle of evaluating, realistically, where are we today and how much more time do we think it's going to take? We got to something we were very proud to show off, set a date and said let's draw the line in the sand and work backwards. Then we asked the team what do we have to do in the next six or eight weeks to hit that and align our external partners-Best Buy and Amazon-and everything else that goes into launching a product? And we worked from there.
When a new product gets released there can be blockbuster sales, recalls or any number of other issues-good or bad. As CEO, how have you developed your contingency plans given the different scenarios that could play out?
We're very fortunate that we've shipped 50,000 units of the physical product since the end of last year. So in terms of the physical readiness, if we need to recall something, we're pretty confident that we're not going to be in that type of situation.
If there are software bugs, glitches or we see ways that can make the experience better we can always upgrade that in the field and don't have to wait for a whole new product release to do that. That's definitely a little bit of a pillow.
There's always risk shipping a brand new product-it's part of being in the startup space. You've got to be okay taking some risks.
So many electronics become commodities, where consumers look for the cheapest gadgets with the richest feature set. How do you plan to compete in this environment if competitors come out of the woodwork?
We definitely see that in a whole bunch of categories, especially Android phones. We're fortunate we're in a space very early and really are making a new category with wearable gesture controllers. We've got some room and a heck of a head start.
A lot of days I wish it were easier and faster to make-it's challenging. There's a lot of technical know-how that's not as easy to reproduce as something like a smartphone or smartwatch. We've got a pretty good barrier on that side and a great community of developers with over 100 applications on our Myo Market. That really helps as well. But ultimately more competition in this space is actually welcome, because it takes a lot of outreach and noise to make a new market. I think we're a long way from it becoming a commodities space.
