#coolestcooler

[ccevallos]

Does your cooler blend tropical drinks, hold 30 lbs of ice, Bluetooth speaker, a built-in USB charger, built-in serving plates, built-in bottle opener ... it does boat, beach, and house calls #coolestcooler Now serving: #lavaflowcocktail Now playing: #jamming (at Onset, Massachusetts)

[derekwilmot]

It's a Miracle! It has arrived #coolestcooler #lifesbetteroutside #shocked #kickerstarter #notreallyareview #video

[lifestylist]

After waiting almost 3 years my #coolestcooler is finally here! Sadly wish I would have used the money on something else. @kickstarter fail #lifestylist #couldhavebeenbetter

[whatdapint]

The first margarita made with the @coolest_cooler is fantastic. The blender does not disappoint. #merica🇺🇸 #coolestcooler (at Weldon Springs Park)

[liketosweet]

#CoolestCooler we finally got it yey! #kickstarter #coolers

[cebimagery]

#roadarita #arizona #coolestcooler (at Apache Lake)

[qutabaldwin-blog]

[tlow]

Physical Products, Crowdfunding and the Production Problem

In the past year I have become highly involved in crowdfunding. I’ve been on, advised, and worked with a variety of teams which have had incredible results. I also have the distinct pleasure of having been on the team which designed the Coolest Cooler — the largest raising crowdfunding product to date. I’ve been the campaign manager for the highest raising tool product ever on crowdfunding the Quickey and I’m currently working on bringing the world’s first all Carbon Fiber Airplane to market (http://igg.me/at/carbonflyer/x/6578809 - referring link). The Carbon Flyer is controlled by bluetooth with onto and has an onboard video camera, besides that it’s beautiful and unbelievably durable (I’ve crashed my fair share of foam RC airplanes with catastrophic results, but I’ve yet to even damage a Carbon Flyer).

Now let’s pause for a second and jump back to late 2008 when I found myself immersed in reading Chris Anderson’s wonderful book “The Long Tail”. That’s when I first came across an phrase that instantly resonated with me “democratization of the tools of production” though I read it as the tools of creation[1].

The original iPhone came out on June 29th, 2007. I waited in line for 39 hours in front of the University Avenue Apple store just behind Robert Scoble and his son. What many of us forget is that the original iPhone launched without an App Store. It wasn’t until WWDC that year that Jobs announced an SDK for iPhone, which wasn’t available until 2008.

Enabling software developers from all over the world to write Apps for iPhone was, I argue, the most valuable and biggest achievement of the iPhone itself. All over the world for many decades hardware and software enthusiasts had been writing software without a real means to go to market. They lacked the ability for “production”. iPhone and the App Store gave these developers a direct line to customers eager for new wares who also happened to have their credit cards already tied to their devices which made buying software an extremely low cognitive load transaction. This was production truly democratized. Looking back now, we can see that people from across the entire Globe contributed to the app Store. Tiny Wings was developed in Germany. Spotify was developed in Sweden. WeChat comes from China. Angry Birds comes from Finland. People all over the world jumped at the opportunity to bring their products to mass market.

And here’s the issue, there are people from all over the world working on crowdfunding, just this week I had a conversation with Japan’s largest crowdfunding company. And although there are projects on crowdfunding from all over the world, nearly all of them are still being produced in one place: China. Unlike the world of the App Store, where a product, in this case a software app can be completely developed and deployed the mass market, physical goods still need to be produced. By and large these physical products are still being produced in the same means as the products you see in stores.

So what’s the answer. It’s not 3d printers. We have 3 separate 3d printers in our offices, two are some of the most sophisticated in the world, but they can’t solve the problem of mass production.

I don’t know what the answer is, but before we can claim we’ve democratized the products available too us, I think it’s worth looking at the homogenous process by which most of the world’s physical goods are still produced. I’m excitedly looking for new answers and solutions to this problem, but I haven’t seen a truly viable one yet.

Thanks for reading. Please direct questions future article suggestions or comments to [email protected]

[1] The tools of production are not yet democratized. It remains a burdensome challenge to mass produce a physical object. I’ve seen a lot of very smart people struggle with this challenge.