Bare Conductive – Touch Board: Interactivity Everywhere
What is the Touch Board?
The Touch Board is a tool to make your projects interactive, responsive, smart or just fun. Use the Touch Board to change the world around you by turning almost any material or surface into a sensor. Connect anything conductive to one of its 12 electrodes and trigger a sound via its onboard MP3 player, play a MIDI note or do anything else that you might do with an Arduino or Arduino-compatible device.
We are all designers and engineers, so we did not set out to create a startup. It is important to have a foundation from which to build any business especially one around physical objects or products. The product needs to be developed before the startup otherwise it will not be sustainable, however not all products should become businesses as this may also not be sustainable. The two need to go hand in hand, but you first need a solid idea and means to execute it to even get to the start line.
Why did you choose kickstarter as the source of funding for your company? Did you look at any other?
The Kickstarter model embodies the way we like to interact with our customers through an open dialogue, and the most important thing to us was reaching as many people as possible, the more people we can attract the more ideas we will be able to share. We feel the Kickstarter is a great platform because it enables a small business such as ours, to test whether an idea is popular before investing valuable resources into it, and it also helps with funding development that would otherwise be very hard for a start-up.
<h4 >How long has the your startup been in the making, and who is the team behind the business?
We founded the company in July 2009 and have been trading since September 2011. We are comprised of 6 full-time employees (including the 4 founders) 2 part time and 3 business partners. We all have a range of skills in design, engineering and business development so it’s s a good balance.
What has been your biggest challenge so far as a startup owner?
Learning languages, in the beginning while we were developing our Electric Paint we needed to learn how to talk to new industries that none of us had interacted with before, so we had to learn the terminology in order to be taken seriously but also the get things moving in the right direction. This is something that has continued as we move into new areas but its a fun and necessary part of it.
In the coming year, what would you like to achieve with your business?
The Touch Board is the first step for us into new areas, we are just looking forward to seeing where this will lead us, we will be focusing on industrial partnerships and extending the reach of our current products.
If you could give one piece of advice to someone thinking about starting a business, what would it be?
Make sure you really really want to do it, you may spend the first year or two just getting to the start line.
