Last year, HWTrek sponsored 30 hardware startups and creators to visit Taiwan and Beijing on the Asia Innovation Tour 2014. We’re doing it again this August. We reached out to Adam Kell (Co-founder of Stower), a participant in the tour last year, to see what he’s been up to during the past year.
Candle Charger
HWTrek: We’d love to catch up with what you’ve been doing since you attended Asia Tour last year. What are you working on?
Adam: Stower has been selling the Fire Charger product through international retail, we are also launching the second product [the Candle Charger, which is designed for power outages and provides instant, reliable power inside your home when the grid can’t, launched yesterday on Kickstarter!]. We have also stayed closely involved in the StartX network and the hardware teams going through the program (I run the hardware program at StartX).
What are some of the major lessons you learned along your entrepreneurship journey?
Since we’ve been manufacturing for almost 2 years, and shipping product to retail for almost 1 year, we’ve learned a lot about the world after you stop being a “startup” with no customers, and have to start making money. Consumer-facing products require massive marketing and sales efforts, and retail strategy is something that a lot of entrepreneurs underestimate.
FlameStower
What advice would you give someone who might have an idea, but has yet to launch a hardware startup?
Don’t stop talking to people (potential customers) about what you are working on. If you are like most people, you will get really tired of answering the same questions, but keep going out, keep talking to people and figuring out how/why people are using/will use your product.
Looking back a year on now, what are your takeaways from participating in the tour last year?
It was great to be in a group of peers who were all in a similar place on the path along hardware development. The “ground-floor” intro/tour of the HWTrek partners was also quite unprecedented in my experience as a scrappy hardware entrepreneur.
What trend do you see that is changing your sector or what shift would you like to see happen?
The changes taking place in the retail arena are very interesting. The combination of more startups providing valuable products, and more of the dollars being spent online combine to make a pretty interesting environment of change.
Do you have any recommendations for a must-read/watch/listen to article, book, blog, film, or podcast, etc.?
Zero to one is one of the best business books I have ever read. I also appreciate the Freakonomics guys and their podcast for diving deep into the way that people think. Lots of interesting thinkers blog, some favorites are Seth Godin and Paul Graham. The podcast “Startup” is also fun, so that entrepreneurs who listen don’t feel like they are the only ones running slightly dysfunctional companies :)
