How we took our Hackaball side-project all the way to Kickstarter
Made by Many recently launched our side-project Hackaball on Kickstarter. You can back it today.
For those of us in the business of helping clients deliver new products the side-project is a dangerous game. The gravitational cash-flow pull towards billable work means they always have the potential to become zombie projects. Usually they are the “agency-hobby”, unsuited to becoming a real venture. But even those you think have the right-stuff to make it, most don’t take off because the agency-type company doesn’t have all the right skills to be successful. To turn a side-project to a new venture in the face of your core business requires commitment and follow-through.
Make no mistake, there are huge upsides for the unicorn side projects that both survive and work. The best examples include Basecamp from 37 Signals, who originally were a design agency that pivoted to product company. The entrepreneurial Mint Digital created, scaled and sold Stickygram. More recently we have the blockbuster hit Monument Valley from UsTwo. The game not only brought in millions, but has also become a Frank Underwood favorite. In the face of all the challenges, these successes prove — without a doubt — that a certain breed of creative client service companies have what it takes to produce great, novel, and inventive products and build businesses.
Others still aren’t looking to create software from internal tools or win big with side-projects. They are simply looking to create an entire new learning environment to test out new methods and fertile training grounds that allow for the honing of entirely new sets of skills. This is what we have been trying to achieve at Made by Many.
We use these opportunities to future-proof ourselves and reach for a whole new level. We often talk about what the future will look like and even if the time hasn’t come we can launch a side projects to learn and then take it into client work when the future rolls around. Staying current is a part of the ethos at Made by Many and structured side-projects let us experiment with the tools of future
You can read more about Made by Many’s earlier side-projects on Tim Malbon’s Medium post.
Hackaball turned out to be our most ambitious and complicated side project to date. Hackaball is a connected toy, a smart and responsive ball that children can program to invent and play games. Back it now on Kickstarter then come back and read the rest of this post ;)
So in 2o12 we wanted to explore connected product design, we were excited about Bluetooth LE and wanted to see how our human-centric process and evidence based product and service design skills apply to stuff that spans the digital and physical. While we felt confident in designing and engineering software based products, the physical raises the complexity significantly. The best way to address complexity is through emergent practice.
We used the opportunity of our summer internship to bring in students with some software development, electrical engineering and physical product design skills. We were lucky to find Thomas Nadine and Ben King, a talented engineer and designer pairing. Ben especially had a new kind of product designer skillset for us and had worked on connected student projects before.
The Made by Many summer internship is different to other agencies in that instead of being thrown into random client work we recruit designer and developer pairs to work on an internal project from a brief we set and are then mentored through our product process from exploration to MVP.
The internship lasted three months and in that time “Ruleball” emerged as a concept alongside many others, it tested well, it was prototyped in many forms to producing a working “version”. The hardware protyping and testing cycles worked brilliantly.
If you want to read more about the intern project check out these posts on the idea and the development.
“You don’t want it to become a Zombie Project, one that is not yet dead but not really alive either.”
Over the next 18 months the project entered the difficult and all-too-familar “agency sideline” phase. At this point it could only be worked in the space and spare time between billable project’s. The key to a side-projects survival to get beyond the initial big push is keeping enough momentum. You don’t want it to become a Zombie Project, one that is not yet dead but not really alive either. Zombie projects are worse than dead ones and should probably be shot in the head.
We were fortunate to have Ben King join the company permanently which helped with momentum. But progress was slow and in fits and starts. Given the nature of the project it was difficult to bring all the right skills together at the same time. We needed product design, interaction design, electrical engineering and iOS programming to move the project forward and not all were always available.
But with first Ben’s passion then Ian Bach and Melissa Coleman; the evolved RuleBall was now code-named “BetaBall” and was iterated and test to about as far as we alone could take it. We produced a custom PCB design, 3d-printed cases, molded outers and a working iPhone app called “BetaBall”. Each unit costed several hundred pounds.
As an organization we got to learn about the combination of different types of prototyping cycles: Hardware and manufacture were long; electronics and firmware were shorter but iterating in software is fast. We would iterate in software as much as we could before realising we needed to take another leap in the hardware design before we could iterate more in the software. Also we found co-designing with kids is great fun when you have a giant velcro phone.
Twelve months ago we had taken the project as far as it can go internally and as a prototype. We needed to make decisions, back it financially and with resources — or kill it. We also decided: if we are going forward, we would need partners.
We did go forward. We knew software and design, but to make it a real product we needed experts in some areas. And so Made by Many partnered with industrial designers, MAP, to make Hackaball attractive, robust and simple to put together. Karl Sadler created Hackaball’s sounds, giving it an engaging and fun personality. Kudu helped with the electronics, making the magic work on the inside.
“great partnerships and radical collaboration are needed to invent the future”
The cross-over world of connected products requires many more disciplines than pure software products. No one agency is ever going to be great at all the pieces. Instead great partnerships and radical collaboration are needed to invent the future. Creating groups that can work together requires process, communication and a bag full of respect.
From September 2014 the collective team had one purpose: getting to a Kickstarter launch for market validation. This required an impressive level of work to pull together a brand identity, character, app design, market positioning and making the logistics and business decisions necessary to cost, price and test the product.
A side-project team is at its best when it can pull from other specialities in the company, and it’s in this way having a deep roster of talent available is a massive plus. If you need business modelling skills, we have people in the company that can run that Excel for you. There is also product marketing skills to put to use, organising the social, PR and content strategy behind a Kickstarter launch.
Clear resourcing is needed to build and keep momentum going to a product launch and that means having a core team pushing forward.
In lots of ways the whole of Made by Many has been involved at some point or another but extra special shout-outs go out to Tom Nadin, Ben King, Tom Harding, Ian Bach, Julian James, Alex Harding, Rachel Mercer, Melissa Coleman, William Owen, Owen Thomas, Mike Walker, Richard Ling, Jon Marshall, Jacky Chung, Julie Arrive, Karl Sadler, Alex Du Preez and Peter Krige.
You can read more about the Hackaball design process over at Core77.
So did we reach a new level for Made by Many? Yes, achievement unlocked. Will it be a successful product? Well that’s still for the market to decide. We’d love for you to be a part of answering that for us by being an early backer.
“In the end, a business needs to be true to its business model and should either change its model or create a new one.”
For side-products to reach full mature ventures they need to leave the nest. In the end, a business needs to be true to its business model and should either change its model (a’la 37 Signals) or create a new one. If Hackaball is successful it will be the latter one we will follow. That would be a good problem to have and another story to tell.
