The Story Behind Tile

Presentation Slides of the Tile by Jie Ji

For those who need a reminder of their personal belongings, Tile can help you track them. Basally, If you lose track of anything connected to a Tile device by using Bluetooth, the Tile app on your phone can help you locate it. And when you get close enough, it can make the device beep so you can hear where it is.

How did they fund themselves in the early days?

In the early days, Tile went from idea to launch in one year, and from launch to 2 million sold one year after that.

Crowdfunding Campaign & Seed Investments

In November of 2012, The founders Mike Farley and Nick Evans began to work on the project full time.

By February 2013, the duo had raised a $200,000 seed investment from Tandem Capital.

In June 2013, they had launched a crowdfunding campaign. A month later it had exceeded all expectations, netting them 200,000 pre-sales and $2.7 million in working capital.

Tile became a remarkable milestone for a product that started life as a crowdfunding campaign. A month later it had exceeded all expectations The company raised $2.6 million via its Selfstarter campaign — far more than it was looking to initially raise, from the earlier $200,000 from Silicon Valley accelerator Tandem Capital.

Selfstarter

Notably, the company did not use Kickstarter or Indiegogo for its campaign: It built its crowdfunding campaign using Selfstarter and ran it on its own website. That was harder, but it had a lasting benefit for the company.

Farley was saying that “We weren’t relying on people who went to Kickstarter — we had to figure out how to get people to our website.

Ultimately, that made Tile a much better direct-sales company, because once sales started, it already had the necessary marketing expertise.

Bluetooth 4.0

The release of Bluetooth 4.0, which included a “low energy” specification, was key. The specification has been around since 2010, but the iPhone 4S was the first smartphone to implement Bluetooth 4.0, in 2011, with other devices following in 2012.

“Bluetooth 4.0 becoming ubiquitous is what made it all possible.”

However…Nothing so easy

Instead of being able to scale slowly, the company had more orders than it was prepared to handle.

“It really changed the dynamics of manufacturing this in a really good way. However, one of the bad things it did was add delays,”

Partner up with Jabil

Jabil, a gigantic company that has 180,000 employees around the world, is publicly traded, and has $15.8 billion in annual revenue, but for some reason Jabil doesn’t hit the tech industry headlines the way its competitors tend to. This time, Jabil won the business and solved the problem.

Now,

Tile is one of the most popular lost item trackers on the market. In Manhattan and San Francisco, you don’t have to walk more than an average of one block to pass a Tile user.

In addition, Tile is also partnering with other companies to integrate Tile’s hardware and software into their own products, to further expand its footprint beyond the market for the trackers.

Tile today is launching support for Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, so people with smart devices like the Echo speaker or Google Home can find their items using voice commands.

Reference

1. Tweney, Dylan. “How Tile Went from Crowdfunding to 2M Units Sold in Two Years.” VentureBeat, VentureBeat, 19 Aug. 2015, https://venturebeat.com/2015/08/18/how-tile-went-from-crowdfunding-to-2m-units-sold-in-two-years/
2. Perez, Sarah. “Tile’s New Lost Item Trackers Have Double the Range, Better Looks.” TechCrunch, TechCrunch, 8 Aug. 2017, https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/08/tiles-new-lost-item-trackers-have-double-the-range-better-looks/
3. O’Grady, Jason D. “Tile Co-Founder Mike Farley on the Perils of Crowdfunding (Interview).” ZDNet, ZDNet, 4 Dec. 2015, www.zdnet.com/article/tile-co-founder-mike-farley-on-the-perils-of-crowdfunding-interview/.
4. “Tile | Jabil.” Jabil.com, www.jabil.com/insights/CaseStudies/jabil-digitizes-lost-and-found-for-tile.html.