Aerotain — The Spot 2018
Who said drones cannot be safe? Aerotain proves the contrary with its drones that directly interact with the audience at large shows. We met Daniel Meier, co-founder & CEO, at his booth during The Spot 2018.
Discover a great talk about the future of the drone industry and the challenges that engineer entrepreneurs face.
The Swiss Unicorn: The drone industry in Switzerland is quite vivid. There are several companies offering hardware or software solutions for different niches. Is it hard to compete in this sector?
David Meier: Yes, this why finding your own niche is essential. In the consumer market, Chinese manufacturers such as DJI dominate the market. However, there are still plenty of opportunities in the commercial sector. The Swiss drone companies all focus on a specific area (e.g. Flyability for inspection, Sensefly for monitoring). There are several players but they all have their respective business to business application. This market is estimated to grow much more than the consumer market.
Did we reach a plateau in the consumer market?
It is hard to say whether we already reached it but the price level is so low now that it does not make sense for us to go into that market.
What was the inception of the product? How come you decided to target large shows?
From the very beginning, we wanted to create a safe drone that could operate around people. We developed it as a video and picture recording device. A flying camera if you want.
But then the reaction of the people at our first events showed us that the visual aspect and the interaction with the audience were way more valuable. Therefore, we shifted our focus away from only acquiring images to more gaming, interactive experiences. Slowly be surely we became more of an entertainment-driven company.
How do you offer your services?
At this point, we offer it as a turnkey solution. We provide logistics and operations. The client only needs to tell us what he wants, when and where and we take care of the rest. We want to make it as simple as possible for the client and learn as much as possible from the market.
How do you split your efforts between R&D and Sales & Marketing?
I would say it is about 50/50. Sales and marketing took a lot of importance lately.
We do not have a lot of investors. The only external investment we received is the prize money of Venturekick. And that’s the only external investment we received (AN 130kCHF in total). We rely on projects to sustain and develop our company. Therefore, we need to push hard into sales.
When do you plan to be break-even?
We already are. Now comes the interesting part as we would like to grow. We are currently considering an investment round. We see that the market timing is right and that we have an attractive offering. External investments could help us accelerate growth.
What is your growth strategy apart from the investment you already mentioned?
For now, we still want to keep our service business model. However, we will work more and more with partners to help us in the operations. We are currently trying a few things out and will decide on how to proceed in the future based on our learnings.
Today we are at an event related to innovation in sports.
You offer your services for different types of events.
Do you see differences between your customers?
All sorts of events have very different customers. It is a fragmented market. There are so many stakeholders you must consider for a single event: the organizers, the sponsors, the venues, the teams or bands.
So you must adapt your message and learn how to talk to all these different people.
That is right, and it is hard to get all these people on the same table.
Therefore, you need to have a value proposition for each of them.
As an engineer, it is incredibly hard to understand this (laughs).
But we start to get it.
The founder team is made of ETH engineers?
Yes
Did you meet each other working on this project?
Two of the management team are founders, and then we have someone else who joined us who also worked on this project during his studies. We have a core team that is technology oriented. We are trying to bring our technology to the market which is obviously a completely different thing than doing research.
Do you have a specific failure that you want to talk about?
We first developed our drone with technology in mind. We wanted to do it as optimal and as fancy as possible.
The engineer’s way!
Totally, but then we figured that to be effective on the market, it had to be way simpler and cost-effective.
What gets rewarded in the research world is not the same as what adds value to the market.
Can you derivate a lesson for engineer entrepreneurs?
I will give you a quote:
Keep it as simple as possible and as complicated as necessary.
Boil it down to the essentials. When coming from the engineering side, you tend to fall in love with the technology and its complexity. There is often no appreciation of simple things.
If you manage to keep things simple, it will also make your life much easier. Maintenance and further developments will be more manageable.
Why are you at The Spot today?
Since we are a startup, networking is a key element. We want to meet as many people as possible to broaden our network. It is not about making sales but meeting people for the future. We are building company awareness.
We also want to show visitors of the show how safe our drone is. Often people think that drones cannot be safe. By making it fly here, we show that it is indeed possible.
Which area of your business would you like to study deeper?
It is still hard for us to understand how interconnections work between federations, teams, and venues. We would like to understand what is the best approach to scale as fast as possible in such a fragmented market.
Influencers and decision-makers are different in each area.
Yes, and identifying them is not an easy task. We do not have the network or complete understanding. We still need to build that. We are convinced that we have an excellent service and offering but bringing it to the right people is difficult.
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