Why We Hit Pause on Indiegogo
"When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.”- Elon Musk
In this post, we wanted to share with all of you why we decided to launch our robot, the Coral One Ultra, on Indiegogo, and why we decided to put the campaign on hold.
Why We Launched on Indiegogo
After we heard everyone’s feedback on our first robot, the Coral One, we went back into the studio and redid everything. We made our robot smaller, more powerful, and smarter with a slim profile design, custom Japanese motors, and computer vision Coral GPS. We also wanted to make it a launch point for our robot operating system, WaveOS, and show that a robot can do a whole lot more than just clean your floors.
However, to get products into stores and onto your favorite e-commerce sites like Amazon, it takes more than a full calendar year of time: creating molds, conducting manufacturing tests, make deals with retailers, ship out product to them, negotiate pricing, etc. It’s a lot of steps.
Indiegogo was a very fast way to get our completely revamped robot out to you and the rest of the world and hear your feedback: what you like and don’t like.
Testing the electronic components of the Coral One Ultra.
What Happened
In preparation for launch, we teamed up with an amazing group of marketers and people from PR to spread the word that the Ultra was coming. Thousands of you signed up to our campaign and we couldn’t have been more honored and grateful. We spent months tweaking our prototypes and offerings to what we felt like answered everyone’s wishes. Then we launched.
We were expecting to fund our goal in the first week to help kickstart enough funds to begin manufacturing. However, it soon became reality that it wasn’t going to happen this time around. There may have been a lot of factors as to why our campaign didn’t get the lift off we were expecting. So, we decided to hit “pause” on our campaign and take this time to ask for your feedback and reflect
CEO of Coral Ted Ko (left) getting feedback from a pop-up event in NYC.
We Want Your Feedback and You to Be A Part of The Journey
We are ready and want to get the Coral One Ultra out to you and deliver a robot built with the highest quality, thoughtful design, and an incredible experience. And we want you to be a part of that journey.
Share with us your thoughts on what you like about the Ultra, what you don’t like, and what you would like to see. We’ll be hosting pop up events all around the U.S. and would love to hear your feedback in person. Be sure to sign up on our email newsletter to stay updated on our website.