The car security system of the 21st century. Volme. How to keep up with a hardware startup during a pandemic?
Hello everyone!
My name is Kostya and I’m a product designer. It has been more than two years since me and my co-founders working on our project — a hardware startup called Volme.
In this article, I will tell you how a team of 3 people living and working in different countries was able to go through a very difficult way from an idea to a working prototype. Also, I will share some useful tips for those who have an idea to create their own hardware product and, like us a few years ago, and for those who are just at the beginning of this journey and have no idea where to start.
Problem
Our team is originally from Ukraine, where the problem of car theft, unfortunately, is still very acute. Moreover, in Ukrainian large cities (like in pretty much all large cities around the globe) the traffic is very high which causes eternal traffic jams, and there are always not enough guarded parking spaces as well. These obstacles put you in a situation when you park a car not where you want, but where you can — even in the areas you don’t know well. Even if you own a garage, or leave your car in a guarded parking lot it won’t protect it at all times: for example when you do shopping in a mall and leave a car in a mall’s parking.
How the idea was born
The idea of creating a new, modern car security system was caused primarily by a chain of issues related to the fact that we, as car owners, have no idea what happens to our cars while we’re not around. We have no real connection with our cars just relying only on the built-in alarm system, which can be easily cracked by the simplest device purchased on the well known Chinese website. Also, people buy GPS trackers. Yes, they could help you to find an already stolen car, but not to prevent a theft itself. So we chose the way to prevent theft, rather than its “quality” search after.
The idea of Volme is based on all known physical principle — the ultrasound reflection effect. Ultrasonic sensors “scan” the car when the owner is not around. When you walk far enough to lose Bluetooth connection with Volme device, our system starts to work. When someone tries to steal your car by opening a door or breaking a glass, Volme will immediately notify you and automatically turn on the camera in real-time broadcasting what’s happening in your car right away.
Volme can turn on and off the car’s security mode (either automatically or manually from the app) via Bluetooth, but with one significant difference — it’s almost impossible to hack it, thanks to the algorithm based on cryptography. Why “practically”? Because it’s theoretically possible, but it will take millions of years of computing from the most powerful computer on Earth.
First steps
My co-founder has an engineering degree, and his father has a Ph.D. in physics. It helped us a lot to create something working to test our idea for viability.
First problems
From the start, we planned to build Volme fully wireless, to make the process from purchasing to installation in a car would be just 5 minutes or even less. But…
The deeper we dug, the more questions we had.
How to make a device that doesn’t need to be recharged every day (in our case to deprive a car of protection for the period of charging), to make it compact and at the same time to have a battery of at least 20,000 mAh, or even more?
Long story short. During the development and testing process, we changed several different sensors, Raspberry Pis, GPS/LTE modules, etc. That’s because, under real conditions, selected components didn’t work as we expected.
What do I mean by the “real conditions”? As an example, let me tell you about one of the situations we had. In the first stages of the prototype development, we were testing ultrasonic sensors stability and the time our system can work from a single battery charge (by the time we were still aiming to make Volme fully wireless). First tests were conducted in the bathroom because it feats ideally: closed volume (similar to a car) and it has doors that allow you to test if an intrusion detection works.
The “bathroom tests” showed astonishing results: intrusion detection worked perfectly, no “fake alarms” etc. We had a strong feeling that we have already built a robust and sharp intrusion detection system. But things went in the wrong direction right after we put the prototype in a real car. The system started to behave like crazy: it registered the door opening once per ten times and it was constantly registering fake alarms. After taking a closer look at the logs of our prototype device the reason for this behavior become obvious — the bathroom environment was ideal: the walls are perfectly flat, which makes an ultrasound reflection perfect. With this knowledge, we reworked the algorithm and in all the future tests the system was behaving pretty much as we expected.
Considering the above we can summarize: if you’re building a hardware startup, try to do all your tests in the real environment your product will be working (of course, if it's possible). Otherwise, you risk fooling yourself 🤷♂️
So, what to do next?
After all researches, experiments, and brainstorms we brought our prototype to the state “still a lot of work, but it works”, thus confirmed the workability of Volme idea.
«What to do next?» — the question, that every startup asks itself, sooner or later.
Nowadays you can’t just come to an investor with your idea and promise that everything will be great. You need something to back up your words. There are a few real ways to go, but, if you know the other ones you can go with those as well (and don’t forget to share it in comments):
- You can invest your own money or resort to FFF financing, build an MVP, and test your idea on mass-market use crowdfunding platform.
- You can go to accelerators/incubators, improve your business model, try to find a business-angel or pre-seed investments to get a small amount of money, and then back to the point №1.
- You can visit different conferences spending your own money, additionally validating the idea of your product and at the same time trying to find investments, and then — crowdfunding.
- If you are sure of your idea for 100%, take a loan in a bank and then get back to point №1 (think twice, huge risks).
Our first conference
Autumn 2019, my co-founder says that in spring there will be a conference in Warsaw, which we have to visit — Wolves Summit. By the way, we were selected for the Web Summit at the same time, but we weren’t ready for 100% and decided not to go.
Wolves Summit is a pretty large conference in Europe. Participation for startups is free, but with a prior selection from the conference organizers. The main feature of this conference is that you can book one-to-one meetings with potential investors, various companies that can help to grow your product in the future.
So, we’ve decided to participate. It’s a great opportunity to present your product, collect feedback, and communicate with different investors or funds. One of the points for selection is a demo video of “how your product works”. Obviously, if your product is software, you can create an interactive prototype, run screen recording and that’s it.
But how can you show hardware at the prototype stage even without a design?
How did we handle it?
Here is a photo of the box that was created to test the prototype. Why does the box look like this? Because we had to put the whole components somewhere, but the most important thing is to place the sensors correctly, for quality testing.
Do you agree that visit an international conference with such a box — not the best idea? 🤔
We didn’t have a product design for Volme at the time, because it’s a resource-intensive and time-consuming process. So, we decided to make the box with a similar form factor, but on a 3D printer, to at least somehow decently wrap our product and avoid participating in one of the major European tech conferences with a cardboard box!
As soon as the 3D box was successfully printed, we recorded a demo video on a smartphone, which we took part in as actors, playing a scene of a “car theft”, and demonstrating the work of Volme in real conditions. No matter how it looked (it was pretty funny as you can imagine), nevertheless, it worked out and Volme was selected to participate in the conference with the provision of a free exhibition stand.
The lesson we’ve learned: don’t afraid to take risks and somewhere seem ridiculous or even a bit weird. If it helps your product, forget about worrying.
COVID-19 and the reality of online conferences
And soon everything was ready! We bought plane tickets, booked apartments, and even pre-booked a roll-up banner directly in Warsaw. But already by the middle of March, the COVID-19 began to spread with an insane speed.
The organizers of the Wolves Summit were really puzzled about what to do about the situation. As a result, they decided to move a conference to an online format, which, in my opinion, wasn’t a fully thought-out solution. What is a benefit for a hardware startup at the prototype stage from attending an online conference?
One thing, in a “classic” offline conference, when people can touch your product, ask questions, criticize, praise, and absolutely another, in the online format, when you can’t show much because you have to present the idea within the framework of three-minute one-to-one meetings, with randomly selected people, and this time was clearly not enough. To be honest, this conference didn’t give us any meaningful results. But I’m pretty sure that the format of the conferences differs from event to event and in the COVID reality — online is the only way humanity can run this kind of public gathering.
So, taking part in online conferences or not — it’s only up to you.
What’s now?
We’ve been thinking a lot about further development, how and what we have to do considering the current situation in the world. It’s absolutely not clear how long it will take the world to open borders everywhere and people could gather at the world conferences again. We decided to get out of work “in the vacuum” and adapt to the new realities. But one thing was clear: we couldn’t go far with our 3D-printed prototype.
So, shortly after the conference, I contacted an industrial designer we discussed a design for Volme with a few months ago. He has a Red Dot Award for his previous design, and it looked like a perfect match for a collaboration. So, we’ve agreed on fully remote work to create something that we and our users would love. Well, we’ve made not just only a beautiful picture, but also we arranged the elements in such a way that our device would be as compact as possible.
Frankly speaking, we had to move away from the idea of fully wireless of Volme for a while, and we’ll be powered our device by OBD2 connector.
Well, on the other hand, we can live with it for some time and even give a choice to users between wireless and connected devices in the future. Currently, we’re in the negotiation stage with one Polish VC fund and at the same time preparing an application to the Ukrainian Startup Fund. We are planning to raise money on MVP for Volme and come out with crowdfunding.
Meet Volme 🥁
As a short summary, I’d like to say that working on a hardware product isn’t easy, but if you have a huge desire and a cool idea, there will be no obstacles for you!
Thanks to everyone who has read our story to the end. If you like the idea of Volme, we launched a website where you can get more information, take a closer look at Volme from different angles, see its real size, and leave your email to get a good discount during our crowdfunding campaign.
Good luck and stay tuned!
