Shulie Tornel Alright, let's get started!

Shulie Tornel Welcome to the #HackChat everyone! Thank you so much for joining us @zakqwy

Julien Provenzano Hello Shulie Tornel

zakqwy Sure! Glad to be here. Lots of good questions on the spreadsheet.

Shulie Tornel Can you please give us a brief intro of yourself and what you do and Neurotinker?

zakqwy Absolutely. I'm Zach Fredin, and I started a company called NeuroTinker a few years back with Joe Burdo. NeuroTinker exists to commercialize an open-source educational product called #NeuroBytes.

zakqwy I am the lead engineer, although six months ago we brought on an intern-soon-to-be-employee named Jarod White. He heads up firmware development efforts now.

Shulie Tornel What has been your overall experience starting an open source company? Have you started a company before?

zakqwy Nope. Never started a company. Overall it's been a crazy learning experience; the hardest lesson is to decide what (of a million things) to _not_ worry about on a given day.

Shulie Tornel Sounds stressful but a really great experience!

zakqwy Re: open source specifically -- that part has been amazing. We don't have a massive community contributing the project at this point, but we have gotten a great deal of help from a few interested parties. A lot of folks have come out of the woodwork and said something to the effect of, "This is a neat project, I wish I'd started it a long time ago, but I'm glad you decided to open source the whole things and now I'd like to lend a hand"

zakqwy [ if you're curious -- eveything is at https://github.com/neurotinker ]

Shulie Tornel speaking of community, @Jordan Bunker asks: How did you start to build a community around your product? How do you manage and organize the feedback/ideas that you get from that community?

Shulie Tornel or.. how did these people come out of the woodwork? word of mouth, other communities (like Hackaday)?

zakqwy I'd say we're still starting to build a community around the project. The first real gathering of folks coalesced around the project site on this page, and ended up mostly approaching the project from a technical / engineering perspective. We were finalists in the 2015 Hackaday Prize, and that gave us a good bump in terms of people seeing the project.

zakqwy On the actual project page, I (and now others) try to be as honest as possible -- talking about our mistakes, hang-ups, stuff we have tried for six months to decide but haven't finalized, that kind of thing. If you peruse the project logs and their comments, you'll see a lot of really valuable input that often got integrated into product iterations.

zakqwy Other communities -- it's been a bit tougher for us to build an online/accessible community of neuroscience (/ biology / A&P / robotics / etc) educators, particularly at the high school level. The majority of those interactions happen in person, which can be nice (as we make a physical product that is best to see in person), but isn't terribly efficient.

zakqwy @Jordan Bunker , my suggestion when you start building a community, especially at the beginning, is to do it yourself. Show your cards, be honest, and actually listen when you get feedback from people. That kind of back-and-forth respect goes a long way.

Shulie Tornel @seesemichaelj asks for suggestions on building a community around a product that serves a niche market. Any tips, based on your experience?

zakqwy Frustrating but exciting. I'd also suggest a bit of caution when selecting the venue to host your community. If you build a following on Facebook (or most other social media sites at this point), don't expect to be able to actually reach that community without spending some cash.

@zakqwy Good to know! Thank you :)

zakqwy I think for niche markets, subreddits seem to work really well. Ideally you have a few engaged and knowledgeable community members that help you moderate it -- or better yet, run it entirely. The quadcopter folks (and 3d printing, and other newer niches driven by OSH) have pretty active subreddits that are excellent.

Duncan @zakqwy I like what you said about doing it yourself and show your cards. I horribly failed years ago at starting a community. I relied too much on others rather than making things happen myself then enlisting help as needed. Lessons learned.

zakqwy So the converse to that is ... it's your project. You want people to get excited about it, but you really have to drive enthusiasm. It takes a lot of momentum for other folks to fill that role for you, I've found.

zakqwy @Duncan I'd also encourage you to not be afraid to say things to an empty room. I started putting up detailed project logs and having mindless conversations with myself about NeuroBytes problems long before anyone really took interest. Then when things come up later, you can always link back to previous posts.

Radomir Dopieralski There is a saying "if you want your people to buid a ship, don't tell them to gather the wood and start building, but rather teach them to love the sea"

zakqwy That is fantastic saying! I'd add, you can also gather wood and build a really shitty ship and start showing it off, then the master shipwrights will come out of the woodwork and tell you how to do it right. I mean, don't build your company's technical foundation on that entirely, of course...

Shulie Tornel I love that, @Radomir Dopieralski

Shulie Tornel Let's get into a little bit about open source start ups: @Jordan Bunker asks 'Has it been difficult to find funding for starting your Open Hardware business? Any suggestions for those just starting an Open Hardware business?'

Duncan @zakqwy Good point. I managed to get all the people enthusiastic, but it was much like herding ADHD cats. If I had set up the basics myself then farmed out where necessary I could have pulled off more. I love the "love the sea" quote BTW.

zakqwy Finding funding took a lot of time and ended up with a few dead-ends before we were successful. Before getting into detail, I'd say be prepared for this part to take waaay longer than you think is reasonable.

Traumflug I think it's also a matter of having the focus close enough. If the field of (current) action is too large, one or two persons simply can't handle all the upcoming questions. Only as stuff gets documented permanently, focus can be relaxed a bit, the field of action widened.

zakqwy Our first 'real' funding came from a National Science Foundation grant that provided salary support and product development funds for 6 months starting 1/1/2016. That was awesome -- grant money is non dilluting -- but it also took a long time to arrive.

Christopher Bero @zakqwy SBIR?

zakqwy As in -- we applied for the grant in May of 2015 and heard nothing until October, and then had about 2 months of back-and-forth scariness with our grant officer before getting our formal award letter a few weeks before the cash showed up.

Shulie Tornel How did you decide to budget and allocate that funding?

zakqwy Hey, Joe is here! Everyone, meet Joe Burdo.

Benchoff woot 

zakqwy :-) 

Shulie Tornel Welcome @NeuroJoe! 

NeuroJoe Hi all. Happy to be here! 

Julien Provenzano Hi 

Ytitne the Great "grant money is non dilluting" as in bankable? 

zakqwy @Shulie Tornel , NSF provides a decent template that shows different categories for funding, but we had to decide how much to put in each bucket. They advise starting with BLS info on median US salaries to figure out how much to pay yourself (which is a wide range). 

zakqwy Non dilluting, as in it doesn't affect your cap table. As our grant officer said, "Our ROI is you hiring more workers that pay federal income taxes." 

zakqwy You're allowed to keep 7% of the funding as 'profit', to be spent as you will. Everything else must be spent in the grant performance period based on the plan you put together in your original application. 

Shulie Tornel wow, that's interesting! 

Shulie Tornel @Christopher Bero asks 'What are the models for generating revenue as an open source business?

How well do they work / what are the tradeoffs?' 

zakqwy It's a pretty fascinating process, and one that isn't terribly well-known; the Small Business Administration (via various other entities such as NSF) give out something like $20B/yr to fund startups. 

zakqwy Well... for us, we want to sell physical stuff for a profit. 

Christopher Bero In that case, are there concerns about copy cats? 

Julien Provenzano what will happen if a chinese company copies you ? 

zakqwy The tradeoff with OSH is that you're licensing IP in a very liberal manner; in our case, we're giving away our board designs and firmware and explicitly telling people they can build and sell neuron simulators, provided they release under the same license. 

zakqwy For us, our 'IP' isn't our firmware or hardware -- it's our relationships with larger customers. I mean, there's other stuff too -- we own the trademark on NeuroBytes(R), NeuroTinker, and our logo. 

Christopher Bero Cool 

zakqwy I'll give you an example -- very few people on this site would base a project on an Arduino R3, right? I mean.. a _stock_, $20-25 board with ATmega328P. 

Ytitne the Great Legally they don't have to honor that license though, correct? 

zakqwy You'd either get a bare chip, or you would get a knockoff board on Aliexpress. 

amigabill How do you find available OS hardware licenses and choose among them? I understand that GPL etc. have loopholes as you do not "publish" hardware products, so copyright gets weird on that. 

zakqwy But the other day, I walked into a Minneapolis Public Schools classroom and they had a brand new crate of real R3s. It's because Arduino (and in that case, Arduino's distributor) had the right relationships and provided support for the sale. 

zakqwy @amigabill , that's a great question and not really one I can answer with much authority at this point. Our products are licensed under GPLv3 and I've read a bit about those loopholes, so we have considered other OSH licenses (such as CERN). But we haven't made a change at this point. 

zakqwy @Ytitne the Great as far as I know, OSH hasn't been litigated in the courts. At least not GPL-based OSH. 

Ytitne the Great Isn't it because the school was unaware of cheaper alternatives? 

Ytitne the Great Hardware isn't protected by copyright, so why would it ever get tot he courts? 

zakqwy Well.. the alternatives are cheaper because they don't have the brand reputation and customer support provided by Arduino or the distributor. Schools have a different set of needs -- they'll pay four times the cost for something that won't fail, or if it does, they have a phone number they can call. 

Christopher Bero Or the school was concerned with quality / durability. It ties into what @zakqwy said about building a brand. 

Shulie Tornel Traumfug asks: 'What do you think about taking open source not as a business model, but as an asset to a traditional business model?

Such a taking implies a couple of consequences, of course. For example, that one can't make money on being open source alone; one also needs something that can be actually sold. Like adjectant services, like proof of reliability, like additional convenience, like custom services, like (not so welcome, but think of Android) proprietary blobs improving the experience with the open source part.' 

Ytitne the Great Perceived quality 

amigabill Or maybe school was smart enough to htink about support issues. During my MS program I did a lab semester making embedded system design, zigbee controlled light and ceiling fans from touchpscreen "wall switches". I bought some cheap, small LCD shields from China, but have never been abel to get them to work I ordered more expensive, but bigger model, from repurable dealer and that worked great. 

zakqwy Yup, perceived quality. 

Ytitne the Great $80 t shirts 

zakqwy I'd advise anyone looking to sell hardware to schools to spend some time in a classroom. See how teachers handle new products, see what stays on the shelf, see what students break, etc 

Shulie Tornel Customer service and quality is definitely a huge part of business models for open source companies 

Traumflug I think @zakqwy already answered part of my question a moment ago: it's not only the hardware getting sold, it's also the relation. Man institutions want not a cheap board, they want a solution to solve their task. 

Julien Provenzano -->shulie : that's the expensive part of the open hardware, support & quality 

zakqwy @Traumflug I think OSH will always just be an asset to a business model -- it's not everything. Products don't sell themselves, customers break stuff no matter what, brands must be protected, etc -- all of those factors exist for all of the OSH companies out there now. 

Shulie Tornel speaking of support, @Jordan Bunker asks: It's fun to ship products, and even more fun hearing how the products help the people who buy them, but what about when things go wrong? How do you handle technical support issues? Have you had any manufacturing defects that have caused customer concern? 

BetaMax oh wait for it... damm! i'm too late for the "Open Source Startup Lessons" chat with Zach Fredin?? 

zakqwy I think I'd be misrepresenting us if I didn't make this clear, too -- we've made a few thousand boards and sold products into a number of classrooms, but our products aren't yet available on the open market. Our roadmap suggests that will change around the end of this year, but at this point our experience with customer support (particularly customers we don't previously know) is just theoretical. 

zakqwy Hey @BetaMax ! I'm still here :-) 

Shulie Tornel @BetaMax Yes, but we'll have a transcript 

Shulie Tornel I mean, not too late, but a little late. 

Arsenijs @BetaMax Just scroll up =) 

BetaMax Oh well :D just for a couple of questions :D 

Shulie Tornel @zakqwy that's exciting! the end of this year is creeping up 

Ytitne the Great How many units sold through and at what price? 

Traumflug Nowadays I absolutely agree, @zakqwy. A few years back everybody was enthusiastic about OSH enough to say "just do it, it magically becomes profitable". So I did, and I learned the lesson :-) 

zakqwy @Jordan Bunker I can speak about our plans, generally -- the most important issue with customer support is responsiveness and understanding the basic expectations of customers. At this point, if anything goes wrong (including someone deciding they don't want your product), you pretty much have to just give them a refund and help them ship it back. 

Lars R. "we've made a few thousand boards and sold products into a number of classrooms, but our products aren't yet available on the open market." 

Lars R. That seems to be a key element. 

seesemichaelj Gotta get back to work; great insights @zakqwy! Thanks for answering my question about niche markets! Best of luck! 

@zakqwy Thanks! 

zakqwy It absolutely is, @Lars R. . We're insanely lucky to have salary support to fund R&D, and we haven't had to deal with a real customer-facing disaster yet. 

Arsenijs Yeah, like customers cancelling large orders as soon the order is marked as "shipped". 

zakqwy @Ytitne the Great , if memory serves we've sold ~10 small (10-15 pcs) NeuroBytes kits and three larger kits. We experimented with several price points between $10 and $15 per board including accessories (cables, etc). 

Shulie Tornel @zakqwy Do you have time to stay and answer a few more questions about open hardware, licenses, patents? 

zakqwy Absolutely 

zakqwy I mean, as best I can. I'm not a patent lawyer. 

Shulie Tornel @Julien asks 'Where can we legally protect Open hardware project worldwide ? If someone just copycat us, can we make a trial ? any association to protect us ?' 

Lars R. I guess: It helps against copy cats. So it provides some sort of protection enabling the success of the open source HW project in the first place. Especially in the beginning. 

BetaMax From: "Traumflug

Nowadays I absolutely agree, @zakqwy. A few years back everybody was enthusiastic about OSH enough to say "just do it, it magically becomes profitable". So I did, and I learned the lesson :-)" 

Ytitne the Great No OSHW protection outside of a patent. 

zakqwy Well.. for starters, the best way (in my opinion) to protect yourself is to get a trademark on your company and product name. 

Lars R. Well, if everybody can buy your product without building it... 

zakqwy That's how Arduino does it. Not that that prevents knockoff Arduinos from being sold under the name. 

zakqwy @Lars R. wwill they? 

zakqwy *will 

Lars R. ...it is easier to estimate the success of copying the product 

BetaMax We recently learn the lesson to not relay on another OSHW Crodfunded project for timeless release and delivery for build an BOM for another project..... we had to reinvent the wheel for the better I guess 

Lars R. In your case, one has to build the product to even get an impression of whether it is worth copying. That is additional effort. 

zakqwy @Lars R. a great deal depends on the target market and customer base. For us, we expect to sell _some_ boards to folks in the open source hardware community -- people interested in neural networks and biology, that sort of thing. But the vast majority of our customers, and our marketing efforts, are in the educational realm -- those folks don't usually cruise eBay for deals on knockoffs, and they aren't going to solder them together either. 

Shulie Tornel @Ytitne the Great asks 'OSHardware licenses – Just marketing fluff? Any downsides or problems with just posting design information then saying it’s open source hardware (lower case)?' 

zakqwy In theory, yes. But again, I'm not sure how many 'official' OSH licenses (GPL, CERN, etc) have actually been defended successfully. 

Ytitne the Great Yes to having downsides? 

zakqwy Personally, I like using a license that has broad community acceptance and support, simply so folks understand the basic outline of what it means. We're GPLv3, and most people in the open-source community know that means you can copy our stuff and sell it and modify it, but you have to release it under the same terms. 

zakqwy Yes to having downsides. 

zakqwy But in practice it may not really matter. 

Ytitne the Great What downsides to not using a OSHW license? 

zakqwy Those I mentioned above -- people not understanding your intention regarding attribution, selling, remixing, etc 

zakqwy Are you non-commercial? Share-alike? etc 

Ytitne the Great People that don’t attribute or pay you royalties, wouldn’t have otherwise and the license has no legal teeth to change that, does it? 

zakqwy I mean.. are you asking me to say that our license gives us no legal recourse to go after someone that doesn't follow our licensing guidelines? 

Ytitne the Great Correct. 

Ytitne the Great 100% 

zakqwy Uh. I'm not going to say that. Pretty sure our lawyer would advise against it. 

Shulie Tornel haha :) 

Julien Provenzano Do you have any patent on your technology, even it is open hardware ? 

Shulie Tornel okay just a few more questions 

Traumflug I think it doesn't. And this fact doesn't matter, because as a small guy one can't defend it in court anyways. 

Shulie Tornel @Muriel Green asks 'What should I show to or ask of a patent attorney during my first appointment?' 

zakqwy But I will say more broadly that if you get into OSH with the intention of litigating IP infringement, you may want to go a different route :-) 

zakqwy @Julien Provenzano we don't have a patent on our tech. As far as we're concerned, there isn't much patentable about it -- modular electronic neuron simulators have been around for a long time. We could patent specific parts of the product, but we'd prefer to focus on fast iteration and getting our product (eventually) to market. 

zakqwy @Muriel Green , I'd start by asking them if they are familiar with open source as a broad concept and philosophically agree with its foundational principles. That seems a bit odd, but if you aren't on the same page -- pro OSH -- with your lawyer, they'll give you bad advise. 

Muriel Green Thank you Zach :) 

Dmitry Sukhoruchkin @zakqwy , If I make my project with schemes and code under GPLv3 and plan to monetize by subscription on service which will be preinstalled on devices, am I right that I can install later my service on all forks of my device? 

zakqwy Sure. I should add that we have a lawyer, but they aren't a patent lawyer specifically. 

Muriel Green Do you have more legal needs in other areas than patent law? 

zakqwy @Dmitry Sukhoruchkin I'm not sure. My gut tells me no. 

zakqwy @Muriel Green yes -- mostly routine 'running a company' stuff. Reviewing contracts. Preparing and updating operating agreements. Figuring out option pools. That sort of thing. 

Muriel Green That follow up question sounded weird, sorry. I mean to ask are there other legal considerations I'm not foreseeing with starting up a OSHW company? 

Muriel Green Ah, thanks! 

Shulie Tornel One last question, from @Muriel Green: Any advice for keeping track of the various licenses for the OSS and OSH used in my project? 

Ytitne the Great After you make your products available to the public, how long (do you forecast) until you can permanently quit your day job? 

zakqwy no worries! I think it really depends. In some cases, stuff like product liability is really important so you may want to seek expertise in that area, for example. 

zakqwy @Muriel Green , we keep it pretty simple -- we use GPL v3 for everything, at least firmware and hardware stuff. And when we forget, we just check the LICENSE file in the repo's top level directory. 

zakqwy @Ytitne the Great , for us it was 18 months. 

zakqwy Re: day job and financial stuff generally -- a great way to stretch your runway is to decrease your expenses. I'll throw out a plug for Minneapolis. 

Ytitne the Great Was? As in you already quit? Selling thousands of units over 18 months for dollars of profit sounds too low. Was that due to the grand money? 

Professor Fartsparkle why did you decide on GPLv3 for you hardware? I often hear the GPL is considered a bad choice for hardware as it specifically speaks about software 

zakqwy Yup. We got a Phase I that funded us from 1/1/16 to 6/30/16, and our Phase II started 3/1/17. We were frugal in between. 

Ytitne the Great You're part of an accelerator as well, correct? ESDi? Do they give seed money? 

BetaMax @zakqwy is a profitable or legal safe way to go with an OSHw reference design with periferals and structure but remain BSD/LGPL approach on the firmware sides? We have a open source bussiness model around a modular system and the secret sauce to sync and control everything is in a FPGA Chip with some IP Cores closed because 3rd party vendors and some Own coded IP cores 

zakqwy @Professor Fartsparkle , good question. We agree with the core concepts of GPLv3 -- specifically the share-alike part. But I'm not convinced it's the license we should use forever, so I'm open to suggestions. I've heard good things about the CERN license. 

zakqwy @BetaMax I'm not sure -- we don't have any closed IP cores (or FPGAs) in our project. 

Professor Fartsparkle that and CC-BY-SA I often see in oshw projects 

Radomir Dopieralski I like CC, it's clear and tested 

zakqwy @Ytitne the Great yes, we participated in EDSi's fall 2016 cohort. They did provide us with a limited bit of seed money, but it wasn't 'salary support' money. 

zakqwy Yeah I've seen CC-BY-SA quite a bit on OSHW stuff too. We'll look into that more, it may be worth making a change. 

Shulie Tornel That's all the time we have for today! :) I think we got to most questions on the sheet. 

Shulie Tornel @zakqwy You are more than welcome to stay and answer more questions. 

zakqwy Thanks @Shulie Tornel and all for the questions! 

Shulie Tornel and always welcome back to just hang and chat, too. :) 

Boian Mitov Thank you @zakqwy and @Shulie Tornel :-) 

zakqwy :-) 

Audi McAvoy Thanks @zakqwy 

Shulie Tornel Thanks so so much for being here, @zakqwy. I hope everyone else found it as useful and interesting as I did! (I worked for a start up, albeit, not open source). I love hearing about start up experiences. 

BetaMax Thanks @zakqwy and @Shulie Tornel for the opportunity 

Traumflug Great chat, @zakqwy ! Thank you very much. 

zakqwy Glad to offer my perspective. I do suggest running the same questions by folks that are a bit further down the commercialization road -- we're still pretty dang early-stage. 

Shulie Tornel Do keep your project page updated so we know when it is avail to market!! :)

zakqwy Will do! I owe the page an update, so I'll get on that.