Dear Eve family,
It’s time to put crowd development back on track!
Our community has provided a lot of awesome ideas in the What’s Next? category. It’s finally time to act on your input, so we are officially starting the next crowd development project now. And we need your input for that. While the community is going through a major update this topic will be the place for people to discuss Eve’s next projects!
What have we learned?
A lot! As you know our first crowd developed product was Eve V. It was our first time running a crowd development project with the community. With your input, we made Project: Pyramid Flipper a success that resulted in the V. But it wasn’t always easy. A compact design, little room for heat dissipation and a lot of moving parts, make a 2-in-1 computer one of the hardest product types to design and manufacture.
We did everything from scratch, by ourselves, which took a lot of time and presented us with a very steep learning curve. We had to find and connect with manufacturers and suppliers and develop quality standards and testing procedures for them. We placed orders to suppliers based on forecasts and negotiated credit terms with them.
If you want a look behind the scenes of manufacturing of the V, we have some videos available.
I think we made just about all the mistakes that could be made, and some of the many lessons we learned are that we must:
- Focus on our strengths (the community, defining and developing products)
- Find partners that compensate for our weaknesses (big processes, supply chain management, shipping)
- Be physically closer to our supply chain to be faster and more effective
For these reasons and others, we decided to partner up with PCH International (you can read more about them in the big update). They have an extensive network of suppliers and good relationships with major suppliers around the world. Our plans won’t be turned upside-down by a screen supplier again!
But enough reflection, it’s time to look forward: to the most wanted tech products of 2019!
The plan
It’s hard to tell what people want just from attending tech shows, looking around stores or watching YouTube videos. There is quite a lot of marketing out there, with advertisements telling us what we should want according to focus groups or executive meetings. But what are the real pain points of people using tech today?
STEP 1: Find out what people want
This is why we start by asking you which product categories have the most room for improvement. Asking not just tech enthusiasts and industry insiders, but everyone. Normal people. End users. People who would actually use these products. People who actually know.
To kick off this project, we’ve created a short survey. Unlike previous projects we are using an external site to collect these results instead of forum polls. This provides us with new ways to ask questions and collect information.
This is your chance to contribute and be heard. The sooner you join in, the more you can influence the course of development!
Please click this link and take a few moments to voice your thoughts. Let us know what you think we should be working on in 2019!
STEP 2: Make what people want, together with you
Once the survey results are in, we will publish our findings and start the discussion around them. We will start narrowing down the options based on popularity and feasibility, working closely with PCH to benefit from their vast experience. Once we know which categories have the most potential, we will start developing new products that take into account the experiences and reasoning of the real experts: you, the users.
When we were working on the V we did not have the resources to focus on more than one product. Now that we have a bigger team, more experience and solid partners at our side, we are looking to pursue development of multiple products, combining projects of varying complexity. This way we may tackle a number of small projects in the time it takes us to develop a single, more challenging product.
Things to keep in mind
- Don’t forget to fill out the survey linked above!
- Products should be made based on what people want to use, not based on what the competition is doing.
- Want to add something that wasn’t covered by the survey? Post below!
- Don’t just say what you want, say why you want it.
- Stay on-topic as much as possible.
Let’s create some awesome tech together!
)
There are many improvements that can be made and I’d be very stoked and excited if there was a V2 by end of 2019 to address the current weaknesses of the current V which by 2018 standards isn’t very current anymore 