Giving Mine Sweeping A Whole New Meaning

I drove to the airport after the Wall Street Journal Conference with Colin Angle, the CEO of iRobot. I must admit that iRobot is a cool name for a company. Its one of the better uses of the "i" or "e" naming trick (e.g., iMovie, eToys, etc.) I've seen. iRobot touts itself as a leading robotics company that is "building robotic products that make life safer and easier for people in many walks of life." The problem for iRobot is trying to serve those "many walks of life" simultaneously.

You've probably seen iRobot's biggest selling product. It is a robotic vacuum cleaner called the Roomba. It looks a bit like some of the more successful combatants on Robot Wars. Ironically, my wife and I had been joking about the Roomba on the way down to the conference, as we happened upon it while perusing the ever-amusing Sky Mall magazine (none other than Andrew Anker won a Roomba in a drawing at the TED conference this year -- I'll have to ask him how he likes it). The Roomba is actually getting great traction in the retail world and Colin gave me a tutorial on product marketing through the home shopping channels.

What struck me as the most interesting challenge Colin faces in building his business was not the vagaries of consumer marketing (although that will continue to be a challenge for the Roomba) but, rather, the difficulty of selling to massively disjointed markets. At the same time that iRobot is selling its $200 self propelled vacuum cleaner, it is also building all terrain surveillance robots that are being used for all sorts of military and police applications (such as sweeping Afghan caves) and the internal logic for the My Real Baby doll. It is true, as Colin points out, that all these things are problems that can be solved with robotics. But that does not go very far when it comes to sales and marketing.

The problem is that it is will be hard for iRobot to gain credibility and build market momentum in one vertical based upon the success of its products in other verticals. It is highly unlikely that the military officer charged with sourcing a surveillance robot will be more inclined to purchase from iRobot as a result of mass market penetration of their roving auto vac. And it is equally unlikely that a parent will be more inclined to buy their child a My Real Baby because its innards are built by the folks who brought you My Self Cleaning Rugbot and My First Cave Sweeping Pal.

Startups are small and have limited resources. Therefore, in most instances, it makes good sense to pick a market and build it out first before jumping into other markets, no matter how promising they may look from a far. A company like iRobot would be well served to pick the market that it views as most promising for near term penetration (both in terms of breadth of coverage and revenue generation) and stayed focused on that market for some time. If it turns out that the market you pick does not prove as fruitful as you had thought earlier, you can always change course and chase another market. But spreading your company too thin when it is still resource constrained can result in the inability to capitalize on the successes you may achieve and will make those successes less likely in the first place.

Comments

[Neal Crocker]

"I, Robot" is a book by Isaac Assimov with, if I remember correctly, a robot protagonist. I wonder if the people at iRobot are aware of this. I'm guessing that whoever chose the name is and that the naming resonance is deliberate. I'd be curious if there's any kind of intellectual property issues involved in naming a company after a book.

[Con Tendem]

1st to Neal: I am sure people at iRobot are aware of the Azimov book. I do not think you could work @ MIT AI labs and not read it. Since their name is not at all the same as the title of the book this point is moot (at least until WIPO and RIAA get to them)

Now to the blog entry:

I believe the reason iRobot is having trouble concentrating in just one or two verticals is two-fold. First, their mission statement clearly says, "3 - Have Fun

Building a great company takes time. By creating a business with a superior work environment, long term stability, amazingly talented coworkers, and fascinating projects, we remain fresh, creative, and determined. " The challenging applications for the military are fun. Fitting that same application into a doll is fun. Finally getting a robot to serve you drinks is really fun. While the markets are different, the technology is much the same for all of them.

Secondly, I think that iRobot people realize that other teams are close to them in product development. Today they can probably make the most money with military applications, but then a chance to establish themselves in the consumer or toy market may be gone. In the long term, large payoff will have to come from retail, not the military, but they cannot really abandon the military market right now as it is fun, pays the bills, and lets them develop the kind of advanced technology they can later squeeze into a vacuum cleaner. Abandoning the military would mean losing their testing grounds and that is at a premium when your competition is Honda and Sony.

[Lukasz]

when you look at iRobots HP in the "about us" section, you'll find "Build cool stuff" as number one within the mission statement. Numer 2 is "making money".

This might explain, why the tingle with multiple markets simultanously.

The question remains, if making more money would enable them to build more cool stuff more quckly...