Zen-Tense: The Prevenge

Before I go on with the story of Zen Table – how it was finished, how I got to running a Kickstarter campaign, where we went from there – I’ve got to back up a bit and tell a little more about how we got to the point where any of that came next. I’ve got to tell you a bit about Lizzy.

Lizzy was a dream of mine since my mid-teens. She was a goal, and a reward of sorts, for years of hard work, late nights and achievements. Lizzy was my Lotus.

I feel a bit weird for feeling so much for a car, but she was a work of art in her own right.

I’d scrimped and saved to get my Lotus and I really loved driving it. The form and purity of its no-frills function, its lightweight design and aerospace epoxy-bonded aluminum, the racing seats and snug cockpit, the acceleration. She was quick, agile and a thrill to drive. I loved that car.

Then, one fateful day, with a bit of damp on the road, she lost traction on a slick, sharply curved on-ramp and died in spectacular fashion. I mean, she was destroyed. Totaled. We never found that right front wheel and I am thankful that wherever it landed nobody was hurt by its trajectory.

The Lotus’ advanced safety systems protected me and I walked away with only some bruises to show for the abrupt loss of something I had spent most of my adult life working toward.

I felt stupid mourning for a car. I mean, it’s just a thing, but that car represented so much of my young dreams and it was a loss.

At the time this happened, I had been working toward finishing the Zen Table, turning the working mechanism into a fully-functional, totally complete, large-scale table. A finished product. It was hard to eke out enough time to complete the thing when I was also working hard as a contractor to pay the bills, keep the lights on and the servers running, and a roof over our heads. Financial pressures are what stop a lot of good ideas from ever seeing the light of day.

And then Lizzy died and I had this big check from my insurance company to replace my car. So, I had a choice. I could go out and get a replacement, or I could buy something cheaper to drive and use the money to finish the Zen Table.

I talked with friends and family, showed them what I’d done so far and asked what they thought of it.

In the end, I traded the dream of my young life for a new one – making the Zen Table a viable product, something that others could enjoy as much I had.

Besides, Lizzy wasn’t replaceable.

Sit Down, Strap in and Hold On

Once the project felt like something that could be produced, I wanted to up the ante on the quality of the table construction, to go from a functional table and production proof-of-concept to a work of art; finished with beautiful and sustainable hardwood. A Zen Table.

My wife, Melissa, just happened to be a skilled wood-working artisan. Lucky break for me, really. Melissa designed and built a new and beautiful table around the mechanism and sand field. It was sturdy, accommodated the mechanism with room to work around and calibrate things, and was a beautiful, solid-wood table. We sourced the glass for the top and at last Zen Table was complete.

All I needed now was a way to market my invention, get some resources for manufacturing and get it out there.

Easier said than done – after nearly 20 years working on this invention, I discovered that the hard part was yet to come.

First, I reached out to Ed Zobrist, you remember him from Part I, for advice on how to get a product to market, and perhaps get some feelers out for potential investors. I asked him to share how someone would go about getting people interested in, and willing to back, an idea.

He was enthusiastic after seeing some of the video I’d shot and posted to YouTube. Though he also brought some buckets of cold water with the question of why we even needed an actual table that did the real thing, instead of just a flat screen with a computer simulation? I asked him to come see it in person, but our schedules never worked out and he conceded that he didn’t have the right sort of contacts for this type of product anyway.

Next, I reached out to Larry Braitman, who’d funded a project for a Facebook game I’d worked on. He told me he didn’t have a lot of insight to share since he only backed software products. He suggested that I try some crowdfunding on Kickstarter to prove that there were people in the world who would buy such a thing.

At this point, I had invested all my savings, as well as the additional money provided by Lizzy’s unfortunate demise. I was feeling a bit desperate to find someone who would help fund Simon Inc., and help me get this thing off the ground so that I could be assured that I could keep supporting my family, as well as get Zen Table to market.

Also, publicly asking for money was very personally challenging for me. To be clear, I’ve done sales pitches before, one-on-one and to groups of buyers, for products, games and things I’d built for the various companies I’d worked for. I actually enjoyed that part of my job and I was good at it.

But, the thought of putting my work on a forum like Kickstarter, visible to the general public, and ask for money was something else again. It felt as if I was standing on a corner, hat in hand, next to my shined up child, begging for spare change. Uncomfortable, to say the least.

I reached out to more people I knew – salespeople, tech people – no, not sure, and no again.

One last try to avoid that street corner. I reached out to the CEO and Co-Founder of one of the companies I’d worked for previously. He’d gotten a generous payout when the company was acquired, and was the kind of acquaintance I’d been told to reach out to for investment opportunities. To protect the innocent and not-so-innocent, we’ll call him Clu. He was excited about the table and told me, “It’s not just amazing, you took your time, energy, risk and you made this thing into a reality – it’s incredible.”

Then he asked a simple question that was flattering at the time, but in hindsight was where everything started to go wrong, “Should we go into business together?” I wasn’t sure.

The Going Got Tougher

I pulled together a Kickstarter campaign, and put my baby on the street corner to beg for cash.

As part of the campaign, I needed to define the various levels of funding and associated rewards – that by necessity had to cost less than the funding amount or the whole concept wouldn’t work.

I set my funding goal at $35,000, which in hindsight was ridiculously and naively low.

Now we get to the sticky part. I was concerned that the full sized coffee tables were expensive, and felt that there should be a lower cost alternative, a scaled down executive-toy version that was more accessible. Only, I didn’t yet have a working prototype for the desktop size.

I had made the full-size model with a custom on-board computer to run the firmware for existing patterns and the capability to accommodate downloads of new images. That computer was prototyped on protoboard and had a mess of wires that wouldn’t fit into a desktop size. I still needed to create a custom circuit board and figure out how to make the moving parts for a 8.5”x11” desktop size that would be durable and a reasonable cost to build. I was rapidly running out of money to keep funding the prototyping.

So, to create the video for the Kickstarter campaign, I mocked up the desktop size by putting a cloth over the big table with a square cut out of it. The small size housing was built and finished, then set on the glass top of the big table. With a taller magnet inside the big table so that the mechanism of the big table could move the metal ball in the small table. I programmed the big table to draw within the 8.5”x 11” limit of the desktop size.

Again, in hindsight, this was not the right way to go.

The Kickstarter campaign got off to a reasonable start, friends and family helping immediately on day one, but on day two things slowed down.[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtozlB2fUvo[/embed]This is where I had to confront my biggest challenge toward ultimate success. I had the belief, I had the stamina to work toward an idea for almost two decades, to keep trying to make it real. Yet, when the push-back got to shove, I started doubting myself, I started to question my belief. I felt like I failed myself and my own idea.

I agreed to go into business with Clu.

We formed a company. The agreement we signed said that he would invest some money, and I would contribute the proceeds from my Kickstarter, if it funded, and ownership of the Zen Table intellectual property.

Then, just a few days after the Kickstarter campaign went live, the next question that should have concerned me came up, “Do you have any more great ideas?”

I did. Back to my inventor’s journal where I pulled out my next pressing idea. The 3D equivalent to an all-in-one printer – I wanted to create a 3D printer that would laser scan, print and “fax” the laser scanned 3D object to be printed on another, networked 3D printer.

Clu was wildly excited about that idea, but how would we fund it? We could go VC funding or find an angel investor. We would be first-to-market with an affordable, commercial grade, user-friendly all-in-one 3D printer. We were both excited about the potential impact of this product – It could be market disrupting.

At this point, only days into the 30-day Kickstarter campaign, Clu clutched at contributing the full amount of money we’d talked about up front. He said he’d provide more funding to the joint venture, beyond the amount he’d fronted to cover basic expenses, contingent on the success of the Zen Table Kickstarter. He also shared that the table, ultimately, wasn’t the centerpiece of our new company, named [part of our last names] Robotics. Instead, he urged me to work on the 3D printer concept, and not actively promote the Zen Table Kickstarter.

He pushed me to, literally, abandon the dream I had been working toward for so long and focus on the 3D printer and robotics. And I let him.

At that point, only friends and family had pledged any money, and my doubt had grown to the point where I turned away from that baby I’d set on the street corner.

I spent the 30 days of the Kickstarter campaign working non-stop on the 3D printer – in that time I made a working prototype (it was ugly but reliably demonstrated proof of concept) of both printer and scanner, built CAD renderings of the final product, put together the hardware, designed the circuit to drive it and wrote the firmware. Clu created the 3D scanning software.

I had several ideas to fix problems that were fairly universal across the current 3D printer market – problems that were often a barrier to entry by novice users. Our prototype had a self-leveling bed, high resolution stepper motors to drive the printer nozzle motion, and advanced power supply solutions to move the steppers, rapidly heat the nozzle, and quickly warm up the printing platform. I designed a custom computer with a multi-core CPU that could drive everything at once.

It worked great – in fact, it was so powerful we nearly burnt our house down when we left it running while in the garage unpacking a new saw.

Fantastic, we had the new, more exciting product ready to go and show off to investors in less than 30 days.

But, Then

A couple of Bloggers noticed my Zen Table Kickstarter and enthusiastically shared it with their audience. With only three days left on the campaign, it went from barely noticed to the brink of fully funded.

I was caught completely unprepared. I’d given up on the dream already and abandoned my kid on the corner thinking that I’d been wrong and no one would like it as much as I thought. While watching the pledges roll in and the total climb toward fully funded, I had a little core of panic eating at me. I hadn’t spent the last month solving the desktop issues – I’d spent it working on a 3D printer instead.

I contemplated pulling the campaign and just ending it (for those who don’t know how Kickstarter works, if a campaign fails to fund or is pulled before final, all pledged money is returned and no pledges need be fulfilled).In the end, we decided to see if it would fund and then figure out what to do.

It funded.

The majority of contributors to the Kickstarter went for the desktop size. The large size table was fully prototyped and ready to build, but most backers wanted the desktop version…the one whose design I still needed to finish with the money from the campaign. Suddenly there were a whole bunch of desktop Zen Tables to build and a lot of technical problems to solve to make them work. First, let me take a bit of time to panic.

I was overwhelmed with the details of getting a new business set up, still work on the 3D printer, and figure out the technical and mechanical challenges of the small-scale Zen Table. Clu offered to create a solution for the Y axis to take something off my plate.

Unfortunately, the solution was not…ideal. He wanted to use a lead screw.

It created more problems than it solved, particularly the timing between the X axis, which was driven by a timing belt attached to a stepper motor, and the lead screw Y axis driven by a separate stepper motor. The belt-driven axis could move with speed and ease, while the leadscrew-driven axis had to turn its stepper motor so quickly to keep up that most of the torque was gone - so much so that the moving magnet would stall.

The prototype had to be painstakingly fine tuned, parts smoothed to reduce friction, aligned so that end bearings could turn with the screw in place, just tight enough so that the screw could turn smoothly but without being so loose that it would rattle, and then balancing the motor current so that the Y axis could run without overheating, without making too much noise, and also without sticking.

After a ridiculous amount of tinkering we had a working unit.

Besides trying to make the Y axis work, I had to design and create a production-quality circuit board from my rat’s nest of wires, complete the firmware to run on the new board, and develop software tools to create new patterns.

That first desk-top Zen table required about 3,000 hours of work. It took us two-and-a-half months to get the first desktop out the door.

We kept working at it, refined the process, and got it down to about 320 hours to fabricate and complete five tables at once.

And Then, Again

In the midst of all this (and I know this is all starting to sound a bit like a TV drama), we suddenly decided to bring more partners into the business. We met with (we’ll call them) K and M. K had previously worked at the same company as Clu and I. He’d started his own company with seed money from the other company founder. M and K still had a bit of the original funds left and were willing to throw in their lot to fulfill the Zen Table Kickstarter pledge rewards and push forward on the 3D printer idea.

I was overwhelmed and hesitant, but K, in particular, was very enthusiastic about the Zen Table. He had ideas about building an on online user community to trade designs and ideas. In the end, I agreed.

We expanded the partnerships and created a new venture, we’ll call it, Material Manipulators.

K helped fulfill most of the low-value Kickstarter pledges – bottles of sand, note cards and the like – while I was working on building circuits, debugging and writing firmware.

Gradually we realized our pledge to use sustainable materials, particularly bamboo for the table bodies, was making the table builds harder and more expensive than we’d thought it would be. Bamboo is an incredibly hard wood to work with; our expensive saw blades were useless after only a few cuts.

Fortunately, Melissa proved a true artisan, with exacting specifications on the joinery and finish work. She stayed late to completely sand-down and refinish a table that didn’t meet her quality standards and to ensure it matched the client’s color preference. Melissa’s father even pitched in, at no charge, to try and help get the tables built.

K and M helped with packaging and shipping everything.

After two months of 80-hour weeks, we proudly delivered the first of the pledged desktop-size Zen Tables. It was a high point, and the beginning of the end.

The End is Nigh

Tensions grew steadily until, three months in, the partners had a sit down to tell me they’d decided, in my absence, that the Zen Table was dead. They would not fund the completion of the Kickstarter pledges. They had taken the money from the Kickstarter that I had offered up as my part of the new venture and used it to pay the rent on our workspace for the remaining nine months of the lease.

They announced that this was Melissa’s last day as an employee of the venture, and that neither our time nor Zen Table build materials would be funded by the company. Clu expressed that since I’d survived for several years as a contractor – finding clients, executing projects and getting paid – I could just go back to that and work on the Zen Table and the 3D all-in-one on the side.

At this point, we had only delivered a few of the desktop models and one full-size coffee table.

Clu had already moved on from both ideas and had a new 3D printer project he wanted to pursue. I felt that all my work had been wasted. That Lizzy had died for nothing. That we had sacrificed our savings, months of our lives, everything, to come to this. That my dream was dead.

They had the money and left me holding the bag – with my name and reputation sacrificed on the Kickstarter, which was under the name Simon Hallam, not our company name.

They figured desperation would drive me to come up with a solution that would work for them. That I would bend to what they wanted and accommodate their plans. No, not this time, not again.

I walked.

Next Up: Return of the Jhair-Dye

What do you do when everything seems doomed? Where did I go from there? And, keeping the Zen Table alive.

Note About This: This is the story of my inventing and creating the Zen Table – I’m posting it in several pieces to make it easier to tell.

It’s about having a dream, working hard to make it a reality, success, mistakes, stumbles and trips, failures, lessons learned, battles fought and the cost of still struggling on. I’m telling this story because it was pivotal to my life, and I think it has some valuable lessons in it for other inventors, creators and dreamers who want to make their ideas real.

In the spirit of being real, I’m going to be as up-front as possible about where I may have messed up or taken a wrong step – and equally honest about where other people may have had something to do with it too. I hope you read, I hope you find my experience useful and I hope to hear from you if you have questions or if you want to share your story.

Cheers.