2021 Q2 Update
The mission of Slate Robotics is to develop a robot butler for the masses. We want to build a future where everyday people have less to do around the house and can devote more time and energy to things that matter to them and their families.
Personally, I’m quite a passionate person, and I have small set of passions that I want to fully devote energy towards and pursue. It feels like such a waste of potential to pull energy from these endeavors to tend to such menial matters. Even worse when family time suffers at the expense of yardwork or cleaning.
If needed, I will gladly do these sorts of chores, mind you. The goal is not to help the lazy become lazier; the goal is to simply unlock 2% to 3% of the potential energy of the world that gets wasted doing dishes and doing laundry. One is no better for spending 10 hours a week doing chores or 20 hours a week. By very definition, a chore is something of a necessary evil.
The course of human evolution has been one of a consistent pursuit of eliminating chores and elevating pressures. Of course, free time is not of absolute value, and certainly many of those who are alleviated of the pressures of daily chores will take their time and squander it. But freedom is something we will pursue with unwavering dedication, and if we can make people freer, then we will have done our job. This is the American way, after all!
Q2 of 2021 has been awesome, and we have made tremendous progress in our pursuit of affordable robot butlers.
For the past 18 months, the focus of the company has been completely spent on improving the reliability of the TR3 robot. Since the company’s formation, we have had an incredibly rough experience delivering robots, and what has made this job so painful has been from our failure in delivering reliability. In the past, after we would build a robot for a customer, half of the components wouldn’t work and we had to dedicate a hundred hours to troubleshooting and pinning down the issues. Parts were fragile and would break under mundane loads. Motors would overheat. Sensors would fail and cause the robot to crash in spectacular fashion. And even when we could manage to get the robot to work after what felt like stacking a house of cards, it would inevitably fail once exposed to the horrors of shipping and freight.
Obviously, this hasn’t been a great experience for our customers, and we weren’t having a lot of fun ourselves. It was through this experience of trying to deliver a few unreliable robots that I vowed to completely stop shipments and refocus — to do what it takes to develop a robot that can last.
This quarter, we have arrived! Of course, I need to preface this with the obvious: reliability is a pursuit and not a state of being. We have much to do to make our robots even better, even more reliable, and even more capable.
But! All of the types of issues that have plagued us so greatly in the past have been addressed and resolved. Our actuators have been designed and tested to handle many times more load than they will be exposed to in normal use. Our sensors all hook up to local PCBs with wireless communication — preventing any movement that might bend or damage the wires or sensors. Actuators are designed with fans for active cooling and have temperature sensors that will shut off the motors if they get too hot. To make it all better, the design has been reduced to its core purpose and simplified tremendously.
These machines aren’t perfect and will eventually require maintenance and care, but we have gone above and beyond to develop a strong, robust product that customers can use for hours and hours on end without issues. I feel a much, much greater sense of confidence in shipping once again.
To boot, we’re building robust processes around all of this with proper quality control checklists and tests that all components must pass before they go out the door. I’m certain that there will be room for improvement as we go forward, but the progress we have made this year has been a massive leap forward towards a reliable product that adds value to our customers!
So, what’s next? Q3 of 2021 is super exciting for me. We’re going to start shipping again!
We have a 4 orders in the pipeline, and we have 1 TR3 already built and ready to go. We’re going to build a few at a time rather than one-by-one, so you won’t see shipments right away, but the goal for Q3 is to fulfill all 4 of these orders by September 30, and I feel very confident in being able to deliver.
To make things smoother, I’m going to hire a little bit of part-time help to assist with running printers, soldering wires, and assembling actuators. We’re going to put together all of the sub-assemblies first, so we’ll build the couple dozen of torque sensors first, then the gear boxes, then the PCBs, etc. This will ensure that energy is not wasted context switching, and we’ll get really, really good at doing each of these jobs.
Plus, just to ensure that everything runs as smoothly as possible, I will offer to all of these customers a 1-day one-on-one from me personally to get the robot set up, running, help answer any questions, and offer any help. This will ensure that they don’t have to waste time figuring out how everything works — I’ll walk you through step-by-step. The customers that have been waiting all this time have been incredibly generous and understanding, and I owe it to them to help them back in any way that I can. I’m looking forward to meeting you all!
The future is looking very bright for Slate Robotics. We finally have a product that we’re happy about and confident in. We have customers that we get to work with to make their experience as quality as possible. And we finally get to start playing with our own robots that we have worked so hard to build.
To make things better, we have an opportunity to start selling again by the end of the year, and we’ll be poised for financial stability with a product that we can profitably deliver. This means growth! In these early stages, we will stay lean and will make smart investments when opportunities arise, and we will be alert to indicators that things aren’t working as well as we hope. We will focus fully on delivering a consistent product that delights our customers, and in doing so, we will move the ball forward in developing a future of affordable robot butlers.
I’m super excited to see what the future holds, and I’m thrilled to get to devote my life to such a pursuit. Thanks for taking the time to read this and joining us on that journey. Slate Robotics is going to make affordable robot butlers a reality!
— Zach Allen, CEO @ Slate Robotics
