Is Silicon Valley building a new master race of machines? Ok, not exactly- here's what we learned in our meetingwith Micah Yairi, Co-founder & CTO of Tactus Technology in Fremont, CA.
Just this December, Startup Grind Fremont hosted Micah Yairi, CTO of Tactus Technology. Tactus makes morphing buttons for your touch enabled devices, enabling products to intelligently transform into buttons when you need them - and effortlessly fade into nothingness when you don't.
As Micah will tell you, you can imagine the current product to be "Transformer Version 0.001" with future iterations on track to give us complete self-adjusting/reshaping hardware - not unlike Transformers. Micah had great nuggets of wisdom that can help a lot of us especially those who are looking to make consumer products. Read out highlights below.
User Experience & Testing
Micah says, the thing entrepreneur need to focus on the most is user testing, user experience and user feedback. Even for a simple product like typing buttons, the feedback was a critical part of product development at Tactus. It is never too early to start testing and the feedback has to be ongoing and continuous.
Watch for Market Developments
Another important thing that Micah talked about is awareness of alternate technologies and competition. When Tactus started, most phones came with a plastic screens, and by the time Tactus came out with their first product, Gorilla Glass had become the industry standard. This impacted their product rollout significantly.
As entrepreneurs, we sometimes get so engrossed in our product and technology that we miss out or ignore important market & industry developments. Micah, too, remembers Tactus should have responded to the threat of Gorilla Glass much earlier.
Pivoting
The most important thing that we learnt for the night was around pivoting. A lot of us have to pivot at some point in our startup journey and Micah had some interesting advice from his own experience.
At Tactus they spend around 5% of their resources researching alternate technologies. This has two benefits: in case you have to pivot you will not be starting from scratch and, second, it provides alternate revenue streams in case main product is not a success.
Passion is MUST
For aspiring founders who are debating jumping aboard the entrepreneurial ship, Micah had some saintly advice around passion: since you are the founder and the chief seller you should always have to be the most passionate person in the room (for your product). If you are not convinced about the product it would be a difficult journey - and maybe you should not make it.
Micah concluded by saying that he really likes the founder lifestyle, as it is exciting, involves marketing, business, fast pacing - and most importantly he is making something that people will use. That is his true passion.
For entrepreneurs and a sci-fi geeks like ourselves, I'm looking forward to the day Tactus develops Transformer V1.0 - they're starting with buttons now, but it would sure be cool to have my Mustang help me keep up with my daughter.
Written by Abhishek & Punkaj, active members of the Startup Grind Fremont Community