Our Kickstarter campaign had fulfilled, if not our wildest dreams, then at least our more rambunctious domesticated ones. We felt we had collected enough pledged funding to fill our backers’ orders. And we believed that our results constituted market validation—people wanted our product and were willing to pay for it. But our crowd funding income wasn’t nearly enough to get our new company off the ground. We needed to establish full scale manufacturing, to budget for marketing, and to improve Tertill and develop new products. For that, we needed investors.
Fairly soon after the Kickstarter dust settled, an organization that might solve our problems approached us. Husqvarna, the 300-year-old Swedish outdoor tool company, told us that they were interested in investing. We were thrilled, Husqvarna brought immense gravitas to the game.
Back in 1995, Husqvarna became the first company to market a robotic lawn mower, solar powered no less! Initially, the robot mower’s technology was immature, and sales were slow. Fourteen long years passed before cumulative sales totaled one million robots. Markets of such small size typically hold little interest for large multinational corporations. But somehow the product, later named Automower, hung on gradually improving over time. Automower must have had a determined champion within Husqvarna’s executive ranks, otherwise the revolutionary robot would likely have been routed from the product lineup during those lean years.
Eventually (in Europe though not the in US), the robot gained popularity and sales shot up. We at Tertill believed Husqvarna’s steadfast, long-term commitment to such a product would make them a reliable partner for us.
Husqvarna wanted not just to invest in a company creating innovation in the home gardening market, they wanted to add Tertill to their product road map. A few years earlier, Husqvarna had acquired a German company called Gardena, a manufacturer of garden tools. The investment team from Husqvarna believed that Tertill could add interest and excitement to Gardena’s line of finely made but conventional garden products. We were sure of it!
We reached an agreement; Husqvarna would invest $1 million in Tertill. We would sell Tertills in the US, Husqvarna would have rights to sell them in most of the rest of the world—for which they would pay us a royalty. These were heady times. We made plans for how the business would grow based on the Husqvarna deal.
Gardena had a request. Before they would add Tertill to their offerings, they needed a bunch of information, and they wanted to test the product at their headquarters. The demand for an audition surprised us, we thought the deal was done, but we dutifully supplied all that was asked. They reviewed our information and put Tertill through its paces.
Gardena concluded that they wanted nothing to do with our robot. They scolded that our technology was immature compared to their other products and the robot’s reliability was uncertain. (Of course it was! Tertill was a brand new, first-of-its-kind product just like Automower had once been.)
We were shocked and dismayed, but Gardena’s rejection erased our blueprint. Husqvarna had told us they wanted the product, and we laid our plans accordingly. It never occur to us that a subsidiary division could veto part of the deal. (This sort of internal politics seems to be a feature of large companies, see for example Dancing with Roomba, Chapter 10 Trilobite.) And even worse, in our organizational naivete, we had failed to write into our agreement any penalty for the rug being yanked from under us.
We attempted to get back on track. Husqvarna’s $1 million investment sounds like a lot of money but it goes very fast when trying to establish a new product in the marketplace. For example, it had taken around $3 million to develop Roomba into a real product—and that was about 17 years’ worth of inflation ago. So, we tightened our belts, we minimized expenses, and we soldiered on. As described in the previous post, How We Built Tertills, we set up an assembly line and put the robots together ourselves.
We worked to get attention, more sales, and additional investment. Along the way we encountered Linda Ystueta. Trained in both engineering and business, Linda’s experience, talent, and especially her enthusiasm for Tertill led us to recruit her. Linda became our new CEO, while Rory shifted his focus to manufacturing and getting Tertills shipped. Once our preorders were fulfilled, we began to sell Tertills on our website and on Amazon.
Linda brought us strategic connections. Through her we engaged with a mentoring group for MIT alumni, a CFO friend of hers gave us financial guidance, and we got advice from other business veterans she knew. We also hired a PR agency to increase our visibility.
Our cause advanced, but only very slowly. The throttling factor was our severe undercapitalization. We were able to secure some funding from angel investors, but regardless of the heroic efforts we made to operate on a shoestring, there were just many important things we couldn’t do given our insufficient funds. Leaving those things undone hampered our ability to attract additional institutional investors.
Linda suggested bringing on a new CEO who had a track record that investors might respond to: Helen Greiner. At iRobot Helen had worked wonders, winning investment just when it was needed most. She’d since led another company, CyPhy Works, that developed novel drone technology, and she had worked as an AI advisor for the US Army. (She was also a Tertill customer.) Happily, she was currently free of conflicting commitments. I’d very much enjoyed working with Helen years earlier at iRobot and was enthusiastic about the possibility that she might join us.
We pitched to Helen the idea of becoming our CEO. It worked! Helen accepted our offer and came on board; Linda graciously stepped down.
Within a few months Helen had worked her magic on investors; we began attracting the funds we desperately needed. We hired people to fill in the missing spots on our team, and we ordered more robots from our factory in China.
Our PR agency, along with our own ongoing efforts, produced some big publicity boosts. The PBS TV show, Ask This Old House, decided to do a segment on our robot. That would exhibit Tertill to a national audience. My garden was conducive to filming so one of the stars, Ross Trethewey, along with the film crew came to my house to shoot in the backyard. Another exciting development was when a Boston TV station decided to visit. A local luminary, meteorologist Mike Wankum from Boston’s Channel 5, also made the trek to my garden. That was great fun.
The timing of media interest in Tertill was less than optimal. The season was mid-autumn, and in New England that meant that frost was a lurking likelihood. A garden filled with frost-damaged or killed plants would not make an attractive backdrop for a weeding robot. So, before the film crews showed up, I took heroic measures. At night I covered the garden with a tarp and snaked an electrically heated cable around the inside. Thus assisted, the plants managed to retain their summer splendor.
Press coverage during and soon after our Kickstarter campaign focused on the novel concept that a diminutive robot could weed a home garden. Photos and videos from that period all came from the carefully staged (but honest!) demos of our prototypes. Now, with the factory producing working units, we had robots to spare so we arranged with several garden and lawn influencers to try Tertill. Their pieces mostly ranged from positive to glowing. We never learned the full story, but one gentleman in Oregon purchased and gave away dozens of Tertill to various individuals and groups. We received enthusiastic testimonials from multiple customer. Things looked quite hopeful for our little robot.
