 Hey, I'm very excited to be here and at my first DMF camp. So thanks to everyone who's making this wonderful event happen. I often give technical talks at events like this and this one is not technical. This one is just about my experience is starting an open source hardware company, Great Scott Gadgets. We make a number of things like the ubertooth, which is a Bluetooth test tool and hack RF, which is a software defined radio platform and a variety of other things that we're working on. And I kind of didn't really think about the fact that I would be starting an open source hardware company until it sort of happened. And I wanted to kind of tell the story and maybe it would be helpful to people who are thinking about making a similar leap, perhaps. But I don't sometimes folks ask me for advice about starting a business or something. And I say, well, you know, I don't know how much advice I have for you, but I can at least tell you how it went for me. And so that's what I'm doing. So my story or the year that I'm talking about starts in October of 2010 with Tourcon 12. And this is an information security conference in San Diego. And I had kind of a busy year. It was the second time I taught my software defined radio class there. And I gave a couple of talks as well. One of them was uber tooth zero a preview. And I had designed this circuit board that was like the first it was the first PCB I ever designed. And it was called uber tooth zero. It was deliberately named zero and not one because I intended I intended to replace it. It was just kind of an initial prototype that could be made to demonstrate a Bluetooth sniffing function. And in particular kind of the killer app of uber tooth was that it can detect and identify non-discoverable Bluetooth devices. And this was a capability that had been missing before. It had not been possible to detect non-discoverable Bluetooth devices prior to this without spending like $10,000 plus on test equipment. So we were pretty, I was pretty excited about it. And I wanted to show people what I was working on. And it was just a short work in progress kind of talk. But when I was there and showing this to people, a lot of my friends in the information security community started asking me, when can I buy it in shops? And I was like, I don't I don't know. Like the originally when I started the uber tooth project, I was trying to make something that people could make for themselves. I wanted it to be open source hardware and or pieced together from off the shelf hardware. And it turned out that I ended up designing the thing kind of from scratch instead of piecing it together from other things. And so it turned out to be something that maybe would make sense to manufacture for people. And so I started thinking about that and thinking about what it would take to manufacture this thing for people. And this was all kind of a side project because I had a job at the Boulder Labs in Colorado. Doing wireless security research. And you know, that was a that was a pretty nice place to be. And I wasn't really looking to start a business. I just was looking to get this tool into the hands of people who could do something useful with it. So but after work on, I started thinking seriously about starting a business and what that what would that would mean and how I could manage to do that on the side and and get this tool out to more people. Initially, that meant I would start kind of redesigning or refining the uber tooth zero design and working toward uber tooth one. And I found this talk by Mitch Altman online and Mitch, I believe is here somewhere. So if you're listening, thank you, Mitch, because this talk that that he had given at some event, not too long before this, had a video posted online and I watched it and I thought, wow, that's pretty cool. Maybe I could maybe I could do this and kind of what he did and following his footsteps, starting a hardware company, building something that that I really enjoyed doing. And it's this talk in particular is full of more practical advice, I think, and probably more so than this talk today. So I would recommend it to you if you're interested in pursuing a similar path. He's he had a couple of particular insights that I thought were very interesting. One was don't do business with people you don't like, which has been a guiding principle for me ever since. And it's it's worked out pretty well. And he really got me thinking about how kind of the economics of of running a business and how I would do pricing, for example. So the pricing is something that was super important for me to be thinking about at that particular time, because I was figuring out what the what would be entailed in the product itself. And what it would cost to build it and how I would actually sell it. And one of the things that I I considered was a reseller model. And in particular, I considered at least kind of three three different distribution models. One being selling direct like have a website and sell direct to people and ship things individually to so retail direct retail sales. Another would be a reseller model like a two tier reseller model where I would sell to resellers and then they would do the retail sales. And then the third would be a three tier distribution model where I would sell to one or more distributors and then they would distribute things to resellers and they would sell them to other people. And I had some background working for companies in a three tier kind of channel before so that sort of made sense to me. But what didn't make sense was that this product was such a niche product that I didn't really think that a multi tier distribution model really made any sense. There were very few retailers in the world who would likely be interested in carrying this product. So since it will be a fairly small number of resellers, I thought it made the most sense to to do the two tier two tier model where I would sell directly to resellers and then they would sell to the end users and do the retail sales. And that's been my model ever since. And one of the important reasons that I did that instead of trying to sell direct which is more possible these days than it used to be, one of the important considerations was that I was trying to do this on the side. I had a day job and I really wanted to minimize the amount of effort I had to do in order to make this a reality. My goal was just to put hardware in people's hands, not necessarily to, you know, make a growing company, even though that later happened. And so I had a goal that I wanted to make this company a solo company. I didn't want to have to hire help. I didn't want to have to hire employees and so forth. I wanted it to be solo for as long as possible. So I looked for opportunities to kind of outsource different things. So for example, manufacturing, I didn't do my own manufacturing. I outsourced that to a contract manufacturer and then retail sales. I kind of outsourced that to resellers and so forth. And around that time I was kind of getting excited about, well, hey, if I if I now that I know how to design circuit boards, it might be fun to design some other things too. And I had this thing called a throwing star land tap that I had made like 10 years previous that was made by splicing together Ethernet cables. And it was super useful. I use it all the time personally and I, you know, I like doing system administration and network administration and security stuff. And I but one one kind of frustrating thing about it is that whenever I would use it, I would have to use Ethernet couplers like RJ45 couplers. And so it ends up being a lot more unwieldy than it looks because of the couplers. And I thought, hey, now that I know how to design circuit boards, I could change this design and make it make a circuit board and put install female connectors instead of having male plugs on that thing. And so I made the throwing star land tap. And this was a kit that I designed. But at first I just started printing circuit boards and started handing them out as business cards. And I still hand these out as business cards. And I have some here, if you know, if you see me around the camp, hit me up for one. But I thought, well, if I'm going to, if I'm going to have a company that sells a product, maybe I'll have two products. And so I was looking into maybe manufacturing the throwing star land tap as a kit, which I did end up doing later. And that's, you know, a pretty easy manufacturing job since it's just making the PCBs and then grabbing a few components and sticking in a bag. So Schmuckan was in the following January and it was at the end of January. And this was kind of a good timing for me because it was around, it was about the amount of time I needed to finish ubertooth one, which was the refined version of ubertooth zero. And I gave this talk project ubertooth building a better Bluetooth adapter. And it was a, it was a talk that was very much about the project of building ubertooth and how I came to build ubertooth and the challenges that I had, like learning electronics so that I could build ubertooth. And all about the, all about the ubertooth project, primarily from a technical standpoint. And so this talk today is actually kind of a sequel to that talk. And that was about the technical project that then led me to start Grayscott Gadgets. And so this talk is about how Grayscott Gadgets came to be. And one of the things that I talked about in that talk is how I started Grayscott Gadgets as a fake company, because I was just trying to social engineer like part manufacturers. I just wanted to try to get like free samples and data sheets and stuff. And like, so I, so I just sort of invented this company. The first name I thought of was Grayscott Gadgets. And I registered a domain name and put up a website and started sending emails from that domain and, and started, you know, trying to hit up manufacturers for documentation and stuff. And it totally did not work at all. But, but I, I started that. And then when people started asking me later about like what I sell them uberteeth, I said, well, you know, I sort of have this company. And so as an experiment, I decided to take this design that I made ubertooth one, which really was this pretty much the same thing as ubertooth zero just refined. And, and I decided to, to try to go into business with it. And this is actually a slide. These are slides from that talk. And at the time, this slide was about, about how I knew nothing about electronics and how I had to just start from nothing and learn electronics so that I could do the ubertooth project. But it's also highly relevant to running a business, because I really didn't know a whole lot about running a business either. And I made a very deliberate choice that if I were going to bother going into business to, to produce this thing that my business would be dedicated to open source hardware. That everything that I had ever done in my life that or anything I'd ever done in my career that I was proud of was something that I did with the help of open source software. And so for, to me, open source is just the right thing to do. And, and, but that was for me a very deliberate choice that that was one particular thing that I would not compromise on every other aspect of running a business. I knew nothing and I would admit that I was an idiot and just, you know, whatever, whatever I need to learn, I would try to learn and try to learn from my mistakes. And I think it was important to kind of have that mental clarity that that delineation between here's what I'm willing to unwilling to compromise on. I am willing to compromise and learn on everything else. I don't want to have preconceived notions about how this is going to go. And I think that was kind of helpful. Well, I started using this thing called Kickstarter, and it was kind of newish at the time I had only heard about it during this period of time when people were asking me if they could buy Ubertooth. And so I put Ubertooth on Kickstarter and launched it at the time of Schmucon. And it, the funding goal was that green line across the screen there. And so, like, I announced that it was, I launched it like on Saturday morning at Schmucon and then Monday morning it just took off. And I think by Tuesday evening it was funded or something. And, and I thought it was kind of interesting how there it looks like if you look at the plot of the of the pledges that came in for the Kickstarter campaign, that it was sort of exponential growth looking at first until about the time that it hit the pledge goal and then it was very linear after that. And that's a pretty common, pretty common looking curve. I've seen other, other crowdfunded projects have kind of similar results. They don't always look like this, but it's a fairly common looking sort of thing for successfully funded crowdfunded projects. But, and it kind of made me think a couple of things. One was, you know, if I, if I had set the goal higher, would it have been had a longer period of exponential growth? Like did I miss out on things? But I don't think that that was really the right conclusion to draw from this. I've, I've later learned that, you know, setting a pledge goal is really a tricky thing. And setting it high is not necessarily a good idea. But I did make a mistake here. I set the goal at $16,000. And it turned out that I really needed about twice that. And so as it turned out, I did get more than twice that. So I was totally fine. But what if I had been funded at exactly $16,000? What if I had just barely met my pledge goal? I might have had real problems actually bringing this product to market. So I made a mistake here, but I got lucky anyway, that I had enough funding to get past what Nate from Sparkfund is called the pit of despair, which is that kind of middle ground where you, you have enough interest in your product to make it seem like you should be going into mass production, but you actually don't have enough funding to achieve mass production. So I got over that threshold, despite the fact that I set my goal too low, I should have said it about double what I did just to have this, the assurance that I wouldn't fall into the pit of despair. One of the things that I did for my Kickstarter backers was I said, hey, if you, if you fund me at the highest pledge level, then I'll get give you a special edition of Ubertooth and that will come with some extra things like an enclosure and some antennas and stuff. And but I hadn't really figured out how I was going to make the special edition units, like would I make them separately, or maybe they maybe they would just come out of the regular batch and then I would just add stuff to those packages. But I thought it would be nice if I actually had them, the PCBs look different. And so I thought about maybe making them myself on a hot plate, but I had to make 50 of them and that's a lot of work. But meanwhile, some some folks from a company in Australia contacted me contacted me and they were really interested in in having kind of early access to Ubertooth. And they wanted, I can't remember, 10 or 20, something like that. And and they were, you know, willing to pay extra to get them sooner, very soon. And I thought, well, you know, depending on how much they're willing to pay, maybe this is an opportunity. Maybe I could kind of get them to pay for the special edition production. And I'll make a few for the Australians and I'll make the rest for the for the special edition people. And some or all of that special, small production costs would be paid for by the Australians. And that seemed to kind of work out. And we made and I hired a different manufacturer, not the one that I've been. So the manufacturer I had been talking to about manufacturing Ubertooth and that did manufacture Ubertooth was one that, you know, I'd gotten referral to. And I was starting relationship with and but they but it was brand new. I was, you know, I was a first time customer. So they didn't want to add on this extra little, you know, 50 to 100 unit production. They want to do like a thousand unit production or more. And so I hired some like random PCB assembler in China to do the white ones, which was this, which were the special editions. And I had I had 100 of them made. And they it was it was interesting because the the the CC 40 CC 2400 this sort of came up during the special edition. The CC 2400 is a chip that is on the Ubertooth. And it's like the essential chip that accomplishes the Ubertooth function. And it was it was a part that I a couple of things came up during during the special edition production that I had not anticipated about having to do with this part. The first thing was they that my my contract manufacturer for the special edition told me, hey, we can't get this part in China because it's because of export restrictions. And I freaked out. And then they said, oh, and also it's end of life. And and I freaked out twice. And so it turned out that one or more of the distributors had incorrectly identified this part in their catalog as being export restricted from the US. It has other parts in it's in a family of parts where other parts are export restricted and this one shouldn't be. And so I had to like I had to like sign paperwork saying that I was taking responsibility for this decision to ship it overseas and so forth. Which was a little nerve wracking, but it kind of made sense once once I figured out what was going on. And it really wasn't end of life. It had just been recently marked not recommended for new designs, which means they're still manufacturing it. They just are recommending that you that you go to the manufacturer Texas Instruments is recommending that you look at other parts for brand new designs. And well, it was kind of a new design at the time. But but when I had designed this into my product a few months earlier, it was not not recommended for new designs. So I was kind of just at the edge of the thing, but I had no idea like how long it would be available. Like maybe there would never be a second production of Ubertooth one. I hadn't I didn't know as it turns out, I'm still buying CC 2400s in 2016. So they're they're still out there, but and they're still being manufactured. But I was pretty scared about this at the time. It seemed like a huge risk for my venture. And the and then also, you know, I made these I made these special edition boards. I had them made for me then after I managed to get the CC 2400s to China. And they came back to me and I think about 30 of the 100 worked. So so I had to sit down with a soldering iron and start fixing them. And so I had to make like the 50 for my Kickstarter backers and then the 10 or 20 for the Australians. And and then there were a bunch more that never got working and are like still sitting in a drawer. So it was quite a task. I mean, the amount of effort I had to put into reworking those was probably, I don't know, 30 or 40% of the amount of effort. I would have had to do if I just made them from scratch myself, which maybe would have been a better choice at the time. So I kind of learned my lesson about just picking a random contract manufacturer online for small projects. They did, you know, pretty poor job of assembly and and did zero testing, which at the time when I first hired them, I was just trying to get something done fast. And I didn't really think about testing, even though I was thinking about testing for my main production. So I started around that time. So after the after the Kickstarter pledge period was over, but before I shipped during that time where I was getting manufacturing going and such, I was talking starting to talk to people about maybe reselling ubertooth one after the Kickstarter, because it seemed that there was enough interest in it that it might be worth keeping this product going and doing more than just a single production. And the first reseller that that contacted me was hack five. And so Darren from hack five, if you may be familiar with the video series online, they're really into education in the information security community, like helping helping new people get into Infosec and hacking. And so they were in the process of starting an online store. And he said, hey, we're going to be starting a store. And I think ubertooth would be good to have in the store. And I said, yeah, that that's a good idea. Let's let's try to make that happen. And I thought, well, if I'm going to make that happen with hack five, maybe I should have some other resellers too. And so the first ones that I thought of the first reseller I thought of to approach with spark fun, which is a which is kind of a different target market hack five targets folks in the Infosec community and spark fun targets folks in the electronics hobby community. And spark fun also happens to be in my home state of Colorado. So, you know, I'm local to them and I met a couple of people there at the time and I actually had taken a class there on SMT soldering like solder paste stenciling a few months prior. And so I contacted the director of engineering at spark fun and said, hey, I'm coming out with this thing. Do you have any interest in carrying it? And they they kind of took a flyer on it. It doesn't it's kind of an unusual product for them because it's a bit expensive compared to other wireless development platforms of comparable size and complexity that they carry. But it sells well for them. And I think that has to do with with the special function that it is capable of monitoring Bluetooth devices. So so that worked out. And those two were my first resellers that I that I kind of got signed up and took orders from to start filling immediately after after the Kickstarter units were sold. So, meanwhile, I was pretty excited about this whole Kickstarter thing being successful. And I was just incredibly grateful to my backers who had pledged to support this project. And one thing that I decided to do just just as an extra thank you was, hey, I was I was putting this throwing star land tab kit together. So why don't I just give a free one to everybody who gets an Uber tooth because they're pretty low cost to manufacture. So I could just kind of roll that into the into the package, no problem. So I actually had these things produced and had those available to sell to my resellers. Even though it's a very low cost thing, it was nice to have, you know, two products in my catalog instead of one. And and then I actually shipped these things these packages of to my backers in May of 2011. So at the time, I thought like my pledge period for crowdfunding was basically the whole month of February or kind of the end of January to the end of February. And then it took me until I think late May when I was able to ship. And I thought that I was way behind like this was like I really wanted to have to have shipped to them sooner. But as it turns out, you know, like hardware project crowdfunded hardware projects have a track record that's actually a whole lot worse than that in terms of delivering in a timely fashion. So going from the end of February to the end of May was really not that bad at all, especially considering that it was the first time I'd ever done volume manufacturing of anything. It was pretty, pretty successful overall. And I think that a big part of why it was successful was because the version that I manufactured was identical to the version that I showed at Shmucon. I made no changes. It was a bear, a bear board. And it was functional. And the design, you know, I had already gone through a couple of design revisions significantly from ubertooth zero to ubertooth one was a major revision. And when I got it working for Shmucon, I was done. I was like, okay, this is it. This is what I'm going to ship. This is what I put on Kickstarter. And I didn't have to do any extra design or changes to design during the manufacturing process, which I think I attribute maybe the speed of production and delivery primarily to that. So the way that I kind of modeled how I would be bootstrapping this business is that I got like $50,000 from Kickstarter. And that was enough to build a thousand ubertooth ones and then have a little extra money so that I could do things like throw in throwing starland tab kits and have a little buffer. And then half of those had to go to my Kickstarter backers. And then the other half were available to resellers. And so all the money from Kickstarter pretty much went into making inventory. And then half of that inventory I was able to sell to resellers. And then the money I got from those was enough to fund the second production of a thousand ubertooth ones. And this kind of worked. This basically was how I bootstrapped the business. And it meant, number one, it meant that I did not have to seek any kind of outside investment at all. And that's super important. I was the sole owner of Grayscott Gadgets and I remain the sole owner of Grayscott Gadgets. And that's very important to me because I can run the business the way I want to, like having open source be such a high priority. But this process of bootstrapping, it worked pretty well. But the reality of cash flow is a lot trickier than it kind of looks on paper like this. This is sort of a simplified view. But really another significant thing is the pricing that I put on Kickstarter was close to the eventual retail price. I estimated what the retail price would be through resellers. And then I use that as my retail price or my Kickstarter price. And that really was important because I didn't just collect enough money from Kickstarter to build the 500 ubertooth that I needed for my Kickstarter backers. I got twice that. And so that allowed me to bootstrap my business. It also was a fair price because actually it was slightly less than what people later were paying for the same product through resellers. And it kind of set an expectation of what the price of this product was. And I think that's important too. So people often ask me, especially in that first couple of years after this happened, people would ask me for Kickstarter advice a lot. People who were trying to launch their own Kickstarter and especially hardware projects because there weren't very many. Ubertooth was actually one of the earlier hardware projects that existed on Kickstarter. And it was at the time it was funded. It was the highest funded hardware project that had happened on Kickstarter. Obviously now they've gone through the roof. But at the time it was quite the thing. And so people kind of came out of the woodwork to ask me like, hey, what do I need to do here? How do I need to price my product? And do you have any advice for Kickstarter? And I don't know. I probably gave some bad advice. But one piece of advice that I kind of started thinking about and continue to give to this day is to do contingency planning. And think about what will happen if you get funded to certain amounts? Like if you get funded to $1 less than your pledge goal, how will you feel about that? Will you feel relieved that, oh good, I don't have to go into production without proper backing? That will be a good feeling to have. What if you get funded to $1 more than your pledge goal? Will you be excited that you can do it? Or will you be thinking, oh no, I should have asked for more? Think about what if you get a thousand times your pledge goal? Are you going to be screwed? Is there just like no way you could possibly handle that? Because all of these things are possible and it's completely unpredictable. Well, maybe not entirely unpredictable. You must accept the fact that any outcome could happen. And if you think through, if you plan for the various contingencies for how much funding you get, then that will help you to set your correct pledge level. And maybe a more concise statement is just to say, set your pledge level to exactly what you need no more, no less. Because if you set it too high, people will look at that and think, well, they don't want to support this project because their aspirations are too lofty. And if it's too low, you can get yourself in the pit of despair and so forth. So as I said, I set mine probably too low, but I got lucky. And I should have set it up around 30K, I set it at 16K. And it turned out I got enough to make it work anyway. So then kind of that summer, I started working on what might be uber tooth 2. And this is a little prototype board called Artichoke that uses a different chip instead of the CC2400 because I had no idea whether or not the CC2400 would continue to be available. As it turns out, I have some prototypes of this board like sitting in a drawer that are still sitting in a drawer because the CC2400 is still available, so I haven't felt a real need to replace it even five years later. But I started doing more electronic design, starting thinking about more projects and kind of how the future of Great Sky gadgets would go even though I was doing this on the side. But I was getting super busy, especially as I started selling more units and getting more resellers and getting more support emails and so forth. And so I ended up in July of 2011 quitting my day job at the Boulder Labs. And this was a rather significant decision for me. I had a nice job working for the government doing research, which I love. And I was leaving it to dedicate my time to an open source hardware company. And I was basically forced into this decision by getting too busy with Great Sky gadgets. And I was working nights and weekends on Great Sky gadgets. And then during the day, during the week, I would go to my job at the Boulder Labs. And it was becoming too much. And I was forced with the decision to choose one or the other. And I had to decide I'm either going to stop doing Great Sky gadgets or I'm going to stop working at the labs. And I decided to stop working at the labs and give it a shot as a business owner. So at that time, I started kind of taking this business more seriously. Obviously, I had to take it more seriously because it had to become a steady living for me. And one of the things that I thought of when I started taking it more seriously is that maybe I needed a mission statement. And this seemed kind of weird to me at first because I'd been in companies where they would have some sort of a fluffy mission statement and it just seemed like bullshit to me. And a lot of times it is, like for example in the U.S., publicly traded companies are actually required by law to maximize their shareholder value. So whatever they tell you their mission statement is, their real mission is to maximize shareholder value. And they don't have a choice in the matter if they're a publicly traded company. Whereas I was a sole owner of my own company and so I had the ability to choose whatever mission I wanted. And personally, that was extremely important to me. And so I chose as a mission that the mission of Great Scott Gadgets is to put exciting new tools into the hands of innovative people. And that putting tools into people's hands is the goal of business has been a guiding principle that has really helped me at many occasions over the years. There have been all sorts of times when I've thought I've had an opportunity or a business decision to make and I could take the company in one or two or more directions and I've been able to make that decision because I thought which direction meets the mission of the business most closely and it's really helped me a lot. And I also kind of wrote down some guiding principles to support this mission and one of those guiding principles, kind of the number one guiding principle is open source that everything Great Scott Gadgets ever does hardware, software, content, whatever, everything we produce will be open source and that that is very important that we can reach more people. We can put better tools into more people's hands by especially innovative people who many of whom appreciate open source and will take advantage of the benefits of open source that we can reach more people by making everything we do open source but we can also reach a lot of people just by selling stuff, right? Like not everybody wants to buy things or sorry, not everybody wants to build things themselves a lot of people just want to buy something that works and so by doing both consistently we can reach the most people and also some other guiding principles to support the mission were education that is really important for the company to produce educational resources and to support educational opportunities for people to learn how to use exciting new tools and research and innovation like I don't want to spend my time and resources building something that somebody's built before I want to build something new that is innovative in some way that meets a need that hadn't been met before for example and also one of my guiding principles is just to be myself I've seen certain companies like small companies, solo companies for example that kind of put on an air of being bigger than they really are and that always looks kind of funny to me and I decided early on that I was just going to deliberately just be myself and my persona is tied to the business and just live with that and be okay with being a one person company or a very small company that is represented by me personally around this time I think it was the first time I did a Google search and stopped getting did you mean Sabertooth when I typed ubertooth which I thought was a good sign that ubertooth was a real thing once it stopped suggesting Sabertooth and I started getting more and more emails from people like idea people people who say things like hey I have this great idea for a product I just need help bringing it to market or I just need engineering or whatever and generally those people don't really have a clue there's kind of a perception and I could go into this for hours that I won't but there's kind of a perception among certain folks that there's great value in an idea for a product or an idea for a project and one of the things that I was realizing around this time especially as I was getting approached by folks who wanted help with things was that the value in an idea is really how much work you put into the implementation and how much effort you put into building something and delivering it so this was kind of tied into my concept of open source and sometimes people ask me okay so you don't do your own manufacturing and you don't do your own retail sales and you give away all your designs for everything you produce like what do you have and I think what we have at Grace Godgadget is the effort that we put into our projects and the effort that we put into supporting our tools and to promoting them and educating people about them and that the more that we put into building open source hardware and software the more value there is in Grace Godgadget the more we give away the more we get back and that has really worked out over time today there are four of us working for the company not just one and we have a brand new lab that we just moved into and we're still growing four years later in fact we went through a period of time or actually more than four years later we went through a period of time where like five years in a row we doubled revenue which is kind of plenty of growth for me thank you very much I don't really want to grow faster than that so my year ended at Turcon 13 in 2011 this particular year I'm talking about and by this time Grace Godgadget was a real thing it was still a one person company I hadn't been able to have enough revenue to hire anybody yet but I was able to keep pretty busy and one thing that I really kept busy with at this particular time was I volunteered to design an electronic badge for Turcon 13 and the original conception here was that we would give all the attendees of Turcon and Ubertooth but unfortunately we didn't really have the funding to make that happen so we didn't, you know, the Ubertooth I tried really hard to try to slim down the design to make it like the bare minimum cost to accomplish the Ubertooth function and didn't really get to the budget that we had available for an electronic badge so I ended up making an electronic badge that had the radio chip but didn't have the other stuff and so it had a radio chip and it had a super low cost microcontroller just the lowest cost thing I could possibly get and a bunch of LEDs and it did a 2.4 gigahertz spectrum analyzer function across the LEDs which was kind of cool and then it had this other section that you could populate if you wanted to that would turn it into an Ubertooth and making it modular like that where like it would have one function but then you could modify it to be this other function ended up increasing the complexity a whole lot and I had like two microcontrollers I had to negotiate with each other about controlling the other thing and like it was ridiculous I worked maybe six weeks for about 12 hours a day, seven days a week on this project which was totally volunteer just for fun just to give people out of conference and like from one standpoint it was like wow how did I waste that much time but on the other standpoint from the other point of view it was actually a pretty rewarding experience because at that time in the life of Great Scott Gadgets I had quite a bit of time on my hands and also some great things came out of it like the person who I had a couple little contests there was a badge hacking contest and then I also threw an Easter egg in there and I had a contest for who could find the Easter egg and people were doing things like reverse engineering binary from a microcontroller that had a CPU architecture that they'd never seen before and it was amazing and the person who ended up winning the badge contest was Mike Ryan who many of you may know now because he's kind of famous for his Bluetooth low-energy research security research and he won the badge hacking contest and so as a prize I gave him a fully populated badge that worked as an ubertooth and that was his first ubertooth and that's when he got started doing Bluetooth low-energy stuff and now he's gone on to do great things for Bluetooth low-energy security and awareness of it and he's contributed back to the ubertooth project a whole lot so just that one person that I reached through this crazy badge project ended up kind of paying dividends long term and I thought that was pretty cool so this was the theory last thing to leave you with here is kind of this is the theory of how the business was bootstrapped that year but this was the practice and like cash flow is hard and I've heard it said that you shouldn't really expect to make any money your first year in business and looking back at that year I'm like yeah I didn't really make any money but I was able to create something that was sustainable and that met the mission that I set out for me and financially actually the picture is a little better than you see there because what is not represented there is inventory and I started of course with nothing and I ended the year with inventory on the shelf so it totally worked out I was able to bootstrap the business kind of following the model that I set out when I did kickstarter pricing and everything and now a few years later we're still growing we have more products we're an order of magnitude plus larger in terms of revenue and everything else and we're still striving to achieve our mission of putting exciting new tools into the hands of people and so I'm very happy to say that this all worked out and that was my Ubertooth year thank you very much for coming