 So we're here at Compitextrussade15 and who are you? My name is Ben Doljan Gardner. So what do you do? I run a company called Hatch and we make custom Android devices. Sometimes Android isn't used for just smartphones and tablets, but it can be used for a large amount of different products. And we help customers make custom devices, sometimes custom electronics, custom firmware, custom casing for industrial use or consumer use. So that's what we do. So you're based in China, in Shenzhen? In Shenzhen and where are you? Yeah, our office is based in Shenzhen. So how many people in the company? 15 people. So are you a design house? We're not exactly a design house. A design house will just focus on doing the PCBA. What we do is integrate resources. So the design house is one of the resources we use. There's a customer coming to us for custom POS now. So we're finding things like the printer that they're going to use and they want a certain magnetic reader for cards and credit cards, our IC reader. So we'll help integrate all the resources, bring it together. They need a custom mold. We'll do their mechanical engineering for them, the design for them, make the actual tooling and then deliver a final product to them. So we work with customers that want a finished product. They're not necessarily technical, even though sometimes they are. And then we help them connect the dots and get what they need. So you make things done. You make things happen, right? That's the most important. Lots of people have ideas, but you want to make it real. And you have experience with that. So how long have you been doing this? So I started the company back in 2004. Back then it was MP3 players. And we went through a period where we were doing very high volume into US retailers doing over a million MP3 players a year, hundreds of thousands of tablets a year. And we kind of redefined the company in the end of 2013 and getting 2014 to focus on Android products. And that's sort of the direction we're going in right now. So you are experts in sourcing stuff and finding the right guys in Shenzhen and getting the right engineers involved. Exactly right, yeah. So how many things have you been doing? Do you have some examples or is everything secret? No, no. For example, just a recent project they're working on right now. They've just won the TechCrunch Meetup in Seoul for the most promising startup. It's a medical device, actually. It's based on an Android platform. And this company, what they wanted to have done was integrate a blood analyzer with an Android smartphone. And the idea there is that patients can send their medical information directly to hospitals or insurance companies. And the blood analyzer part is also a new component where it could read 50 different types of diseases. So as opposed to going to a hospital where it takes like 48 to 72 hours to get your blood work done you can get it done fairly quickly. You're going to analyze a bunch of diseases and then you send all that data to your healthcare provider and you have a nice record of it. And I think in the long term the play is that when you have enough statistics you can start making sort of preventative type prognosis like 60% of people that have this kind of history might end up with this new disease or you might have so. I think that's the big play. So a company approached you and said we want to do that and you figured out how to do it. So this company has a background in medical devices. So they came to us with their sensor board which was the blood analyzer part of it. And then what they did is they gave us a very rough sensor board and we helped them integrate it into a non-existing phone we created from scratch. So everything from the casing to the PCBA to some custom interfaces they needed to have done we put it together for them. So Shenzhen is like the real Silicon Valley right is where the hardware is being done and Silicon Valley is just the place for iPhone apps. Well I think there's a lot of creativity in Silicon Valley. I think Shenzhen is a great resource that that creativity can utilize as you mentioned before to get their ideas done right. So there's definitely creativity in Shenzhen but not quite as much as you find in Silicon Valley. So in Silicon Valley there's a bunch of guys with crazy ideas but none of them know how to do it and they get to you to get it done. Yeah I wouldn't say none of them know how to do it but I think that their key value is those crazy ideas and our key value is helping them execute on those crazy ideas. So that's how we work together. And do you do partnerships or do you do charge a fee? How does it work? So generally speaking we'll just sell the product. So we'll make an assessment of how much development is going to require in terms of like cost, time, experience, whatever, resources. So we'll amortize that into the unit cost and then we'll say okay you can guarantee us 10,000 pieces or 20,000 pieces so for your first 20,000 pieces it's going to cost this amount. After that it'll be lower because we've already sort of worked out the development costs. But I guess that some of the ideas are so crazy it might be awesome but it's hard to ship sometimes right to sell and then so there's a risk component in your company? There's a huge risk component. Or do you actually charge up front a bunch of money? Well we don't want to see projects fail right so before we get into a project we definitely analyze it and make sure that it's something one that we can do and two there's a market for it. We don't want to see someone being all excited about things getting investor money using their own money paying for it and then it turns out no one wants to buy it right. So we'll definitely have a couple startup meetings and say okay you know what's your plan how does this work and then we'll say look if we really believe in it as well then let's do this to make it happen. They do pay a deposit in the beginning right and then as time goes on we ship more products they pay more along the way. Alright so sometimes it's difficult right some ideas might be awesome for the guy that got the idea but not awesome for people listening to the idea. But it might actually be an awesome idea but it's difficult to know sometimes. You don't know before you know people buy it or they don't. Yeah that's often the case like especially as an entrepreneur when you have an idea you hope that everyone loves your idea and you truly believe in it but sometimes it's tough to see the big picture so we try to take it from the big picture perspective and make judgment space on that. Do you provide marketing stuff or do they have people find that out because that's important that's maybe the most important. Do you mean how do we market? To get stuff on the market to get it sold. Yeah great question. So we do have some channels in the US that we can help people with but they're more on the retail side. We hope that our customers come in with their channels we really focus on just that product development manufacturing sort of resource in terms of like the direction the distribution the after sales service that kind of stuff is usually in our customers hand. Can you give two or three more examples of what you do with Android like it's tablet related smartphone related what kind of... Yeah sure. So I mean we also do mass market retail stuff right so it's kind of obscure but the largest mobile device retailer in the Ukraine has a house brand and that's our client. The largest mp3 brand in the US behind Apple started with mp3 players moved into tablets and we helped them make that transition and products were selling in very large tier one retailers in the US we were behind those products as well. We work with MVNOs which are cell phone network providers well they don't probably the physical network resellers of bandwidth? Exactly. So they'll get wholesale prices on network time I guess from the networks and we make products for them as well. And you're very well connected with like O-Winner and stuff like that and then you can get it the O-Winner is the solutions customized for all kinds of stuff. Well that's exactly right so from a technical standpoint we have direct relationships with all the major android IC companies all winner, rock chips media tech, spectrum actions and we'll figure out what the client wants we'll figure out what resources are available what the best company is to work with and then we'll work with the IC company if necessary but sometimes it's not necessary sometimes you can just work with the design house and get it done that way.