Wattage

» see wattage.io as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Wattage was a browser tool for designing your own electronics. You said what you wanted the device to do and the software worked out the parts and the enclosure. A factory somewhere was then supposed to make the thing and ship it to you. Four people in Toronto built it, most of them out of the design studio Teehan+Lax, and the line they kept repeating was that they wanted creating and selling hardware to be "as easy as writing and publishing a blog post". You would not need to be an electrical engineer. You would not need to know anything about supply chains.

They raised $250,000 from friends and family and spent about a year on prototypes, mostly laser-cut, eventually narrowing the whole platform down to one customizable radio. Then Jeremy Bell spent six months trying to raise a $2 million seed round on both American coasts and at home in Canada. His own summary of how that went is the sharpest line in the write-up: "In the Valley, I was told we were raising too little. In Canada, we were raising too much."

The money never closed. On 5 May 2015 Bell published a post called "Well, We Failed." and the opening sentence did not hedge: "after a year of development, we've run out of cash and are shutting down Wattage." Hacker News had it thirty-four minutes later and pushed it to 328 points. By that evening wattage.io was already redirecting to the post. It still points there today, more than a decade on.

Wattage's pitch was that you would not need an electrical engineer, which reads oddly when you are the engineer being routed around. I was doing embedded work in Ankara the year this happened and never heard the name once, though the usual geography excuse does not really apply. The product was aimed at anyone with an idea for a device and no way to build it, in any country at all. The year's honest finding is that 1,600 such people would hand over an email address and none of them would buy a thing.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the deck everybody liked ~

The one consistent piece of feedback Wattage got from investors, across roughly sixty revisions, was that the pitch deck looked nice. Bell wrote that the team joked he could always take a job building decks for other people. Someone described the contents as "nowhere near as crisp and focused as required" while the design kept drawing compliments, and he published the final version alongside the obituary so anybody could see both halves of that at once.

~ an absence of traction ~

Bell's own diagnosis is his section heading: an inability to show traction. Wattage was trying to open a market for mass-customized electronics before there was one. The founders had read that as an advantage, on the theory that a new market is a market you get to own, and investors read the identical fact as an unproven market with no evidence anybody was waiting for it.

Being a hardware company, they spent the year on prototypes that proved the vision was technically possible, and he is blunt that the order was wrong: the year should have gone on proving somebody wanted it. They were moving toward a beta to test demand when the cash ran out, and would not ship a beta they could not afford to support. The fabrication did not help either. Laser cutting got the prototypes close to the vision without getting them good enough, and the 3D printing that could have closed the gap was still too slow and too expensive in 2015 to put in front of a customer.

~ what was left to give back ~

The unusual part of the ending is that Wattage returned its investors' money. "We did manage to secure a deal that allows us to return our investors' money," Bell wrote, and he never said what the deal was. The domain has pointed at that announcement ever since, which is its own sort of answer to the last promise in it. He wrote that there was "a high likelihood Wattage will be reborn in another form sometime in the future." That was eleven years ago.

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