The Inside Story of the Lily Drone's Collapse (wired.com)

New submitter mirandakatz writes: Lily Robotics had everything: Two charismatic young founders; millions in funding; and a product that promised to change the world -- or, at the very least, transform photography. But over 60,000 customers are still waiting for their Lily Drones, and the company is now being sued by the San Francisco District Attorney's office for false advertising. As it turns out, Lily Robotics never actually had the right tools to create the product it was selling -- and it all came crashing down. At Backchannel, Jessica Pishko has the untold story of how such a promising company went so wrong.

From the report: "The magic of the Lily Drone was in its concept: It was a product you could unpack and throw -- so easy, Antoine Balaresque, the cofounder and CEO of Lily Robotics, wrote in emails, that even an old person could do it. But translating that idea into a tangible product proved difficult, and the storytelling that made the Lily Drone so tantalizing to consumers ultimately factored into its downfall. In one of his presentations, Balaresque presented a PowerPoint slide with the sentence, 'Humans have a fundamental need to put themselves in the center of stories.' It appeared to be a quote he made up, but the idea that human nature needs stories is fundamental. Stories are how we make sense of our lives. But while a good story can get you funding and acclaim, ultimately it isn't enough."

Comments

LoL..dumb people shouldn't get their money back

[Anonymous Coward]

So this company was funded purely on a 'story' no 'working prototype' at all...only after they get a piss pot of money do they even try to figure out how to build it simply to discover the 'tools' (e.g. 'technology' didn't exist)...wow, anyone investing in this shouldn't get their money back as far as I'm concerned.

Re:Had everything?

[dgatwood]

But ideas are cheap indeed. Most ideas from "ideas people" are impossible/unfeasible, and it is too much refuting them all with a nice explanation of why it can't work. Hence ruder dismissals designed to keep "ideas people" away and give the impression of a hostile forum. A few of their ideas are feasible, but the reason nobody works on them is because everybody is working on some feasible idea of their own which is more interesting.

Ideas are cheap, good ideas less so. What you really need is not to drive people away, but rather to route them to an appropriate forum for suggestions and encourage (require?) them to search for existing threads that might already include that suggestion before posting. That way, you collect the ideas and can have people comment on them, vote on them, etc.

"Ideas people" are not special at all. All the useable ideas they come up with is stuff that devs are perfectly capable of coming up with themselves.

Then why don't they? The thing is, I've seen lots of software that was written by developers without adult supervision, and when developers all focus on their pet features without taking into account user needs, the result is almost invariably worse for it. Those pesky ideas people are your average users. They're the people you're trying to reach with your software (typically). And the tendency to push them away rather than to organize their ideas and prioritize them is the reason that so much open source software is, frankly, crap.

And I say that with all due respect, as I've contributed to open source software frequently in the past, and have even open sourced various things that I have written. When I read things like what you posted, my first reaction is to assume that the project is never going to go anywhere, and in a few years, will be replaced by some other project that is designed from the ground up around the features that users have been complaining about not having in the existing tools for years.