Warren Robinson is part of the core team of Mindset, a smart headphone startup that aims to help you become your most productive self. The Mindset team spent three intensive months at the renowned HAX hardware accelerator in Shenzhen with the goal of creating "the perfect work headphones." After launching their Kickstarter campaign, the headphones were successfully funded in less than 24 hours.
Their selling point? On top of your typical smart headphone amenities — bluetooth connectivity, active noise canceling, 'premium sound' and comfort — Mindset added embedded electroencephalography (EEG) sensors that can monitor concentration levels. Over time, the smart headphones help users develop more effective work habits.
We talked to Warren to hear about the team's experience during development in Shenzhen, and what it's like turning a cool concept into reality.
To start off, where did the idea for Mindset come from? What was the process like, from the germination of the original idea to you guys actually coming to Shenzhen to work on the product?
The founders of Mindset are all self-improvement gurus. The two founders (Jacob and David) have spent their whole lives trying to come up with hacks to improve their quality of life, whether it’s at the gym or with nutrition.
One of the founders spent a ton of time researching productivity and he came up with everything from exactly when to drink coffee and how many milligrams of caffeine to consume, to going into different physiological states so your body is processing fats instead of carbohydrates so you can have a steady state energy level.
He also had an interest in biofeedback, which is a little like meditation, but you instead use biomarkers to gauge your progress. You can use a device that measures [biomarkers] and learn to adopt good states. Neurofeedback is similar where you’re trying to up and down regulate specific brain frequencies, and that was something that Jacob was getting into and became relevant to our product.
How did you get involved with Mindset?
I met one of the founders in a graduate Artificial Intelligence class at McGill University. David reached out to me the very day I decided I wanted to start looking for a job. We set up an interview. He told me that they got into HAX accelerator and were leaving in six weeks to go to China and they needed a guy to do machine learning for them. I was immediately sold. I thought it was a fantastic fit.
What was the experience like at HAX in Shenzhen? What kind of support did they provide for you?
They provide a lot of support. HAX is owned by a parent company SOSV Ventures, and SOSV has several other accelerators. Some are specific to things like biotech, and HAX is the hardware one. The guy who owns HAX is Sean O’Sullivan – he’s a genius. He’s scaled up companies to like 10,000 employees. Massive scale.
You get to talk with people like him who are high impact entrepreneurs that have become successful in their careers, and they are advising you and meeting with you all throughout the way to make sure you’re on the right track. On top of that you have someone in every single domain of expertise that you might need – be it design, a lawyer, marketing, electronics, you name it – they have a specialist on board that is happy to either advise you or do work for you. Again, on top of that, they’ve worked with something like 135 start-ups over the course of the last five years.
I’m assuming you sourced your materials from nearby factories around Shenzhen? Did you ever visit them?
We visited a few factories, but most of it was educational. Another great thing about HAX is that they educate you on everything you need to know. They educate you on every single tooling process there is; we saw a casting factory, machine pressing, we went and saw everything. I don’t even remember all the names of them – I’m a software guy.
For our own parts, for the first 90% of HAX, it was all Taobao and just ordering online. That’s really all you need. You don’t really need custom parts until you have a proven concept. Once you’ve put everything together roughly, that’s when it’s nice to machine a metal part. For example, we did the sideband for our headphones out of a machine part.
Shenzhen has made a very concerted effort to brand itself as China’s Silicon Valley. You were in the middle of that, so how do you think Shenzhen is doing in fulfilling that image?
Well, they definitely have the largest electronics market in the world. And I think they also have the largest set of supply chain constituents around the area and all the tooling processes, and because of that if you want to prototype a hardware product then I have not seen a place in the world where you can do it faster than you can in Shenzhen. In fact, I haven’t seen a place where you could do it half as fast.
There was a funny anecdote someone told us when we first entered HAX that turned out to be true for our team. He compared making a product in North America to making a product in Shenzhen. He said that in North America first you need to make a CAD (computer aided design) model, which is like a digital representation of your product, and when you know that’s good, which takes about two weeks, you can order the specific parts, and then that takes about two weeks and it’s pretty expensive. And it may or may not work. So it’s one, two, three months until you get a prototype out.
In Shenzhen, you don't make a digital representation. You go on Taobao, you order like 10 of each part that you might need in all different sizes. They come the next day or in two days and you just put it together like building blocks and you have a prototype in three days.
Where is the company at now? Where does the money raised from Kickstarter go? My understanding is that you have a workable prototype – now do you just manufacture them, or do you still need to work out the kinks?
We have a proven concept. We have a “works like” and “looks like” prototype. But we manufactured the “works like” by hand. So we basically need to redesign what we have so you can make it in a manufacturing plant. In addition to that, we can monitor concentration levels like a cognitive psychology test but we want [the headphones] to pick up practical distractions in the workplace. So we’ve hired a group of researchers out of McGill University, PhD students in the Psychology Department, to do a massive big data collection for us.
On top of that, we’re scaling as a company. We’ve hired a marketing lead. We’ve hiring two more engineers. It’s exciting to be growing.
Let’s say I contribute to the campaign. It says the product will be delivered by December 2017. So, theoretically, if I contribute, I’ll have my Mindset headphones in December?
Not theoretically. You’re going to get them! For the reasons I’ve already mentioned, it would be a mistake to make this product anywhere else in the world. Shenzhen is a big reason we’re going to make the December deadline.
Any fond memories of Shenzhen that are not related to work?
Steamed buns.
For more information about the Mindset headphones, visit the Kickstarter page.
[Images via Kickstarter, HAX Accelerator, Mashable]
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