random CAD of a cathead for another project we worked on recently because it is adorable

Hello everyone!

Wow, it has been a while since our last update (several months!) In the meantime, we wrapped up the core part of the class, had a contest with prizes, learned that taxes absolutely can kill your company, and are hard at work on our next project, which will launch in a month. Continue reading for some statistics about the class, pictures of the awesome robots people built in the contest, gory details about why not to do your own corporate taxes, adorable pictures of the other robot we have been working on, and some teasers about the project we’re launching in a month.

The Class

Alright, so what happened with the class? Here’s what it looked like:

So, we had 69 people actually register for the class (plus me and Cappie).

40 people completed the first problem as far as we can tell (we didn’t assign actual homework, but used the “problem” interface to hide the answers)

and we had about a 33% completion rate for the core of the class. That is, they got all the way to the potentiometer-controlled LED.

We then got to the contest part of the class, the part we were pretty excited about — we wanted people to take apart their robot and make their own robots. Theoretically there are a lot of benefits to this: (a) you get your own project to show off (b) it helps us understand how much of the material you’ve understood (c) it helps you understand the material better and ask questions as you build your own robot. However, only two people ended up participating in the contest! So, that was a no-go, sadly. In fact, we released the extra kinematics part of the class and 25 people even participated in that. We’re not sure if we just need to tweak things, have a larger student base, or what.

Here are the two submissions, both of which we are very happy about (Owen won for completing a project in time) both in terms of the robot and the design notebook.

Although we’re still stumped as to why a two dozen people haven’t even registered for the class yet, ⅓ of people completing the class is quite high for an online class. It’s lower than we like, but we are happy about our feedback so far.

We asked for feedback mid-way through the class, of which there were only 4 responses. (this is cut-off, but at the top people just rated it as “very interesting, very educational).

 

We are still trying to work on completing the extra parts of the class — the inverse kinematics and everything — and will get that up as soon as we can, but it’s been tough going lately, as we’ll explain shortly.

The Gory Tax Part

Well, down to the less fun parts of this kickstarter. Roughly, the lessons we learned can be summarized as (disclaimer: do not take any part of this post as legal or tax advice yada yada), if you are serious about your startup, right when you start out, you should (a) get a lawyer to help you incorporate (b) get an accountant to help you with your tax forms (c) get payroll services to deal with paying yourselves. Note: these lessons may only be relevant to C Corps, which we are incorporated as. I don’t know about LLCs or S Corps, I’ve never started a company before

Basically, we thought that payroll and taxes would be three forms a year and simple to do since our situation seemed pretty straightforward and common. How bad could it be? We decided to try doing it ourselves to learn a bit about taxes and what everyone complains about.

BIG. MISTAKE. Here is a rough schedule of how many forms need to be filled out or deposits paid:

Here is the estimated number hours for just one form:

 

We will reveal our finances some day shortly to really drive home how badly doing your own taxes can go, but we asked around and had some people judge us for our honest mistake of trying to do our own taxes and not understanding the difference between book-based and accrual-based accounting, so we’re not revealing our finances now. But basically, we were in a rather unique situation where messing up this difference hit us _really_ hard (since the kickstarter money all came in at the end of the fiscal year in December and we didn’t have time to spend it actually fulfilling things, in book-based accounting it looked like we had a ton of profit/taxable income. In accrual-based, you get to discount your expected liabilities going forward).

What else is there to say? I feel like paying ourselves at least minimum wage would make us a lot happier. Maybe bootstrapping is not the way to go. It’s hard to say. We hope the next kickstarter will be successful enough that we have a recurring source of revenue, like oneTesla does, and can also at lesat pay ourselves minimum wage for long enough to ship that kickstarter and launch our next product as well.

The Teaser for our Next Product

Since we have no income as there haven’t been continuing sales after the kickstarter, we’ve been forced to go full-speed into our next product, which will hopefully have recurring sales. Keep an eye out for a product launch in the next month. We started out with these motors:

(just kidding, not the small ones but the large one by itself), although now we’ve moved back to continuous rotation servos. Here’s a teaser video:

Our interns for the summer came in. We have two interns from MIT and three high school interns coming in at various points this summer. They’ve been super-helpful. Another update sometime soon…

Wish us luck! Thanks again for all your support and understanding.

–Nancy and Cappie