- It's one thing to run the New York City Marathon.
It's another to do it blind.
In 2017, Simon Wheatcroft did just that,
becoming the first blind person to run the marathon unaided,
thanks to the Wayband:
a device that helps you navigate
entirely through vibrations on the skin.
Though the Wayband made marathon history,
the tech behind the Wayband was actually developed
for a much different sport.
- This all started for me
because I wanted to build a suit
that would allow me to download kung fu using vibration.
So that was my foray into the world of haptics.
- From that idea sprung WearWorks,
a haptic design company run by Keith and co-founder, Kevin.
Inspired by the experiences of their blind friend,
and now company advisor, Marcus Engel,
Kevin and Keith committed to using
their haptic technology backgrounds
to help the blind and visually impaired communities.
- I wanted to create something
with a new functionality that was innovative.
How do I really change lives of somebody
using a product, using design?
- They figured out how to do just that with the Wayband.
So now the question remains,
can they raise the capital to bring the product to market?
- The road has been ridiculously challenging,
but I think from my point of view,
the road of life is always challenging.
That's the entrepreneurial journey.
It's about autonomy.
It's about independence.
It's about freedom, but freedom isn't free.
- You just started your dream business.
How much profit would you need
to pay your basic living expenses, like rent and ramen?
This is a show on the economics of entrepreneurship,
and founders turning their dreams into reality.
This is Ramen Profitable.
- When we were first doing this,
we didn't really know a lot about what we were doing.
So, I got this box of stuff.
This was VS-0.
This was the very, very first prototype that we built.
This is VS-10.
This was one of our early versions of the Wayband.
This is actually one of the Waybands
that we used to run the marathon with.
We had to put a bigger motor on so he could feel it clearly.
So, yeah, so we were just doing
what we could with what we had.
All the technology that we spent building in here
ended up being the technology that got compressed
and made it into here.
- Years of prototyping later,
WearWorks finally has a model ready for launch,
with the first units going to awesome people like Erskine.
- Hey man, how's it going?
- Hey, how you doin'?
- Keith, man, pleasure to meet you.
- I'm Erskine, nice to meet you, how's everything?
- It's doing fantastic, man.
- So the Wayband is a wristband that gently guides you
to your end destination using only vibrating cues,
without the need for any visuals or audio.
When you're going in the right way,
you feel absolutely no vibration at all.
And when you start to veer off,
you'll get a tiny vibration.
And that vibration will get stronger,
the wronger you are.
- All right, okay, so as long as it has no vibration,
you're good.
That means you're straight.
- Mmhmm.
- Every little bit helps.
It's pointing me that way.
- Let's go.
- Getting the Wayband to this point was no simple task.
WearWorks faced many obstacles during development.
Their largest challenge came back in 2017
after they received a $250,000 NSF grant
that they spent in just six months.
As Keith and Kevin learned the hard way,
to make your product cheap,
you first have to make it expensive.
- The National Science Foundation grant was
the biggest grant that we've ever received.
250,000 did not last a long time, that's for sure.
We paid our interns.
We hired ourself our team.
We hired a guy from MIT,
and he was doing all the PCBs for our prototypes.
That grant got us to the first phase.
We have a product now,
but once the money ran out in the grant,
we were going through the drought.
- We went almost 18 months with no funding at all,
like not a single dime into the company.
- No money, no security, no healthcare, nothing.
We were a lot more stressed out,
a lot more angry at each other.
And we were scared as well.
It was like a rollercoaster of just
constant failures, mistakes.
- The temptation to quit is super real.
You're doing something that you don't know is possible.
You're walking into a venture that basically
has a 90% failure rate guaranteed, as part of the process.
I could be making $200,000 a year right now,
but I'm choosing to make $2000 a month instead
all for the hope that maybe one day,
this will turn into something that is huge.
- To make ends meet, Kevin and Keith taught and consulted
while they continued refining the Wayband.
Despite the lack of funding, they refused to give up.
- The reason I never really quit was because
when I looked at all the other things that I could do
they were just different ways of doing
what I'm already doing right now.
- The silver lining of the fear and of the drought is
we always get back to the core,
the value of why we're doing this.
And are we willing to sacrifice everything we have for it?
And obviously, that's the reason why we're still doing it,
you know, six years in.
Now, we're looking at, what are the assets we have built?
What do we need to do now?
And how are we going to get profitable?
And how are we going to get interest of
further investments right now?
- So, we started building relationships
with blind and visually impaired organizations.
We did speaking engagements.
We were talking to people who were in the space,
working with other people in the haptics world
to see what life does our device have
outside of the blind or visually impaired community,
and outside of navigation.
And then all of a sudden, things shifted.
We got an investment and that investor's reputation
brought in a lot of other people
who we didn't even know were on the table at the moment.
So, things just kind of started piling in.
So, we basically like went 18 months with no funding
and then raised half a million dollars
in the middle of a pandemic.
- So they're networking and tenacity paid off
and now their fundraising is back on track.
- We're currently raising a $1 million round
and we have 49% of that closed.
That's going to get us our first 5,000 units
and get us to break even by the end of the year.
- WearWorks' plan is to begin manufacturing
their first units in June, and then launch in October.
After launch, they plan to market the device
through pilot programs with the Olympics, the Paralympics,
and blind and visually impaired organizations
- What do you enjoy about it?
- This could take me to the park by myself.
It gives me the freedom to be free.
- Money always comes and goes.
So, you've got to have a purpose
and one that you can stick to for years and years to come.
It's a really tough industry, if you also choose technology.
Get a good co-founder, build up a good team,
and have a purpose and an impactful market,
that you really can make a change in.
- This is really about freedom.
It's about autonomy.
It's about independence, that's the entrepreneurial journey.
But finally, that's also exactly what Wayband is about.
It's about giving people freedom,
autonomy, and independence.
And one of the things that I've kind of learned
personally in life is that the easiest way
to get the thing that you want
is to give it to others.