Madhav Ayyagari is a seasoned professional with a background in engineering and warehouse automation. He is the co-founder of Inductive Robotics and inventor behind a new robotic EV charging solution designed to solve core infrastructure challenges.
Nate Wheeler is the host of the popular Manufacturing Insiders podcast. He also owns weCreate, a nationally recognized marketing agency that helps manufacturers grow, save money, and become more efficient.
In this episode of Manufacturing Insiders, Madhav Ayyagari breaks down why the current model for EV charging infrastructure is failing commercial and multi-family properties. He explains that the real barrier to adoption is not the technology, but the poor economics of installing expensive, fixed charging stations. His solution is a fleet of autonomous robots that delivers on-demand charging directly to vehicles.
Madhav details how this approach eliminates the high upfront capital expenditure that prevents property owners from investing in charging. The conversation explores how a subscription-based service can increase revenue by servicing more vehicles than traditional stations. Read on to learn how rethinking the delivery model can solve a persistent infrastructure bottleneck.
WeCreate (00:01.24) Welcome to Manufacturing Insiders. I have an exciting guest with me today, Madhav Ayyagari. He’s a seasoned professional in the engineering space. He has invented a pretty innovative and very interesting product.
I’ll let him talk about this, but we’re really talking about the future of EV charging here. I’m very interested to get your take on where you see that industry going, where you see your product fitting into it. And I’m also interested in picking your brain. We’re all talking about geopolitics right now. I’m interested to get your take on the US’s relationship with India, China, and what your thoughts are there. So welcome to the podcast, Madhav.
Madhav (00:45.564) Thank you, Nate. Great to meet you. I can do a quick intro if that helps the audience and then get into the questions you asked me. So my name is Madhav. I’m originally from India but moved to the US in 2013 to get a master’s at University of Florida, followed by working in a combination of startups and big companies, mainly in the warehouse automation space. So I worked for a startup called Redworks in Austin, where we helped big retailers and companies like Starworks, Sephora, Rent the Runway, Walmart move from manual pick pack sortation to fully automated warehouses.
Imagine people picking with paper, now picking with RFID guns, moving in a warehouse and maximizing efficiency. This was the time when Amazon was expanding really quickly in the US in terms of warehouses and its presence and everyone else wanted to catch up or was trying to catch up with them.
As a result, they were increasing their warehouse productivity and automation and that’s where we came in. I really enjoyed that job and also realized how much I liked working with end users and training them and doing a combination of deploying and testing and actually training end users on the job.
I then got into gaming and this came about through one of my side projects. I think this was a time when we were in one of those VR hype cycles. Back then it seemed to be hype, I think it died down, it came back again.
WeCreate (02:40.928) It was really big. Like, you’d go over to a friend’s house and they have a VR headset on. But yeah, it just kind of died off.
Madhav (02:47.292) Yeah, exactly. It died off. I mean, Oculus came back with it. But Google had these $15 cardboard things you could buy. It was just very cheap. So I bought one. And I took this Udemy course, a nanodegree on VR. And I just loved developing something which I could see and feel and see immediate results. So I developed a basic game as part of the course and I really loved gaming at that point. I thought this was very interesting. I played a lot of games growing up, Counter-Strike, Call of Duty, all those first person shooter games, but learning more about gaming and making them was really fun.
And somehow I started working with this gaming company in Austin called SciPlay, then followed by another five years in gaming, where mainly I started working on consumer games, direct to consumer games, mobile apps, and was very successful in growing games, which scaled to many millions of users and also growing revenue as part of the equation and fully understood how the ad market works. You know, what is consumer acquisition cost? What is consumer LTV and stuff like that.
Madhav (04:14.192) That was a whole new world I really liked, but after five years of it, I really wanted to try something else. And I got an MBA at Berkeley Haas School of Business in California. And I used that time as, okay, I always wanted to maybe have something on my own, build a new company, but just didn’t have the knowledge or support structure in terms of how to do it because you have to start somewhere, right? So I just didn’t know. And the MBA helped me get the structure.
As part of a class called entrepreneurship, I pitched this idea of mobile EV charging where this was going back to. I used to have a Model Y while living in an apartment where I didn’t have access to EV charging and I was trying to figure out why. Then, I pitched this idea about, okay, what about your car charging everywhere you go. Like I’m sitting in class in Berkeley, my car is charging, but it is parked overnight. Then I don’t need to make this separate trip I’m making to an EV charging station. It could be much easier, I thought. So that’s where the inception of the idea of Inductive Robotics started.
WeCreate (05:35.936) As most good ideas do come from that kind of annoyance you find, a problem in your own life and it’s like, yeah, I gotta fix this.
Madhav (05:42.076) Yeah, exactly. Something like that. I mean, it was nothing close to what we are doing now, but the beauty of it is that you start with something. I said, OK, I did this degree now. Might as well try this and see where it goes. Worst case, I can get a job, I thought. And yeah, that’s what happened. I stuck with it, and I found my co-founder Dave who has 10 years of experience in robotics and automation from Amazon.
And he was also at that time looking for something to do in the climate space. He had just taken a year off after Amazon and was just exploring new ideas and happened to meet him through this interesting forum called Work on Climate. And then, we really hit it off and thought, okay, there’s this interesting idea about mobile robots, or just mobile EV charging. Then we thought, okay, robotics is a place where we can take existing tech and build something.
It was very funny. We started with something like Roomba style robots, which would go under a car and charge the car. And then we scaled back from that thinking, okay, the car needs to have a receiver, it needs to be able to take the charge and also imagine maybe 20 robots scuttling around in a parking lot. Sounds very dystopian and scary too.
WeCreate (07:16.428) Right. Yeah.
Madhav (07:35.556) But yeah, we started with the germ of an idea, but eventually we built a fully autonomous EV charging robot, which is a prototype now, but essentially what we did was we showed that you can park your car anywhere in the parking lot, plug in our adapter, and then that adapter tells us where the car is. The robot drives up to the car autonomously because plugging in the adapter gives it a signal that this car is needing a charge, and it just goes there.
WeCreate (07:51.806) I see. Was there another function? Forgive me for my ignorance here, but I’m not really up to date on my EV knowledge. I have a gasoline-powered Chevy Silverado. How do they typically charge? I mean, is there a reason you’re charging them differently that you need this adapter?
Madhav (08:21.127) Yeah, that’s a good segue into the problem in the sense that our solution is one among many solutions, I would say. And it is very narrow and specific to a very particular scenario. So typically, there are three ways to charge. I would say the charging market is split into three broad categories.
One is at-home charging. So people who have a single-family home, you go home and you charge. So this is called level one charging. It charges at a very low rate, like I think six kilowatts.
And then you just leave your car charging overnight. By the time you wake up, you would have close to a full charge. So this works for most use cases. You just go to work and come back.
Now there’s this other big group of people who live in multifamily housing. So they may have access to EV charging, but slowly, like apartments are adding those. But again, not everyone has it. And if you have access to them, it’s a challenge to find a spot when you have time.
Maybe there’s a car already there. So those people charge maybe at work or they charge at like a fast charger, which are chargers made available to the public by the government or other programs. So they go to a mall, they charge, they go to a fast charger, and the fast chargers are mainly started by Tesla. Then there are many other companies like ChargePoint.
But you have these two extremes of the market: at home slow charging and fast charging. Fast charging is level three, which is the high speed. In half hour to 45 minutes you get a full charge and in the middle is level two charging which is slightly faster.
WeCreate (10:17.378) Yep. Those are going to be kind of few and far between. The Tesla charging stations, you’re not going to have those everywhere, right?
Madhav (10:28.988) Yeah, they’re trying to, there’s an effort to get them everywhere. But again, that comes back to the problem we are trying to solve. We try to figure out where there is a gap in the market or where the charging doesn’t work. And what we saw was at home charging works fine.
It’s just very easy. I mean, if you have a home, you just pay maybe a thousand bucks or maybe two to have an electrician come in and do a basic setup and that’s it. You just have a 240 volt plug. It’s very simple.
I mean, you could still do it with one, it just takes very long. It just takes very, very long. Then the other challenge comes when you’re at a workplace, when you’re at a commercial parking lot or a hotel.
WeCreate (11:04.778) Okay, you need 240. Okay. Yep.
WeCreate (11:10.966) Right. Right.
Madhav (11:23.74) Who takes up the cost of installing these chargers, right? So if you’re like a company, you typically take on the cost. But in our case, what we learned was in commercial parking, what we saw was it’s very expensive to get these chargers installed. The cost is coming down to maybe $3,000 to $4,000 to $5,000 to do one charger, but it varies quite a bit depending on the structure.
Like in most of the parking lots we work in, the infrastructure was put in back in the 60s and it’s very expensive to put in these chargers, almost like it costs 10K to put in one set of chargers. And when we looked into the quotes, it looked like the actual hardware is just a small portion of it. The rest of it is just installing, digging up everything and adding more energy.
So that’s where we saw that there’s this commercial parking operator who doesn’t own the building. He has a real estate owner and now he has to convince this real estate owner to take up this cost. Because he’s seeing demand from the consumer that they want charging and he sees that as an opportunity to add more revenue.
WeCreate (12:22.795) The pads, the concrete, all that kind of stuff.
Madhav (12:50.524) That’s a big, maybe often like 60 to 100K capex project, which they don’t want to take on, right? Because they are just operating a lease on the real estate parking lot. And their goal is to make as much money as possible in that. Why would they spend a ton of money?
So when it goes to the real estate owner, they just look at it as a pure ROI equation. And what we’ve seen is initially like maybe 2016 to 20 or 21, they’ve put in a lot of money in these EV charging setups, but they haven’t quite seen the ROI on them. So they’ve put in a ton of money, but actual usage hasn’t seen a lot of success because you often have two charging stations for a big building, and you have a car sitting there for most of the time.
There’s no efficient way of cars coming in, cars going out, which increases more cars, more revenue. So what ends up happening is there’s this stalemate where parking operators want to install EV charging, the real estate owners don’t want to fund it. And as a result, there’s no charging. And this happens across industries, in multifamily commercial parking.
So what we are trying to do is can we break this link between a parking spot and a charging station wherein you’re not tied to parking at a specific place. You just park anywhere you can. And we can give you EV charging. But we will do it at a much lower cost.
And the reason we are saying we’ll do it at a much lower cost is that we’ll do all the setting up the charging and everything. You just pay a monthly subscription for using our solution. So you don’t have the capex sync you have to take traditionally. And on top of that, as opposed to just charging two cars a day, maybe three, you get to charge maybe 10 or 11, because the cars can be anywhere and the robot goes from car to car to car.
WeCreate (15:17.133) The property manager here or owner is making money from each charge. So they’re paying you a subscription fee, but they’re gaining revenue as well while they’re charging vehicles, right?
Madhav (15:29.402) Right, yeah. So there are two models typically, like, either you take a revenue share from the revenue from the customer, or you pay a downright subscription cost. I think for us, we want at least now what we’re thinking is that, yeah, just pay us the monthly subscription costs and you keep all the revenue from the customer, because you know how to best charge your customers and we want you to have the upside.
WeCreate (15:58.934) Right. Yeah. And plus it becomes a lot more difficult. You know, you’re going to have to track how much usage they have and the accountability issue. Yeah, that makes sense.
Madhav (16:04.208) Right, exactly. Yeah, but that’s the whole landscape of EV charging in a nutshell.
WeCreate (16:15.254) So what does it cost? So what’s the comparative cost for you? Like, so let’s say you were to put in a charging station that’s fixed, right? I don’t know what the average number of stations is if somebody puts an installation, like four, five, 10, like what would that normally be?
Madhav (16:34.3) Yeah, so charging stations are typically put in in sets of two. So you have two or four, or six, things like that. And in terms of when you compare a traditional charging installation to what we would do, so to speak.
So if you put in a traditional charging station, it would cost you somewhere between like for two, like maybe one charging station with two ports. So let’s take four charger installations. So you have two stations where there are like four charging ports.
What will happen is you’re looking at something like close to 50k to somewhere around 100k in terms of the overall installation costs. And assuming you go on the lower end, you look at something like maybe 50k to install these chargers. So you put in all of this initial capex to do the whole install and then followed by there is some maintenance cost every month. You pay the company some maintenance cost.
Madhav (18:01.572) And then at the end of the day, you maybe charge the customer like maybe $0.20 a kilowatt hour. So you hardly make any revenue in this model. You’ve spent maybe $60 to $100K on this charging station, and you make very little revenue from the customer. When you contrast that with our model, what we are saying is that you pay us like $995 per robot per month. And then let’s say we deploy a four robot system that costs you close to 4,000 a month, maybe less depending on the configuration. And with this, get a capability where you get to charge 20 to 30 EVs every day, as opposed to just four or six you would charge traditionally.
WeCreate (18:56.672) Right, yeah, it makes a ton of sense. So they have lower operating costs, they have lower upfront costs, they can charge more vehicles. Is there any downside?
Madhav (19:08.132) Yeah, I mean, sure, there’s always a downside. The downside is that we need to do a really good job maintaining the infrastructure. At the end of the day, it’s a robotics solution which needs to be up and running all the time. So the downside would be when the system is down and it’s not an easy fix because it’s a complex operation.
And the other thing some people argue as a downside, I say more like an inconvenience is you have to plug in the adapter each time. But I think that’s a very common behavior. Anyway, you are plugging in a wire into your car and it’s the same like that. You just plug in an adapter and then by the time you come back, your car would have been charged.
WeCreate (19:57.23) So why can’t it use the same connection as the traditional charger?
Madhav (20:03.748) It actually does, it uses the same connection. It’s just that the adapter we created is built for two sets of standards. One is the NACS standard, which is used by Tesla, where it’s the same plug which goes into the car. It’s just that the other side of it is fitted to our robot. So the other side of it is the interface to the robot, the side which plugs into the car is the same as your existing charging plug which goes in.
WeCreate (20:36.49) I see. So do different models of EVs have different connections?
Madhav (20:47.874) Mainly, there are two standards which are coalescing at this point, like the Tesla standard and a non-Tesla standard, like CCS, CHAdeMO and NACS are two big standards. So more and more you’re seeing companies like Ford, GM moving to the Tesla standard. So I think there’ll just be one in the future, hopefully, but right now you have two. What we did is we just built our adapters for both standards. So depending on the car, you can pick either one.
WeCreate (21:22.004) I see. I’ve been watching the EV adoption play out and it seems to really be skyrocketing from what I’ve seen of late. I actually had a friend who bought a Tesla and I was surprised. He didn’t really seem like the kind of person that would buy a Tesla.
He’s like, well, you should see all of the incentives they have to buy these. There’s tax credits, there’s money off. It actually turned out to be a pretty reasonable price and they’re pretty cool. And then there’s places where you can charge it for free for slow charging.
In some cases, there’s very few of these places, but evidently there are places where you can charge it for free. You can end up spending less on fuel costs. I guess I’m curious from your perspective.
Because arguably the big reasoning behind electric vehicles is that it’s somehow more environmentally friendly, right? However, you’re using fossil fuels to create the electricity to power the vehicle. You’re using a lot of rare metals to build the batteries. I’m just curious from your perspective, do you feel like EVs accomplish the goal of a more green solution, a more environmentally friendly solution? And two, when there are less incentives from the government to buy EVs, less subsidies, do you think that the curve will remain the same, the adoption curve?
Madhav (23:11.814) Yeah, two good questions. Overall, net net, I wouldn’t say you having an EV means you can say, oh, I’m saving the environment. I guess that’s a hard argument. But in general, the more EVs you have, the more tailpipe emissions you cut down because 20 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions come from general cars and other vehicles on the road. So it is a big contributor.
But again, I think what you end up seeing is it’s just like the first wave of electrification. Slowly, you will have electric vehicles moving to semis, trucks, boats. So mainly, you have a lot of other areas too, where you have a lot of emissions coming from which will eventually be cut down when you have EVs.
Having said all of this, at the end of the day, it has to be a great consumer product, which is what Tesla has done, which no one else had done until that point. You might be inclined to buy an EV if it makes you feel better, but at the end of the day, you just keep it because you like the car.
I think that is what a lot of Tesla owners say. I used to have a Model Y, I sold it because again, I had a charging problem where I used to live in Berkeley, all of these charging issues and I drove twice from Austin to Berkeley and back. And then you pass through like deserts, literal EV charging deserts where you’re always anxious that your car might die. So that was a reason for me it didn’t work and we just had one car between my wife and I.
It should be gasoline and maybe my next car will be. So I think that going back to the question of, is having an EV overall helpful with reducing greenhouse gas emissions? Yes. But again, the other point might also be truly net-net like all the raw materials which go into it, like the lithium processing and the supply chain might be less carbon efficient than the car itself. So that’s very hard to say.
But what I see is that even with the administration change, like the reduced incentives, EV adoption still continues to rise. So this tells me a few things. One is if it’s a really good product and people are loving it, they’ll continue to buy it and your approach might be different. Some might come at it from this environmental angle. Like I want to feel better about what I’m buying. Others might just like the car and it’s a cool car.
So that’s how I feel about it overall. And again, I think going back to the whole greenhouse thing and everything, I think ultimately there won’t be a world where the US won’t trend the same way Norway or another European country trends. I think Norway 2003 to maybe 2013, had a crazy shift in terms of EVs. The US won’t have that happen. I have a gas car. I’m in Austin, Texas.
Everyone, a lot of people have gas cars here. We will continue to have gas cars and there’ll be cases where we need gasoline and we need all of these different energy sources. I just think of it as another energy source. So your car is electric, but the electricity that powers your car can come from many sources. It could be renewable, it could be coal, it could be natural gas. So it just gives you more optionality and better technology. And they’re also more safe, presumably.
WeCreate (27:42.798) Right. So you grew up in India and you got your undergrad degree there. Tell me how growing up in India influenced your decision making, your decision to get into this sort of a space. Just tell me a little bit about that.
Madhav (28:03.708) Sure. So I grew up in the city called Hyderabad and this is in the southern part of India and it’s like a big tech city now, but I think it’s very interesting. I was watching this earlier. Everything changed for where I grew up, for my city when our then chief minister of the state, think of it like the governor here or the senator. Maybe the governor is better. He got a five minute meeting with Bill Gates.
And he got a five minute meeting with Bill Gates. I think this is when Bill Clinton had come down to India and he made a stop in Hyderabad. So back then there was hardly anything in a sense, like hardly any tech sector. There was a little bit like outsourcing, but not to the extent. So the chief minister showed a PowerPoint presentation of how you could get a driver’s license very quickly to Bill Gates.
And Bill Gates was apparently very impressed how he used his own product, Microsoft PowerPoint. And this is a tech forward guy. And they then committed to investing and built the biggest development center outside the US in Hyderabad for Microsoft. Yeah, so that changed things. Once Microsoft came, everyone else came in and there was a boom in IT and you had all of these big Indian companies like Infosys, Tata, and all of this and then now many product companies too.
So all of the major tech companies have a presence in Hyderabad and Bangalore, which are the two big tech cities. So I grew up in this context and again in India, I think here people have a lot more options in terms of what to study, geography, social sciences, whatnot. There it is, I don’t know for good or bad, it was just two options. You either become an engineer or a doctor because that’s where the jobs are. That’s how you get a job. And now I guess there are more, but I chose engineering because I was more inclined that way. My elder brother was already working as a software engineer.
And for us, my dad and mom, they were more traditional, my dad was a journalist, mom a teacher, this information technology or IT represented a way to a better life essentially. So I saw how my brother, if you study hard and you get a good job, you can make a great life. And so it just showed that promise and all of these companies coming there and giving us this opportunity made me more inclined to try that and then work hard and do that.
So that’s how I started my career. And I worked in India for a few years. And again, I’m very, in general, curious and I get bored very easily. So at the end of three years, I thought I should do something else. And in Hyderabad, we have this very interesting connection where you always have a cousin or someone who lives in the US. So there’s so many people from Hyderabad who’ve gone to the US.
Madhav (31:25.948)
you have some kind of extended relative who lives there. And in my case, my uncle lived there and I just asked him like, hey, I’m interested. And he’s like, yeah, you should come here, get a master’s degree. And it opens up a lot more options, which is what I did. Yeah. But essentially like it was a good place to grow up, but I grew up in this tech boom kind of sector where, yeah, you could build stuff, you could build technology and it could lead to a great life.
WeCreate (31:58.366) What observations do you have of having gone to school in India and then having gone to school in the US? Like what observations do you have about maybe the differences in how education is approached from a student perspective or from a teaching perspective? What do you think about that?
Madhav (32:19.046) Yeah, I think it’s an interesting question. In India, the education system is extremely, extremely goal focused. Like from day one, it’s an insane level of meritocracy where you have to beat the race to go somewhere else because there are a billion other students who want that opportunity. So that’s instilled in you from day one, and the entire education system is built around it.
It’s extremely based on getting a job and getting a good job and having education around things which are employable.
WeCreate (33:07.118) Right, which makes so much sense. I mean, it frustrates the crap out of me. I see so many kids go to school here in the US and end up with this huge load of debt. And it’s like, well, what did you go to school for? Oh, psychology. It’s like, what did you expect to get out of that? What are you going to do now? Now you’ve got this debt and you don’t have a career. But I mean, yeah, that makes so much sense.
In India where, as you said in our previous conversation, the opportunity is just not as much. There’s not as much opportunity. You have to be very, very focused and very goal oriented. Whereas here, it’s almost like people just kind of feel, it’ll work out one way or another.
Madhav (33:48.86) I think it’s a double-edged sword. I would say one, yeah, there’s an insane amount of competition and it’s drilled into you from a very young age that you have to beat this competition to get out and get a good job. And then the other side of it, in the U.S. is that you have really, really good universities that do really good research and do groundbreaking stuff.
So again, there are merits to that. I think what I’ve observed is that students or people, kids who grow up here, they’re a lot more independent minded and they express, they get to, I guess, maybe taste freedom at such a younger age that they want to do whatever they want. I guess sometimes it results in great things like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs who founded these iconic companies.
Or the other end of it is, yeah, I studied something where there is no market and now I have this lot of debt. I think there are really good plus points because at the end of the day, every major tech company is from the US. All the big inventions happen here and that’s why everyone wants to come here. So I came here.
But you also have this other side of it where you could get lost into your point, like, studying, taking a degree where at the end of it, you might not have much, but now you have a big load of debt to go through and you have to do a regular blue collar job, which is not bad, but you didn’t have to pay so much to go to college if that’s what you wanted to do.
WeCreate (35:34.792) Exactly. So basically in the US, there’s a lot more, you know, kind of do what I want, which does lead to more entrepreneurship and more kind of independent research and new product development, which is what you’re into. But there it’s like, you have to be focused. This is the way these are the steps that you’re going to take to get a good career. You follow the rules and it’s going to work out.
And that does kind of make sense. And honestly, like I’ve worked with a number of Indians over the years being in the marketing and website space. And the one thing I noticed, this is not a negative or a positive observation, but one thing I noticed is that with a US designer, you can say, hey, I want something like this. I don’t want it to look like this exactly. I want you to kind of use your creative flexibility and make it something unique.
When you tell that to an Indian designer, you’re going to get an exact duplicate of what you showed them.
Madhav (36:38.758) Right. Yeah, I think that speaks a lot to how we have been brought up in the education system. Again, because going back to how it’s set up, it’s just very rule-based. You have to do this to do that, you have to do X to get Y. And then what you get out of this is much lower creativity or more rule following.
I think you see that clearly in the culture too, having worked there and here. There, you’re being told to do something and you do something. And in a way, that’s also true in other Asian cultures. It comes more from a cultural standpoint growing up. But here, you have the ability to speak back and you maybe suggest something else and you do this. So yeah, you’re right. It’s a result of how people are brought up, the culture they grow up in and the education system in both places.
WeCreate (37:44.738) That’s really interesting. The one last thing I wanted to chat about was I think it’s really interesting and impressive that you were able to take it. I’m always impressed with anyone who’s able to take an idea and turn it into something and be making concrete steps towards that goal. Because I think there’s a lot of people out there that have great ideas and they never do anything with them.
So how do you move from the idea of, I want to do robotic EV charging, and here’s a basic concept, to getting the money for prototyping, and then eventually taking it to market, which I think you’re still kind of in that last phase. How do you go through that process?
Madhav (38:32.944) Yeah, I think the answer is different for hardware and software companies, but at the core of it, ideas don’t, I mean, they mean something, but they don’t mean anything until you execute on them, right? They live in your head rent free and you can chew on them and you can imagine great things, but you need to manifest them into reality. I think we are really, I think at least, I’m really lucky to be in an age where if it’s a pure software product, you have the ability to learn something.
I mean, one, you might, let’s say you are a programmer already. That’s already like a step up from everyone else. I think this comes back to what you pick in school. I think right now to be a programmer is a great thing because essentially that’s one of the realities we live in, virtual software.
So if you can build something and conjure up something, that’s great. So if you are in the software industry and if you have an idea, the best next thing to do is figure out what is a problem you’re solving immediately. Let’s say, just take a quick example, like you want to build a budgeting app, let’s say you have that idea. So the next question would be, who needs this budgeting app? Because someone has to pay for it at the end of the day.
And then the first thing you need to do is talk to those people. So let’s say you yourself have the need. So you just build it for what you want to do. If someone else has the need for it, talk to them. So I think a good rule is to maybe, I think there’s this program called NSF, called I-Corps. National Science Foundation, they ask you to talk to at least 100 people before you validate that there is something like a real need.
WeCreate (40:37.964) I was going to ask you that. I didn’t know there was going to be a number, but I’m glad you said that.
Madhav (40:41.756) Yeah, I mean, they just have this program around it. But in general, the more the better, right? Because if you ask your immediate family, they’ll be nice to you. They’ll say good things. You need to ask a real person.
So once you have validated this idea that someone needs something, yeah, the next best thing is to build it exactly for that specific need. And a few ways to go about it. One is, yeah, if you yourself are a programmer, you build it by doing some learning. There are many places where you could hire contractors to build something quick and useful. I mean, the earlier word was quick and dirty, but now the bar has been raised. It needs to be a good solution.
So you build something and you put it in front of those people. And what do you think? So they’ll give you some feedback and you keep repeating this loop over and over again until you find something that’s worth paying for. So that’s broadly software, I would say.
WeCreate (41:43.68) Yeah, I have a little kind of a follow-up question to that part. So in terms of talking to those hundred people. I don’t think the right question is, would you use this? I don’t think you’d get a strong enough answer. Because they’re like, yeah, sure, I’d use it. Whatever. How do you ask the right question of that audience?
Madhav (42:08.144) Yeah, I think it’s more about learning from what they’re telling as opposed to asking yes or no questions, right? You want to first very clearly understand what the pain point is. So within budgeting apps, it could be something like, yeah, I already use budgeting apps, but I find it really hard to have this decision point whenever I spend my credit card. I don’t know if it happens after the fact. That’s a problem I have. I filled in this beautiful budget, but it’s very easy to swipe my credit card, and that budget has gone down the drain.
So it has to be very, very specific things you’re looking for. So you have to listen to the journey of how they go through the process and where in that specific area do they have the pain point and then the question is would they then pay for it? Would they pay someone to solve this problem for them? So there are many things which are like it’s a simple annoyance you just get around it, but other things you’ll be okay, I’ll pay for someone to do this.
So I think asking more open-ended questions of okay tell me how you use the regular budget app you use and tell me, talk me through as you’re using it, what are the challenges you face? So that’s one way you learn about problems. So this is like the consumer side of it. Then you have the other B2B side of it too, where you have to talk to maybe an actual company who is facing the problem.
But yeah, overall, this is software, easy to bring up something and manifest it and share, but in hardware, I think where we are, the big challenge is you need money. You need money. So either you’re rich, which I’m not, or you have other sources of income which you try and do as a hobby and it works, maybe it doesn’t.
In our case, what we did was we went through an accelerator by this really good VC firm called Antler and they run an accelerator in Austin, New York and Boulder, I think. So you go there and you go with a group of people, maybe a co-founder and yourself, or a group of three. And then you try to convince them that your idea is worth pursuing. So again, in this competition, you have to prove that the person who is giving you money believes in you, the idea that you can execute on it.
And this goes into a whole new sector of venture capital funding, right? They operate in a completely different set of structures and rules and in venture capital, they need their money to be 100x in a few years, like maybe 10 years is a typical timeline, but they want to look for crazy groundbreaking out of the world ideas. So you have to show them that there is a big enough market for these ideas so that they can take a bet on it.
So they are taking 100 bets and they know that 95 of them fail and five of them succeed and of the five, maybe three of them return the whole money, the whole fund. So that’s one way. If it’s not a VC scalable business, but there are also many small businesses, you could build something really quick. You could show some initial early traction and maybe get an SBA loan or do other things.
But in our case, it’s a venture fundable business. So we got venture capital early on. They invested in it when it was just an idea. It was nothing. So we showed them, we talked to a lot of customers and we showed them that there’s this real pain, we are the right people to go after this problem and solve it. And one day it will be huge.
But I think it’s a dichotomy in a sense that you have to show that it’s a really big problem and ultimately grow big, but you need to start in a very, very, very narrow space early on because you can’t solve a problem for a thousand people out of the gate. It has to be a problem for a very specific person in a very specific scenario. If you do that successfully, you’ll grow out of it into a much broader audience.
I feel like everything in entrepreneurship is a bit of a dichotomy in itself because you need to show that you’ll be big, but you need to start small and really focus. And in the early days, all your focus should be on making at least one customer really, really like your product. Like design by committee will kill everything. If you ask 10 people, what’s the best way to do it, it’s a sure way to not be successful.
WeCreate (47:44.815) So, Madhav, if there was anybody listening to this that could help you in any way, what kind of resources are you looking for right now? Is there anything that you need help with, whether it be funding or whether it be manufacturing components or anything?
Madhav (48:07.024) Yeah. So we are actually currently fundraising and we’re looking for potential investors, like either venture capital or angel investors. So if anyone is interested in building or supporting founders building in the robotics and AI space, I’d be down to have a conversation. And what I’ll say is we’re at a very interesting point in robotics itself where costs have come down drastically, where it’s much easier to build something now than it was maybe a few years ago.
And this gets back to the discussion with China too, like tariffs are changing every day as we speak, but ultimately the message remains that manufacturing in the US is favorable now. So we want to build a robotics factory here in the US. But initially we have customers who are ready to try our solution and pilot it and test it. So that’s what we want to do and we are looking for people to fund the business. So that’s one ask.
The other ask is, if you’re someone interested in robotics, automation, you’re another founder in the area. I’d love to chat because we learn a lot from other founders, their mistakes, their wins.
WeCreate (49:37.502) Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, I think it’s a brilliant idea. I think there’s a huge market for it. It makes a lot of sense. You’re filling a very much needed gap in the space. Yeah, I mean, I think there’s a pretty good chance you’re going to be successful with it.
Madhav (49:52.25) Yeah, thank you. Regardless of the endpoint, the journey has been great and hopefully it continues to be exciting.
WeCreate (50:02.39) Awesome. Well, hey, thanks for coming on, Madhav.
Madhav (50:04.988) Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Nate. And yeah, I can stay on if you want to chat more and come back later.
WeCreate (50:09.848) Sure, sounds good. All right.