Matt Rogers and Tony Fadell spent six months researching the thermostat market before hiring anyone, cold-calling EPA experts and running late-night Skype sessions to validate the idea. They built a team of 10-12 engineers and designers to create prototypes and mock-ups, then approached investors with a full business plan and go-to-market strategy.
Chapters
The early days of Nest were actually really unglamorous, I'd put it that way. So Tony and I met at Madeira at Rosewood for lunch, kind of between his house and my office at the time. And we kind of had our big brainstorm, like, this is something we should probably investigate, something we should definitely look at. And actually we spent six months investigating and looking so very unglamorous. We did lots of late night Skype calls. We would hold ourselves in kind of walled conference rooms and friends companies and just brainstorm and do whiteboarding and do Internet research, cold call experts, which is a really funny thing. So Tony Fadell, guy invented the iPod, now CEO of Nest, cold calling experts at the EPA. Hey, I have some questions about thermostat industry. People actually asked and answered. It was great, but it was really unglamorous. We did a lot of market research. We really wanted to kind of get it right before we said go and before we started calling friends to hire them and before we called VCs to raise money. It was about six months later we realized business is there. This is definitely a business opportunity. We could make a better product. It was clear with our talents, with our skills, with our network, the products would be better for sure, that we could make a difference, that we could make a big enough difference. That was kind of our key metrics. And we could do it in a reasonable enough time. This is not something that would take three, four years to get the first product done. And once we had that, then we started pitching first employees. And we hired about 10, 12 folks in the early days to build sketch prototypes, prototype ui, first industrial design, build the first prototype, early software, first app. At that point, we realized we had enough meat on the bones. We probably could talk to some investors, but we had the kind of. By the time we talked to our first investor, we had full business plan. We had our go to market, which completely changed, by the way. Plans do change. The key is just to have a plan, something a guiding force to push the team that said plans change. They guarantee they will. No one gets their plan right on the first try.
