As many of you know, Jordi Munoz and I founded 3DR in 2009 as a way to help get drone technology into the hands of the masses. And it certainly has reached the masses—these days, there’s never a day without many drone stories being published, and interest only continues to grow.
3DR continues to grow and evolve. Where we were once a company focused on bags of parts and bare boards, we are increasingly centered around integrated products that just work for people, products that allow people to focus on the results rather than the mechanism. Additionally, we’re placing bigger bets on a smaller number of products, with Solo being the prime example (so far!). Today, we are more than 200 employees and the overall business grew by more than 500% this year.
Like the drone industry overall, we have evolved from a DIY company to a mass-production company and now compete directly with DJI and Parrot, both of which manufacture in large-scale factories in Shenzhen. We do the same with the Solo family and our future products.
For those of you who are familiar with my 2012 book Makers: The New Industrial Revolution, you may recall that this was always the plan. The above is a chart from that book, which shows that as volumes approach 100,000 units a year, economies of scale and a focus on margins require a move to mass production and deep supply chain integration. That's the volume 3DR is now at. For a product that increasingly resembles a smartphone, this scale can really only be done in Shenzhen, the capital of the smartphone industry.
As part of this transition, we are in the process of sunsetting many of our legacy products, which were made in our Tijuana factory. There are now many great frames available, many supplier of FPV cameras, and many companies focused solely on very specific drone components. In the process of winding down some of our older products, we’ll do our best to point you to alternatives. And of course, many of you here already build and release technology that surpasses what exists commercially today!
Going forward, we will focus on the Solo family and other core elements of our next-gen platform. In particular, we will continue to offer Pixhawk-compatible autopilots, with improved versions designed in cooperation with partners. And autopilots continue to be a core focus of 3DR, with exciting new platforms coming in 2016.
3DR will continue to work on making a difference where we can best do so: in providing highly integrated, innovative, and fully configurable complete systems. Additionally, we will continue to provide tools to enable people to stretch the boundaries of what this technology can do, and to work with true innovators like those in this community to build the core elements of our common drone future.
You can count on us continuing to be VERY active in the DIY Drones community (today, seven years after founding it, I still post and comment every day -- it’s a source of constant joy and amazement for me, and one of my proudest creations). You all have been a central part of 3DR’s vision and development and will continue to be so—and we will continue to be active contributors back to both this community and the broader Dronecode development project -- indeed, this focus on becoming a much bigger company will allow us to devote even more resources into contributing open source code to the community and recruiting more partners to do so as well.
At 43 companies and counting, Dronecode has more than doubled over the past year, and we will lead its march as the world’s leading open drone platform by extending the platform into video, the cloud and advanced computing by creating world-class developers tools such as Dronekit and the Solo SDK.
Thanks,
Chris
Comments
@Rob - I hope you are right and the DIY market it is not shrinking. I have heard some people closer to the business end of this that it is dramatically shrinking in some many sectors outside of FPV racing. I have no numbers though.
Intuitively it makes sense that it may as RTF options (be it Solo/Inspire/Phanton/Yuneec) achieve more than can be done by DIY easily. Go check the RCGroups classifieds. They have an ever expanding selection of higher end AP machines designed to carry GH4s and Nex class cameras.
Is it just me that notices theyre riding the wave up, but the graph fails to show the next down turn.
Is there a sustained market cycle for drones? A market has to have its limits. We're kind of stuck on AP platforms.
Where is the next step? It has to be heavy lifters and long duration drones.
Solo was sold as an upgrade platform. So once they saturate the market with units, Is it the upgrades that are manufactured in the 100,000's?
Is there a plan to get the products to consumers on time and as advertised?
Or is the plan still to rely on the consumer to point out the issues ?
Is there a point in which you plan to bring in the best minds of the company and house them together so future products dont suffer basic design flaws such as Solo's gimbal clearance.
Its hard to maintain confidence if Solo has not yet reached its advertised initial capabilities.
Qualcomm and other investors have to notice that development is not keeping release dates.
If we're talking a new revolution of products, youre going to have to not only innovate, but deliver.
The market and consumers have a short attention span. As you can see smart shots are now being implemented in other products and in the SDKs of these products, yet Solo, the flagship of AP with smart shots is still lacking basic camera controls.
Its not even a question of: Where are we going?, it boils down to why cant we get to the starting line to deliver an experience to consumers out of the box?
I'm a stats guy so maybe I'm wrong. This site has seen decreased traffic (slowly headed downward) for the last couple of years - a time when the market in general is up 6 to 8 fold. That speaks to me...about something!
A lot of DIY'ers - perhaps myself included - were DIY because we were fiddling around trying to make our machines do what we envisioned them to do (not crash, be fun, take great photos and videos, etc.).
There is a much more serious group of hobbyists who will always be in it for the science and engineering.
I see it as being similar to HAM - I was a HAM for many years and when the internet came around I still visited my more serious friends who were "real HAMs" and found them doing slow scan image transmission...while I was building an internet empire (so to speak). They liked climbing towers and having 4 letter call signs...while many, like myself, moved on to the angle we were most interested in (communication, in this case).
Once many of the underpinnings have been created - as with this pursuit - it doesn't take as many folks (outside of the paid jobs at corps and universities, etc.) to move the ball forward. IMHO.
There are numbers hidden in those site stats.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CSWssoSUEAA0BEw.png:large
If 10X more people are interested in drones and the main DIY site is on a downslope (or even even or slightly growing), that's numbers. Maybe not the kind of numbers you believe in - but I do.
You could come up with an alternative explanation, but Occam's Razor is probably more correct.
@Craig, I think it's a mistake to think that DIY/Hobby market is shrinking. Maybe not growing at the supernova rate of the RTF consumer market, but it's still growing. There are still many people, particularly in the commercial market, for whom there is no RTF option that suits their needs.
As always, where are the numbers you are basing your statements on?
What an interesting journey this is. I'm sure it will continue to be fascinating and a lot of fun.
@James Pike glad you enjoyed it and thanks for pointing that out. Maybe this will help thin/cull the community so we can get back to discussing DIY aircraft and science related activities vs. corporate drone shenanigans.
There was probably little option but to change the focus of 3DR as DIY is simply dying. I am sorry to say it was the Phantom 3 that made me fully realize this and not the Solo -- after some years of using APM and Pixhawk platforms I realized that DIY was simply getting in the way. I still have and use my Pix/APMs. I see room for a Solo but maybe it will be a Solo 2.
That said, the really interesting part of 3DRs journey is how well open source development can be seamlessly integrated into off-the-shelf products that just work. Doing cool open source development is not quite the same as making consumer products that function intuitively out of the box. Frankly, I dare say the latter is less fun.
Right now, things like mapping, cloud image processing, and advanced autonomous flight are now becoming absurdly easy with DJI products and 3rd party apps--something I did not realize until I acquired a little white thing (the only RTF machine I ever have owned). I wish 3DR well and will always fly Arducopter firmware as long as it is available and in development. I am still building Pixhawk platforms for long range AP off windy coastlines.
I hope 3DR figures out profitable segments of the market, that are not the focus of DJI.
Well, earth, I think you have some of it right - but not all.
3DR could have done fine and stayed a 20-50 million dollar hobbyist and small commercial/industrial semi-custom shop. It was their decision not to - but rather to seek investments of 100 million dollars in order compete on the world stage.
It's really not different than other companies. I know guys who had great 2-man drywall companies...next thing you know they had 60 people working for them! Of course, a few years later they were back to 2 and happier, but that's another story!
Despite all the flak about drones they are a very real part of the future. They represent a large part of the robotics revolution that many have been predicting for decades - due to their ability to move in 3 dimensions without requiring expensive and complex ground-based locomotion.
As with other such endeavors, most companies who attempt to get in at the start will fail.
"During the period 1896 to 1930 over 1,800 car manufacturers were believed to have existed in America."
No different with drones.
The hostile environment, IMHO, was first due to Military Drones and the backlash which is predictable against any such new weapon (personally, I'd be surprised if military drones are less damaging to civilians than manned aircraft bombings, but that's another story).
Now it has been exacerbated by idiots and "freedom droners" who feel they have the right to not be members of our civil society (fly anywhere, anytime and with no responsibility or caring for others).
But all of this will eventually settle out.
3DR took the money and took the bet. Now they perform or they don't. The hobbyist end, unfortunately, is shrinking and there are more suppliers than ever before. We all know how that ends up.
Tough market. We went through a similar situation in one of my former industries - from 400+ manufacturers to probably 20 or so. Even so, those 20 don't have enough business to thrive. It's a new world out there.
earthpatrol: What a fantastically insightful post. In this industry there is a great deal of throwing a lot of crap at the wall and watching where it sticks. When it sticks somehow that is proof that it is good enough. Even at the high end it is still crap that is being flung.
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