Hi Ralph,
Thanks for your questions. Indeed, the development from idea to the current stage of prototyping and testing has spanned a period of several years. My process was and continues to be one of iterative discovery, learning, testing and improvement. It requires patience, takes most weekends and afterhours and it is often times frustrating. Nonetheless I enjoy doing it.
To your questions:
The need: It all started from my own experiences. Here are a couple of examples that you or others on this forum may find to be quite familiar. (1) I code using VMs stored on external drives and there is no way to attach the HDD to the laptop when moving around the room/office. Sometimes I forget about the drive and the cable comes out loose. Either way it is a pain to carry the drive connected to the laptop and if you also want your coffee mug and/or stack of papers it all becomes impossible. (2) I also use a standup workstation that has a small desk underneath the two monitors where I usually keep notes for quick reference. Since I listen to music on my phone when I work the best I can do is to keep it in the back pocket of my pants because there is not enough room on the desk or if I put it there, the chances of it dropping four feet on the floor and ripping off my headset cable in the process are high. The battery also drains quite fast when playing music continuously. With my system I can carry the hard drives safely in a non-obtrusive manner and I can remove them when I pack the laptop. If anything, the rail itself is an incredibly useful grabbing handle for picking up the laptop with one hand – you just need to try it for yourself to see how easy it becomes to move around. Also, I can listen to music all I want because the phone is charging connected to the monitor USB, it is safe and right in front of my eyes on the side of the monitor, or on top depending where I choose to place the rails. I can text and do all the phone things that I normally do only much easier.
User research: I work alone because I found no one who had the time/passion/will for this and so, my user research is limited to opinion grabbing from people I meet daily: family, friends and co-workers. Is there a significant need for this product? I have no hard data answer this one way or another. I can only extrapolate that if I find it useful there are chances others with similar working and playing habits would also do and this leads me to the next question.
The market segment: To start with, the demographics for this product include software developers, gamers, and in general computer users that want their workspace nice and tidy. Anyone tried to use a sound bar with your computer? Where do you place it? The best you can do it is under the monitor or on the wall behind your station if your desk is close to one. I place it on my monitor using a couple of the arms I designed and the original Samsung mounting bracket. If this product is ever produced outside the prototype stage it can be used in all cases where rail-based mounting is superior to spot mounting. Just look at the popularity of Picatinny, Weaver and KeyMod systems. In fact just recently I found out that a gaming company that specializes in mobile gear is about to release a desktop solution based on Picatinny rails.
The will to buy: The first questions I get from people are: what is this, why do I want it, how does it work, why would I put that rail on my 3,000 bucks Mac? I think that because there is nothing quite similar out there, people have hard time associating it with anything until they actually start using it. I tried to send it out to blogs with not a whole lot of success thus far. I am glad that you asked these question though and hopefully I did not bore everyone to death.
One from me: Future work: The laptop manufacturers may recognize in the future that there is a lot of space wasted on the back of the lid and may want to use it for built-in rails to assist with peripheral mounting (Wi-Fi access points are another common one).
Ask away anything else you want or reach out to me directly.
Thanks,
gabriel