Scholar
Lisa Tamayo, a serial entrepreneur whose earlier company Green Building Studio was acquired by Autodesk in 2008, launched Scholar, a $99 pre-order smart collar for cats and small dogs. At the time of the interview, Scholar had about 10 pre-orders, had come out of stealth at CES, and was preparing a Kickstarter campaign to fund production. The founders have put roughly $600,000 into the company, using a bank line of credit, a state lending program, and a $50,000 short-term loan.
Scholar was designed exclusively for the underserved cat and small dog market, with a smart caller that shows pet information such as feeding, flea and tick treatment, medication history, and lost-pet instructions. The founders also wanted a modular, expandable open platform that can grow with the pet's needs.
- •Scholar's founders had already sold a prior company, which gave them personal assets and credibility to secure a bank line of credit that a pre-revenue hardware startup would otherwise struggle to get.
- •Targeting the underserved cat and small dog segment gives a differentiated position rather than competing head-on in the broader pet tracker market.
- •Partnering with an experienced outsourced engineering firm (Spanner, whose team has ties to Fitbit) lets a small team reach a credible hardware product without building full in-house engineering capacity.
- 1.Use existing business assets or prior sale proceeds as collateral to secure bank or state-backed lending before revenue exists.
- 2.Validate demand with paid pre-orders before manufacturing, then use a crowdfunding campaign like Kickstarter to fund production and build a following.
- 3.Outsource hardware engineering to a firm with consumer device experience, and budget for repeated prototype iterations since hardware costs far more than software to test.
- 4.Target an underserved niche with a clear product differentiator, such as a swappable battery or tappable display, to stand apart from larger competitors.
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