Police Radar Avoid Now…
You’re driving somewhere and out of nowhere you hear the siren and look at a flashing light in your rearview mirror. Damn@&%#¥_|\#}]*!!!, you’re getting pulled over. Your blood pressure soars, pulse quickens, hair stands up on your head and you’re thinking why me, why now?
I do my best to drive carefully but sometimes find myself spacing out and driving too fast. I don’t want to get in an accident or find myself on the opposite end of the police radar deserving a moving violation ticket. When I first began driving it would cost about $70 and a never-ending, longest day ever in traffic school so my insurance doesn’t go up. My last ticket cost me almost $500 and about an hour taking traffic school online. What I need is to be more focus when driving and a legal device that I can put anywhere in my car that warns me of speed traps, school zones, and red light cameras or anywhere a police radar might be. Good think I found TrapTap on Kickstarter and contacted Bryce North, head of their sales and marketing team and asked him the following questions:
What is TrapTap?
TrapTap is a simple and stylish wireless button that warns you of speed traps, red light cameras, and school zones by flashing different colors. It already knows the location of every red light camera and school zone but relies on its community of users to mark the location of mobile and police radar traps. TrapTap is completely legal and acts like your personal co-pilot, constantly warning you of danger. To us, he is like our little buddy who always sits shotgun. It simply sits on your dash and is designed to save you cash.
Our team has spent months building, testing, and perfecting TrapTap to get to the design we have today. Our journey has been epic (with a few speeding tickets for testing) and below you can see how we progressed through our different prototype stages to finally bring you TrapTap. In October we partnered with a design firm that has built products sold in Apple stores with manufacturing facilities in Winnipeg and Texas. We spent numerous hours testing and recalibrating. After finding the right design and sourcing out the correct components and LED’s, we finally had a product ready for production.
How was the prototype process?
We started simple and were very fortunate to be able to prototype both electronic and plastic components locally in Winnipeg at a local tech shop. Within the first week of design we had a minimally functioning prototype that would flash an LED when a connected iPhone passed through a specifically marked location. We used Google Maps and manually placed points of interest to demonstrate the technology. From here we were able to start refining the layout of the electronics, iterate on the design of the plastic components and begin to work through the obstacles of the software backend.
How was the patent process?
We are still in the legal process 🙂
How do you plan to market the Traptap?
We plan to use Kickstarter to help validate and test our pricing and hopefully generate enough PR to give us a bit of boost after our campaign. We will leverage online e-commerce in the beginning, hopefully gaining enough attention to pull into retail stores. The motorcycle market seems like a positive verticle as there is really no safe and legal device to use for this type of detection. Even before the retail market, we plan to leverage the B2B market by selling to professional drivers, truckers, couriers, and rideshare programs.
How did you did decide on a manufacturer?
We have prior experience in the manufacturing of electronic products. As such we have connections to manufacturing facilities in Canada, the USA and overseas. This gave us some flexibility for manufacturing based on demand and price point of the product.
What advice would you give to those interested in inventing?
Inventing and building a product are completely different adventures. Just because you have a great idea doesn’t mean anyone will buy it or it’s going to be manufacturable at scale. Compromise is often a huge obstacle for people to overcome. You have to understand that what you envisioned in your head on day one is most likely not at all going to be what you end up producing. But that’s just part of the process – learn to adapt. All that said – with current technology it’s becoming incredibly easy (and economical) to iterate and build a prototype. With desktop 3D printers and easy to learn programming languages building a physical product from nothing is a lot less daunting. So my advice? Get out there and build your idea, show it to people and see how they like it!
Click here to visit the Kickstarter Campaign page.
