How Ambi Climate rebounded from its failed crowdfunding campaign

Julian Lee of Ambi Climate speaks while interviewer Casey Lau of SoftLayer listens.

We have written a lot about crowdfunding on Tech in Asia in the past, but few companies have had campaigns as bumpy as Ambi Labs. A Hong Kong-based startup, the company’s flagship product is Ambi Climate, a connected device that automatically controls one’s home air conditioner. Ambi Climate originally launched a crowdfunding campaign on StarHub’s Crowdtivate, but failed spectacularly. The company bounced back and its current on-going second attempt at crowdfunding reached its funding goal in nine hours. It’s now en route to raise US$100,000 – four times their target amount.

For our Singapore Meetup last week, we invited Julian Lee, co-founder and CEO of Ambi Labs, to talk to us about his new product and his two crowdfunding campaigns. Lee was candid as he shared details with moderator Casey Lau of SoftLayer.

The genesis of Ambi Climate, solving an Asian problem

Why was Ambi Climate created? The team wanted to focus on solving Asian problems. Observing the global hardware market, Lee felt that most of the innovation in the space was happening in the US or Europe. As a result, these companies were designing products for a Western-centric lifestyle, one where home owners use their heater in the cold season and the aircon in the hotter months.

But in many Asian countries, air conditioners account for the highest energy consumption of any home appliance. One common complaint among Asian consumers is that when they turn on the aircon before bed, they’ll get woken up hours later because the room gets too cold.

So the Ambi team worked on Ambi Climate for two years to help households in Asia auto-moderate the temperatures in their homes through the air-conditioner. Ideally, this would also help consumers save money on their electricity bills.

Making hardware

Over the past two years, Ambi Labs has iterated its product constantly. The company released a minimum viable product (MVP) early and placed it in the hands of friends and family in hopes of collecting data. For example, as a form of climate-control, Ambi Climate has to work well in different seasons. In order to make sure the device optimizes properly, it has to understand how temperature and humidity varies in different climates.

Lee urged the audience members considering launching hardware startups to do their homework before sourcing. Can you actually get the parts you need? How can you check whether the parts are really available in China?

The crowd watches a crowdfunding video of Ambi Climate.

The road to crowdfunding

Since hardware startups require a lot of upfront investment, crowdfunding is a great way to pre-sell products along the way while continuing development and production.

For the Ambi Labs team, crowdfunding was an obvious route. But after looking at international crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, they were fearful of being drowned out by other projects on those popular sites. Lee and team did not think that Ambi Climate would have a strong global appeal, and there was a real need to show validation in Asia, their market of choice. Their key question was, “How do we engage with the Asian consumer?”

That’s where Crowdivate came in. Crowdtivate is co-managed by Singapore-based telco, StarHub, and its partner, Crowdonomic, Singapore-based crowdfunding site.

While a crowdfunding campaign typically takes two to three months to set up, Ambi Labs only had four weeks to plan for a campaign to coincide with the launch of Crowdtivate itself. As the most successful campaigns have a lot of marketing done prior to the launch, this meant that Ambi Labs had a much shorter timeline.

Iterating crowdfunding campaigns

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