EllieGrid is an Arrow Certified Indiegogo campaign that received $75,000 in flash funding as part of the Arrow Certification Program.
Hi, I’m Zach, an engineer with Arrow. Through the Arrow and Indiegogo partnership, we just gave out $75,000 in flash funding to EllieGrid, the sleek, smart pillbox that makes medication management easy.
Introducing EllieGrid, a fun and elegant smart pillbox that helps you organize your pills in seconds and reminds you when to take them. “I need to take certain vitamins every single day in order to stay healthy, but I always forget to take them. With EllieGrid, I can receive reminders when it’s time to take my vitamins and I don’t even need to think about it because the lights tells me which ones to take and how many.”
Today, we’re Skyping with Regina Vatterott and Abe Matamoros from EllieGrid to find out more about their intelligent pillbox and how the Arrow Certification program and flash funding from Arrow and Indiegogo helped them along their path from ideation to production.
So let’s talk about flash funding, first of all, congrats! What are your intentions with the $75,000?
Honestly, it will go straight toward inventory and it will get us through the testing phase since EllieGrid is still a young product and really be able to scale from there. What we raised on Indiegogo was enough to build the molds and order the first batch. This flash funding will now allow us to take it from there.
What kind of design challenges have you faced throughout the life of EllieGrid and how have you overcome those?
Finding a balance between functionality, cost, and brand. With EllieGrid, it has compartments like other pill boxes but each compartment contains one type of medication; the others are organized by time. By organizing by one type of medication, all you have to do is pour it in whenever you need to refill it. So now it takes seconds to organize.
How has Arrow helped overcome those design challenges and how has Arrow been involved in the process?
We have one person working on the firmware and the electronics and when it comes to parts, it can be pretty difficult to find parts that affordable but also have good supply so we don’t have issues in the future supply chain. It was a lot of work for this one person to do everything by themselves. Arrow came in and Arrow engineers helped him identify what we needed and then they found the parts and delivered options to choose from. It made it a lot easier for him to focus his efforts on firmware and other things; Arrow was like an extension of EllieGrid.
What advice would you give to entrepreneurs that are thinking about using Indiegogo as a crowd funding platform or thinking about applying for the Arrow Certification program?
Be prepared before you start a campaign; it’s not about just having an idea and starting a crowd funding campaign. You really have to prepare and do a lot of work before that happens. We recommend you use Indiegogo because their team talked to us, gave us advice, and connected us with Arrow and the Arrow Certification program; which was essentially a stamp of approval for our campaign. Our backers probably saw that we were young and had just graduated college, but because we got that stamp from Arrow, their engineers looked at what we had and they said these guys have something and know what they are doing, we are going to give them that Arrow Certification. It really helped give us some credibility in the crowd funding world.
EllieGrid is well on its way to a successful market entry, in part thanks to support from the Arrow Certification program and our partnership with Indiegogo.
If you’ve got a forward-thinking tech product that would benefit from engineering support and a chance at a share of $1 million in flash funding, apply to the Arrow Certification program today. We’re here to help you drive innovation forward.