Save $750,000

Last month I attended the Hi-Tech awards in Auckland. This is a fantastic event where you can find out about some exciting companies and catch up with a group of really interesting people. I attended as a judge for the hardware category and would like to congratulate all the finalists and in particular the winner of that category, Halter.

One of the recurring themes we saw across the entrants to this category was how they were able to make their products some combination of smaller, cheaper, and better as they iterated their designs and in particular, as they increased their production volumes.

This is something we expect to see with the Cacophony Project products. We've done an exercise to see how much we could reduce the cost of our trap if we made it in volumes of 250. If we did this we would be able to bring the cost down significantly - to less than $2000/trap. Although it would take us 6 months to tool-up.

As an exercise, I've added a discount, so that if you order more than 250 traps on our website it will reduce the price to $1999/trap, saving you three quarters of a million dollars. Go ahead and try it. Just don't hit the buy button without getting approval from your boss. I don't expect anyone to do that - but it shows you where we would like to get to.

One of the reasons we we’re not making this many traps yet is because our team is rapidly improving the design; its reliability, cost, size and weight, as well as new functionality like an intelligent trigger and an auto kill mechanism. One day we'll even try to make it kea proof and solar powered, but first we're trying to make something effective.