Wireless technology is one of the most significant contributors towards widespread adoption of smart home technology, lowering the barriers and costs involved in connecting just a room or an entire home. Instead of paying for a custom install, devices can connect to each other and to home networks over WiFi, NFC or radio waves to name a few options. That means no drilling, no wiring and little technological know-how required for a homeowner to establish a smart solution.

Wireless speakers are among the most popular connected devices for the home, and they’re also some of the most beautiful. As the market matures, expected to reach $13.75 billion by 2018, companies like Philips, Sonos and Samsung are differentiating their products through design. But such differentiation tactics can be employed by startups as well.

Portland, Oregon-based BlueshiftPDX is one startup looking to pave a path to success by designing a better battery for wireless speakers. Its Helium speaker charges in only five minutes, thanks to its supercapacitor, powered by Maxwell Technologies. This energy storage capability allows the speaker to charge quickly, and then play at full volume for six hours, Blueshift claims, lasting about 500,000 charge cycles.

Turning to crowdfunding, Blueshift has already exceeded its $35,000 campaign goal. Today we hear from Blueshift founder and head designer Sam Beck, who began by building bike speakers. Here Beck details the reasons his team chose CrowdSupply over Kickstarter, the importance of open source tools in startup communities, and his speaker design process.

Why CrowdSupply over Kickstarter?

Sam Beck, Blueshift founder

They’re local, so I was able to meet with them in person, and I got a great deal of support from them. They helped with public relations and marketing – more than what I would’ve been able to do on my own.

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For Blueshift, what’s the role of open source? 

It’s been really helpful so far, probably five or six electrical engineers have looked at the project and offered feedback. I have a couple guys helping with final round for revisions before our speaker goes out to production. It’s been amazing to see how willing people are to help out.

The challenge has been finding those people and organizing a “non-team” of people who are interested, but not committed to the project. I’m working on how to organize that community more effectively.

There are a lot of electronics forums where I can post questions for specific things, but I haven’t found a place where I’d want to deal with the open source side of this project that deals with the code integration — what I’m doing now is setting up a forum on our website and using github for the file management. It’s a piecemeal solution, and we get some traffic that way, but not a lot.

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Would you have been able to get this far in your project without open source?

Yes and no. The open source community hasn’t solved anything specific thus far. You get bits and pieces. So my design is stronger than it would’ve been, but I would’ve figured it out either way. As things move along and more people contribute, I think open source will gain momentum.

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What advice can you offer to other startups?

The challenges for Blueshift are all about how small the scale is for our startup. We hit our $35k goal on CrowdSupply. It was hard, but we pulled it off. We’re now building the first batch of 100 devices. Other speaker makers are set up for thousands of units. There’s a big gap between what we’re trying to do just this week and what the big guys are set up to do.

I knew I was taking a risk building a product with thin margins. I’m still getting out of the woods on that.

What we did right was doing something different and honest. The marketing came together because there’s a story behind what we’re doing.

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What’s the role of design for Blueshift?

It’s all over the project – from a marketing angle, the way the speaker looks is a critical part of what people see. It also comes in a huge way when dealing with the supply chain – the buildability of the unit. Each decision impacts everything else, the whole system. Every time I make one little tweak to one thing affects another thing, from the number of switches – everything is pretty integrated in that way.

As far as my design philosophy, it’s really simple. Inside the box, there’s no onboard computing beyond the Bluetooth. It’s all done with mechanical switches, and we’re focused on doing that well.