01:08:40 · Soren Monroe-Anderson
[01:08:40] S0: We've been able to get much higher quality feedback and also know how to respond to it much better. Because at the beginning, we're trying to figure out everything, and also everything seems critical. So like here, like, you try to do everything that you hear from the end user. There's a approach to valuing everything you hear from the end user, but you have to prioritize stuff. You can't do everything at once, and you also have to listen to the problem, not the proposed solution for for a lot of stuff. Right? Because it's like the classic, you know, you build people a faster horse. You you like, you you... What you what you wanna do is deeply understand the problems the end users are running into. And especially in Ukraine, they have a a lot of amazing knowledge on how to build good drones. So there are learnings to take away from that, but there's also cases where we do things differently and we, you know, they... For an an example, our propellers are much more like flexible than the standard prop that they use in Ukraine or the standard propellers that they use in Ukraine. So a lot of units will receive the drones and just like see and feel the prop and be like, this will not work well with a heavy payload because the prop is too flexible, it will it will deflect under the load. And every time we see that, we we make a bet with them, we're like, you know, we go try it, go go actually fly it and compare it back to back with your props. And then they do that and they're like, okay. Yeah. It works really well. But it's just this is like knowledge that they've built up is like stiffer props work better with heavy payloads, and that's a very logical thing to to think. And generally the props that are designed for heavy payloads are much different, and so they're like completely understandable why that's an assumption. You can, you know, we broke that assumption by testing a lot of different stuff and ending up on this prop. And so, yeah, we we just like have to have that that good back and forth with the customer.
01:10:45 · Ty Morse
[01:10:45] S1: What other like product assumptions do people in conflict have that have been wrong, and you've been able, basically, by having this, like, super in in-depth knowledge on how to solve these problems, and, like, understanding their problems, you've been able to figure out unintuitive solutions?
01:11:02 · Soren Monroe-Anderson
[01:11:02] S0: We we we covered it a little bit earlier, but the flight performance of the drone, how well the drone flies. You know, there's a lot of opinions about how to make a drone fly well, and also, like, how much does that matter? Actually very fair question, like question the requirement, do you need a drone that flies good? I'm serious, like if you're just trying to take a, you know, take a payload from one spot to another spot, maybe you don't need it to fly that well. There's actually a lot of precision that can be gained from, you know, a high performing drone, and that's actually become something that our users appreciate, and they're... They immediately notice every time they fly that, wow, this was amazing, and a lot of that is from, you know, the way we design the airframe, the stiffness of the whole vehicle, and then, you know, mostly in the tuning as well, and and also the the motor and the prop selection for the payload size, like there's lot of factors that go into it, but it it ends up becoming something that is highly appreciated, but at first undervalued, like you tell someone, yeah, our drone's better than yours because it flies better, and they're like, I don't care. I I like how how much does it carry? How far does it go? You know, does it hit the target? So that's that's something, you know, the the the steps to get there actually are things that we've gone against the grain on, you know, our motors are for our eight inch drone are significantly bigger than a lot of eight inch drones, and when the initial reaction of the Ukrainians usually when they see that is like, this is a waste of money or it's like, you don't need this, you just want this size motor. Every eight inches drone uses this size motor, like go try it. See how it flies with a heavier payload, show that it actually works better, and, you know, we we've again, we got to that answer by doing an insane amount of testing, and we we are very confident in the fact that it is a better solution,
01:13:01 · Ty Morse
[01:13:01] S1: and so you just sort of have to break through assumptions sometimes. What's been the evolution of your testing process since end of twenty twenty four to today?
01:13:09 · Soren Monroe-Anderson
[01:13:09] S0: We've gotten wildly better at running testing in the company. So there's a, you know, a few different types of testing. In development, there's like benchtop component level testing that you can do. This is things like measuring the thrust efficiency curves of motors and propellers, and then there's actual, you know, flight testing and trying to replicate the conditions that you expect for the, you know, the product to actually be used in in a test environment and and understand how it performs. You do a lot of testing in development, and then you also do a lot of testing in qualification to ensure that the product is, you know, meeting or exceeding the requirements that you've set and will be reliable. And then there's testing and manufacturing. So there's component level testing along the line to make sure that every component before it gets built into a drone is actually functional, and then end of line testing to to see if the whole system is is is meeting spec. So again, yeah, wide category, we've gotten better at all of it, but I was sort of talking about the like performance, the flight testing in development. We, I think, have good instinct there given our racing background, but it's also an engineering task. So our our our... The person who leads our flight test team, Levi, he's an old friend of mine from drone racing. He's one of the only people in the company who's younger than me, he he runs our flight testing team and does an incredible job at it. But I've also get... I've gotten to see him grow in that role by learning from working with amazing engineers to understand, like, what is the data output they need from a flight test to make the product better. Because a drone racer, you hand them a drone, and you say like, alright, how does this fly? Or like, go fly it and tell me what you think. Be like, yeah, man, it's locked in. It flies on rails. Like, there's just like these terms that are completely useless to engineering. An engineer does not want to hear the drone is
01:15:18 · Ty Morse, Soren Monroe-Anderson
[01:15:18] S1: Locked in. [01:15:19] S0: You know, locked in or or not locked in. So we, you know, we we built a team that's much better at at giving, you know, analytical feedback and stuff that's really helpful to engineers, and we test every single day. So we operate out in on the desert, and so our team is able to go from our headquarters to the desert every day, and they actually can stay out in the desert. And so we we just like run... I mean, we're usually testing like three, four, five different things at once and doing it every single day and maximizing the number of sets and reps. [01:16:05] S1: How do you decide to do Archer fiber?