The Four Worlds Podcast
The Four Worlds Podcast explores how a simple idea can grow into something that changes the world. Each episode takes you on a journey—from the spark of inspiration, through the creation process, innovation challenges, and to the path of real-world production.
From sketch to shelf and prototype to product, join us as we uncover the stories behind breakthrough inventions and innovations with the creators, engineers, designers, and visionaries who bring them to life.
The Four Worlds Podcast
How Bird Buddy is Bringing Nature to Your Backyard
Bird Buddy’s CEO, Franci Zidar, shares how the company is bringing nature closer to home with their smart bird feeder. 🐦✨
Learn more about Bird Buddy
Welcome to the Four Worlds Podcast from Tomorrow's World Today. We're diving into the latest in tech, science, and sustainability, from nature's mysteries and the world of inspiration, to the hands-on crafts of creation, the bold breakthroughs of innovation, and the scaled-up wonders of production. This is your ticket to the stories shaping tomorrow. Francie, thank you so much for joining us and hopping on the show. We're really excited to have yourself and BirdBuddy on with us
Franci:thank you yeah i'm very excited to be here uh always great to talk about bird buddy and meet people who are interested in
Steven:bird buddy absolutely and i think you're reaching the the right target audience for that one let's jump right into it with talking about who you are and who bird buddy is
Franci:okay so uh my name is francie i'm one of the co-founders and the ceo of the business uh i am for whatever reason, super excited about getting people connected with nature through digital stuff. I've founded a couple of other businesses before BirdBuddy that were all very much in this area, right? So getting people excited and connected with real things, primarily nature through digital kind of means. Yeah, BirdBuddy started in 2020 with a beautiful Kickstarter campaign, right? That was a very, like, it was just amazing. Like thinking back, right? How many people actually came in in to support us and to engage. We built like an audience of about 50,000 people in a matter of two months as we kind of started to go out with this idea. Right. And it was really kind of an organic thing that just kind of happened once we started showing it to people and get people engaged. Launched the Kickstarter late 2020, funded it in 2021. So that's when you complete it because it was like a two month campaign. And then, yeah, very quickly grew to where we are today, which is a team of about 60, 70 people doing amazing work and shipping hundreds of thousands of units that get people connected with nature and excited about birds. I feel extremely fortunate to be able to build this business.
Steven:You took my next question out of my mouth. How did BirdBuddy start? But hearing about that journey, that very quick journey that it took What did that mean to you? And how did that feel when you come up with this idea, get it ready on Kickstarter and then quickly get it and make it come to fruition? What was that feeling like?
Franci:It's such a blur, honestly, because it was all so intense and so fast. Building a hardware business is hard, period. Whether you love it or you hate it, it's easier if you love it, but it's hard regardless. So there was a very short, like the honeymoon period was very short, I'm trying to say. right so i was like yay this is a beautiful business people love the product right now we have to build it and then you know everything happens which is extremely uh intense and complex kind of trying to pull together everybody that's required to be able to build this product right which is a a uh not a you know super sophisticated uh like electronically type of product but it's sophisticated enough and it's a complete novelty right you have nothing to lean against right there was no product like bird buddy there were no products helping people take photos and AI recognition of birds and nature around the home. We were really trying to invent this from scratch. That was hard. Even today, being the category leader and a bit of a market maker in this space is actually hard because you have to really think hard about what people actually want and then try to build it.
Steven:Just hearing about that and hearing that journey, hearing how it all started, let's go into what a eventually BirdBuddy became and what you do, what you make. Just give us a quick overview of some of the products and what they do and how it connects people with nature.
Franci:Totally. Yeah. So BirdBuddy is a connected bird feeder, right? It's effectively you can think of it as a bird feeder with a ring type doorbell camera, right? That as a bird lands, it takes photos, it sends you a notification, it recognizes the species through AI. And it also well, at this point, it's a pretty compelling experience. Actually, it started out as a pretty kind of bare bones as I've described it. But right now, there's a lot of meat on that bone as well. You can go pretty deep, you can engage, you can learn, right? You can share. It is very much a family experience is what we learned, right? BirdBuddy is a household product. People very often buy it for a loved one, for a spouse or a parent, right? And they enjoy it together, which is beautiful, right? And we've had a lot of people share. So for example, like a child buying it for a parent, we've had a lot of people share stories about how they're now texting their parents more than they have in a year years because they're both connected to this, you know, beautiful product and they both got the same content. And then you chat about northern cardinals and flickers and all that stuff. And it's really, there's a lot of emergent stuff that happened over the past couple of years that we didn't, you know, quite expect and they surprised us, but they're beautiful. But yeah, so that's the hero product, right? It's a bird feeder with a camera. From the beginning, the core design intent behind the product was that the camera is modular. We call it a nature cam effectively. You know, the purpose or kind of the ambiguity there is intentional because we want this product to be broader, right? It's not just for birds. It's also for, you know, potentially butterflies and bugs and, you know, all nature on your home. We've launched a hummingbird feeder last year, right? We're now going to start shipping the birdbath product. So, and even the birdbath, I almost kind of see as a water product, right? Because it's a nutrition for all wildlife, like butterflies need water, right? And all sorts of features need water in your backyard. But yeah, bottom line, helping people connect with all nature in their home, around their home, right? And we're trying to design the ecosystem in a way that is very flexible and adds value to our customers kind of across multiple years yeah
Steven:yeah it's clear that you have a passion for this and that idea to create this obviously came from somewhere we have four worlds here that we like to discuss inspiration creation innovation and production and the theory is that all of those drive one another so when we're talking about this idea what inspired that creation
Franci:so i mean that's That could be a very easy story or it could be a super complex story. I can just say like two words and I can explain it and the other one is pretty long, but I'll try something in between. So effectively, BirdBuddy happened over a beer. I came back from LA in 2019 because one of my previous startups was invested in by Snapchat, right? So I spent some time in Venice working with them. Beautiful product, I still love it, but it was very hard to find like a proper product market fit for. And I came back to Slovenia just looking for something to do, right? And we were drinking beer December 2019, and an old friend of mine just casually throws out this idea of a birdhouse with a camera, right? It stuck to me immediately because the product I was building previously, or the startup I was working on previously with Snap, right, was about creating kind of these Pokemon Go experiences in the real world, right? So a platform for building experiences in the real world with elements of chat fiction and augmented reality and location-based. And the purpose was to get people to engage with the outside, right, and to kind of use digital to get you to engage with the physical. And this is exactly what BirdBuddy is, right? And that's always been my passion. Any project that I've ever worked on was kind of in this direction. I guess it has something to do with the fact that my dad was a founder of one of the largest national parks where I come from, right? So in Slovenia. He took me out a lot, you know, and got me excited about conservation and biodiversity and, you know, preserving habitats. And as I grew up, I fell in love with all things digital. And this is kind of my, you know, I guess, passion to try to merge those two things together. So in It kind of felt like it had to happen that way, but it also feels kind of random. But at the end of the day, it's probably not very random, right?
Steven:Right. Look, everything happens for a reason. It seems like it's more than often over a drink or two. So we love that. So just hearing about that story of how you were created, where that idea came from. Let's talk about the products itself. You know, one of your mainstays is the SmartBird feeder. We touched a little bit on that. Dive a little more deep into its capabilities and what users could actually experience with it.
Franci:Totally. Yeah. So BirdBuddy is a smart bird feeder. It takes photos of birds. It recognizes them through AI. One of the core pillars of the experience today is that you can invite more than one person to your product. So basically, if somebody buys it for themselves, for their household, or again, it's bought as a gift, right? Everybody can enjoy the same experience. And we're kind of really trying to double down on that social piece of it, right? There is is a bespoke and something we've invested in quite a bit, which right now is something that probably you can do with various different LLMs really well. And we're also trying to investigate that. But we have custom profiles for each bird, right? So basically, if you kind of collect or unlock Northern Cardinal or a Blue Jay, right, you will get a custom profile that has this, I think, a pretty fun mix of educational and fun content, right? That's not too dry. One thing we really try to avoid is to link people to weekend Wikipedia, right? Because that's just not, you know, we're trying to get people excited about nature and we're trying to kind of reduce the barrier of entry, you know, or make it just, you know, compelling enough and rich enough that it's nice, but not, you know, too overwhelming. But yeah, so you can learn about birds. You can connect with people that are kind of in your social circle, right? Especially people that you really love, that you're sharing kind of this experience with. And then one of the things that we're right now trying to explore that's kind of not on the hardware product side, because on the hardware product side, the exploration for us is really how much nature can we unlock, right? So how much we can allow you to get close to everything that's living around your home. There's like a hundred different species of life around like an average US household, right? And we just want to unlock as much of that as we can. But on the software side, the goal is to try to connect people through the BirdBuddy experience that are also outside of your household, right? One thing we've learned from our customers is that people really care about the nature that's in their neighborhood, right? Especially that's around their home, but also in their neighborhood but you are much less connected. And that makes a lot of sense, right? But it's not something that's maybe like immediately obvious. You feel a lot less connection with something that's like in another state or country, right? It's nice to look at like a BBC or whatever documentary, right? Where there's like, yeah, some exotic species that you're learning about, right? But if it's kind of general purpose nature, right? Or something that's pretty broad, right? You're not gonna really pay that much attention if it's not really around your home. So really trying to figure out how to get people connected within the BirdBuddy platform that are close to each other, that really care about kind of the same nature that's close to them, right? That's kind of at the core of it. Other than that, right now, family is the main unit. That's a beautiful experience, right? Really sharing the love of nature that's within the household.
Steven:No, that's really special because it really connects you with what's right outside your door. You use BBC documentaries as an example. That may be in a different country, but it really makes it special when it's in your own backyard. It really does. Yeah, totally. And talking about those species and in unlocking them. I loved your reference to something like Pokemon Go unlocking these species. Where does the species identification end? Is it endless? How many does it identify?
Franci:Well, that's, you know, I guess fortunate for us, right, is that BirdBuddy has, you know, we started in 2020. We started shipping product in 2022. This is kind of peak period for AI evolution and innovation, right? So effectively, we are a major beneficiary of all the investment that's being done in gen AI and various different LLMs around the world right now. So I can't give you a straight answer to that, because I don't know. I don't know where that ends, ultimately. But right now, it seems pretty endless, which is really compelling and really interesting to me. And really, I think for us as a business, but also for us as the source of value for our customers, it's so exciting. Because it's just like every day, it feels like there's a new door that opens on what kind of value you can provide. Because ultimately nature, is ever changing, right? It's evolving. It's super interesting. You don't know much about it, right? And, you know, up until I guess today, right? Or maybe like a couple of years ago, you have to know somebody who was kind of specialized and knew how to really take you on that journey, right? AI these days can really act as that, you know, intermediary, right? So we're really trying to figure out ways where we can leverage AI that is really not just for kind of recognizing species, right? Because that is really something we can probably do, you know, pretty easily moving forward for any species, right? But really adding that layer of value, interpretation, an opinion, some sort of guidance to get you excited and to get you on the journey is probably where AI will add the most value over the next couple of years for BirdBuddy as a product or a brand, but also for other people who are in the space of making something that's super beautiful and compelling, but also very complex, more understandable and digestible. That's where
Steven:AI does really well. And it's obvious that you're utilizing AI in a very special way. And at CES this year, you were pretty busy kind of launching and teasing at some new products. If you want to talk a little bit about that, the Wonder brand, the Petal, Wonder Blocks, give us a little bit of information about those.
Franci:Totally. So quickly on Wonder, right? Like the whole idea, and this is something that we've kind of struggled with for a while. Like we've always seen BirdBuddy as a entry-level product, right? Helping people connect with all nature around their home, right? And we've also always struggled on like, okay, what does the brand look like? How do we kind of evolve, right? because BirdBuddy clearly is for birds. You know, you can't like have a BirdBuddy that's for, I don't know, like butterflies. Squirrels or something, yeah. Or squirrels, yeah, correct, yeah. So there was always this search for something that makes sense as an umbrella brand, right, where we can kind of, you know, have like a broader mandate of what we're actually here to do, right? And Wonder came up last year. I think it's wonderful. I think it's beautiful. In essence, right, there's kind of the underlying thesis, right, is that the world is full of wonder. Everything around us is really wonderful. Nature is around you. It's wonderful. And us humans are also full of wonder. We wonder about nature. What is it? How does it work? Why does it do that? There are so many questions that are there. And it's really hard for us to get to the bottom of that or really kind of, I don't know, exercise that muscle or really go deep because there's nobody there to take us on the journey. It ends almost there unless you go on Google and search it out. And that can be a pretty dry experience. So for us, what I've just said kind of outlines what we are here to do as a brand with Wonder, right? So birds are a beautiful, like a gateway product for that, right? But ultimately, Petal, which is the product you mentioned, right, that we've hinted at or kind of teased at CES this year, is I guess the first product that really kind of doubles down on that concept, which is it's a nature camera, right? It's a nature camera that's tiny, beautiful, right? You can put it anywhere around your home. It'll understand what nature it's looking at and it'll interpret it for you, right? It'll give you daily alerts. If there's beautiful content like butterflies flies bees bugs you know you name it birds right it'll share that it'll also tell you if flower is waning or if it's flowering and you should go check it out right so really you know basically trying to bring that wonder to you instead of you having to search it out, right? And connect you with nature at the same time in a really kind of more meaningful and deep way. So that's Petal, right? And it's a beautiful flower-shaped camera that I hope we can get like a really good growth with because I just want it. I want it for myself. I want it for our customers. It's a beautiful product. And on the other side, there's Wonder Blocks, which is Petal is kind of like a camera that takes shots of all the action and it kind of captures beautiful stuff. Wonder Blocks are the stage, right? We're trying to make it super easy for our customers to have a space in their yard, in their garden that's for nature, right? And it's for butterflies and it's for bees and it's for bugs and it's for flowers. And basically Petal, you just put Petal, you know, on top of it, right? It captures all this beautiful action and evolution and kind of daily happenings. And then Wonder Blocks are, you can think of it like a really beautiful, playful, modular set, like almost like a, you know, a base for planners, right? It also has has these modules for bee hotels and bug hotels and butterfly feeders. And yeah, to me, it feels like an adult Lego set for building beautiful natural spaces, right? And they work in tandem.
Steven:So what's really interesting about that is focusing on insects, their ecosystems. There's a lot of bad stigma, right? Around bees, around bugs. So how does this kind of open up people's interest in these insects, in their role in an ecosystem, in their role in a wildlife.
Franci:100%. And I think that this is something that we'll have to figure out. I don't have an answer to that yet. So I know that even for birds, right? So I'll use squirrels as an example because I think they're a great example in this case. So our customers, right? So bird buddy customers, people that buy a bird buddy, smart bird feeder, people that feed birds in general don't really like squirrels that much, right? And the reason for that is that you put seeds in a bird feeder, whatever bird feeder, and squirrels come and they mess it up, they destroy your bird feeder potentially, right? And it's just a, you only see mess coming out of it, right? What happens if you have a bird buddy, and we've seen that with a lot of our customers, which is kind of, again, something that we didn't expect, but it's beautiful, is people tell us bird buddy has changed our attitude towards squirrels, because, okay, we see a mess, but we also have really cute photos that come with it, right? So basically, you know, bringing people closer to that, right, and making them appreciate it, seeing the personality in these kind of tiny little creatures, right, really changes the perception of it, right? And it's no longer, to your point, like an insect, right? Because the insect really has like a bad connotation, right? But it's like a beautiful butterfly or it's a bug or it's a, you know, caterpillar or like it's a, you know, bee. All of these things are really special, right? And the more you know about them, but again, you know, knowing is not like a Wikipedia article, but it's like a very carefully dosed, you know, stream of information, the more you appreciate it, right? And beautiful photos help as well. So that's kind of the bet, right? Is that we can do for bugs what we've done for squirrels
Steven:you see and that's kind of what i was was asking and and i think that it's going to do that job in my opinion i think it's gonna you know open up people's minds about the little parts of the ecosystem and little parts of the wildlife that we may forget or maybe a little scared of
Franci:yeah totally right and we take it for granted but it's like it's a critical piece of the biodiversity around us right so there's there's a lot of talk about the you know die off of bees right and and other important pollinators and it's a like that is is actually a huge agricultural issue as well. You know, there are huge budgets for agricultural companies, right, that are all about supporting pollinators, right? But that's for business, right? And here, like, you know, with Wonder, with Petal, with Wonder Blocks, we're kind of trying to democratize that a little bit, right, and give everybody the tools to be a part of that solution. And they actually can, right? If everybody had, like, a little bit of a space for nature in their yard, and all it really takes is, like, a flower bed, right, with native plants and berries and things like that. Life comes if you have that. We're trying to make that super simple and maybe even beautiful and compelling from a kind of product experience point of
Steven:view. Which is a great point and seamlessly goes into my next question. How does BirdBuddy aim to kind of contribute to bird conservation and scientific research and wildlife conservation in general?
Franci:Totally. So the the biggest impact that we're already making and I think we'll always be making is just getting people to appreciate it. Right. So getting people close, getting people to connect is you're changing kind of hearts and minds effectively. Right. So people that buy BirdBuddy, right, all they do is talk about birds then. They're really just by the nature of having it and engaging. Right. They become an ambassador for birds. Right. So that's I think that's beautiful on its own. And ultimately, what you need to do to drive change is to change people's perceptions and their intents and things like that. So I think that's the number one thing that we're doing. And I think that's always going to be the least tangible because that's hard to quantify, right? But I think that ultimately the most important impact that we'll ever make. So the other piece of it is we have a ton of data, right? Like I think at this point, we have like 2 million birds per day detected by cameras, right? And we have yet to figure out exactly what the best way to engage with academia is to make the best use of that data sets, right? Or those data sets. But We've seen our customers actually take that data because it's live. People can download it and they can use that data to analyze bird migration pattern changes, bird population changes. The more that global warming and climate change in general creates major changes in habitats, the more that's important because it's pretty hard for analog ways of measuring bird population changes and bird migration pattern changes is you have to capture a bird, you have to ring it, you have to release it, and you have to capture it again, right? And look at the ring. So that is extremely labor intensive. It's expensive. It's also not super, you know, scalable. And it's something that we can work around and help make better, right? And it's something we've already done. But like, keep in mind, right? BirdBuddy has been on the market for two years, right? It's a relatively new concept. It's a relatively new product. And it'll take a while for, you know, researchers and academia to kind of catch up and start really leveraging this data as much as they can,
Steven:right? That was exactly my next point. I mean, this is still, you know, at the faces of it, a very young company. So there's still so much room to gather that data and try to contribute to other things for conservation efforts as well. Do you have any personal stories or maybe someone close to you with someone's experience using Bird Buddy and how they connected with nature?
Franci:Totally. Yeah. I was just in Phoenix with a family that has gotten to appreciate exactly what I said earlier. So they'll live in like an outskirts of Phoenix. They have a bird buddy. I think they got it as a gift. Before having a bird buddy, they, especially the mom, I think really didn't appreciate birds as much because it was only doves, like morning doves. And it wasn't really pleasant for them. So they got a bird buddy. And so I was blown away by the diversity of species that they have in Arizona and in Phoenix, like in general. Because they have a beautifully positioned house on like the edge of the desert with like a couple of bushes. And we were kind of standing there and looking at the bird body. And I think I saw like seven, eight beautiful different species of birds visiting while we were chatting. Right. So the bottom line is they went from a bird's cupcake or whatever into a bird loving family. And again, it's really, you know, it's a big piece of the family conversation, which is kind of beautiful. And then there are other instances where, again, people reaching out to us and telling us their stories, right? How important BirdBuddy is for the people in their care at hospitals, right? Or hospices or schools, right? Where people just can't go out, right? And they can't engage and they can't connect. And having a BirdBuddy that's outside that they can see, right? But then have this content come to their phone is beautiful, right? And it's like things like this are things you don't expect, right? But I guess are things that matter the most at the end of the day when you think about the impact you're making with the product that you're building And there are a lot of stories like this that are very inspirational, I guess.
Steven:Right. I mean, it just opens up so many avenues. I mean, just as the example, as an education purpose, having it in a classroom and putting it on a projector or something like that. It really just opens up so much. So we're here at Tomorrow's World today. We love sustainability. Where does sustainability rank in BirdBuddy's business model? I know there's the solar roof attachment that could use. Are there any other sustainable efforts that you'd really like to highlight?
Franci:So I'll be honest, it ranks too low, right? It ranks too low, but that is a necessary evil for like getting product to market, right? Sure. I would lie if I said that we could, we had the opportunity to kind of prioritize sustainable supply chain and all that in the first couple of years, because it is just, it is impossible. It is becoming, however, like a major point of conversation in the business, right? Your point, there's a solar roof that people can use. They don't have to charge everybody almost ever, depending on how much sun they have, right? The fact that we are, we've designed the product in a way that where it's modular, right? So you actually have the camera you can put into, you can put the same camera into a hummingbird feeder or into a bird bath, right? Is a piece of us trying to, you know, offer our customers a way to not have to buy like multiple cameras from us, right? So it's adding value and kind of increasing the use case of our product without having to buy too many electronics, right? We are currently exploring options to ship biodegradable units, right? Which that is super compelling to me, but it's something we have to test with the market because, you know, it's an outdoors product, right? It has to be weatherproof, obviously, right? And then if you make it biodegradable, by nature, it'll degrade. So a couple of years and it'll start falling apart. But, you know, we can give our customers the choice, right? So you can buy this, it's going to be slightly more expensive, but, you know, for 10 bucks in three years, we'll ship you a new one, right? So you have that peace of mind, right? And that's something we're really kind of now trying to innovate on But it is definitely hard to make that into the top priority or in the top priorities because there's a lot of challenges in getting product to market without that. And that almost makes it impossible to price it at a level where people would
Steven:buy it, right? Right. No, I appreciate your transparency on it. And you know, again, We'll go back to it. Young company. I mean, in the future, technology will advance. You really don't know where it'll go. So maybe more avenues may pop up. Another thing that we really like to talk about is as failure as a necessary step into creating something. Are there any challenges that you could think of starting the company, coming out with new products that you faced and how did you kind of overcome that?
Franci:So Burt Buddy on its own, right, was a total outlier when it comes to that stuff. Because it went from a birdhouse with a camera in December 2019 to doing some product market fit testing and building a website and trying to figure out what it is the demand for product. And everything was just insanely well performing. So clearly we've hit on something that there was a lot of energy there that nobody was tapping into. So that's very rare. So you rarely get an opportunity to start something that just has this major massive pull from the market. BirdBuddy is not my first company. And I've learned that failure is a normal part of building businesses. And even within BirdBuddy, after we've had the original Kickstarter campaign and then started shipping, we have done a lot of searching, like soul searching, right? And product market fit searching and like wonder, right? Who are we, right? What are we here to do? And that was a massive process of iteration, right? And we're very, I'm very comfortable with failure, right? And that's kind of a natural part of evolving even within BirdBuddy, right? So BirdBuddy, the first kind of iteration of it, right? And just the fact that there was so much excitement around the core kind of product concept was special that way, right? After that, if you don't fail, you don't try basically, right? And obviously you have to be ready for that and that you should almost kind of want it, right? You wanna try it, you wanna see if it works, it'll likely not work, but that needs to be kind of a part of the process, right? Yeah, yeah, I really think that for any entrepreneur, right? The biggest inflection point is getting to a point where you're very comfortable with failure and you're very comfortable with letting go because when you start something, it's your baby, right? special it's my idea or something right and then it doesn't quite work out the way you wanted it right but you still wanted to make it work and then you spent like five years working on something that nobody wants right and that's i guess that's a natural like rite of passage for for a for an entrepreneur you have to go through that right but once you're through it i think you should really embrace it and just be okay with things not working out the way you've intended
Steven:and just using trying as an initial step leads us into the future are there any avenues or opportunities with technology as it advances, implementing those new technologies, a little more advanced technologies for, let's say, augmented reality, virtual reality. Are there any plans for that? Is that something that interests you for BirdBunny?
Franci:I think at the core, our goal right now is to try to find ways to make real things as compelling as we can. To find what's the least amount of alerts or notifications or outreach that we can do to keep you engaged and excited and engrossed in a way. One of the ways I like to frame what we do is we want to give nature a chance to compete for our attention. Our attention is under an insane attack. Everybody's trying to steal five minutes of screen time here and there. Everybody's competing for our eyeballs. It's all about advertisements. Our senses are under assault and it's one of the major reasons is why we're having a super hard time to connect with real things that are around us. And the more we can get that balance better, the better. And I think that AI is a huge element of this. Whatever's happened in the past four years, and I think we kind of know where it's kind of going. I think leveraging it to help nature reach out and help you connect and help you appreciate is where I think we should really innovate the most. VR is super exciting to me as a consumer. they are, right? All these things are really, to me, have a lot of potential benefits and like a natural place in society and the world, right? But they're, again, like screens, right? And if we can use them to get people more connected, right? And ultimately to get them to go out and check the real thing, right? We'll use it, right? But only if it achieves that, right?
Steven:Sure. Sure. And keeping all of that in mind, you mentioned, you know, four years down the road. Let's go five years. How do you see bird buddy evolving over those years as, again, technology continues to change.
Franci:Yeah. Super small cameras, like tiny cameras, really, right? That don't need to be powered, like maybe like if it's solar powered and with a tiny solar panel, right? Something that's very easy to put anywhere around your home and close to nature, right? And that can be a bird's nest or a fountain or a pond or a bird feeder, right? It doesn't matter, right? Just put it there. So like these tiny little little cameras that get you very close to nature and get you really connected, right? I think, you know, technology is clearly moving in that direction, right? Everything's getting smaller and more power efficient, batteries are getting better, right? So I think that's in the future. And I think that's the way I see us really kind of delivering the most value to our customers while at the same time building the biggest business we can, right? Because obviously that's also a goal. And I think that that's really, for BirdBuddy, one of the most beautiful things is that I see our success and our growth as that's directly related to the impact that we're making. So it's kind of easy to be extremely ambitious on the growth side and genuinely want the best for your customers as well. So it's a nice place to be in. But yeah, ultimately tiny cameras that do all of these things. And then the big exciting challenge really is how do you build a customer experience, a user experience that really hits on all the right notes without making it overbearing. Just kind of this beautiful layer of connection with all living things around you, right? And that's what kind of wonder is really
Steven:there to do. No, that's incredible. And we're really hitting home on the future of uncertainty. What is the future look like that you know of that people should be excited for anything that you are working on that people could expect in the near future? Yes,
Franci:in the near future, we have a couple of things. Yeah, so I've already talked about Petal and Wonderblocks, right? So Petal, this beautiful flower-shaped camera that gets you close to nature. WonderBlocks, effectively a, like you can think of it like a beautiful raised bed for pollinators, right? But really beautiful and modular. But anyway, like these are very close. We're actually going to be launching a Kickstarter campaign for those. We are also working on a true kind of Gen 2 bird body product, right? Which is an entirely new camera, like a new feeder, right? And a couple of other things. I don't think I've talked about that publicly yet, but it is really exciting. expecting us to be doing this. So it's not something I need to be hiding. But yeah, like that I'm super excited about, right? Because it really doubles down on that modularity piece of it, right? Even to our earlier conversation about sustainability, the new product will be totally detachable from the battery, right? So effectively you will be able to just buy a battery replacement, which to me like is the biggest, you know, negative sustainability impact, I guess, for the current product line, you cannot remove the battery, right? So basically when that dies, the product dies, right? With this new product, you'll be able to do that which I think is great. But that's really for kind of this year or let's say the next 16 months, right? Getting a new product to market that is really a major kind of Gen 2 upgrade for the BirdBody product line. And then working on Petal and Wonder Blocks kind of, yeah, as a, I don't know, like maybe as a Gen 3 kind of product, right? Sure,
Steven:sure. Now we're excited to see where it goes. We really encourage everyone to be excited and follow what you're doing and just be ready for you know those new advancements and those new products now let's talk about the meat and potatoes as we uh wrap these this thing up you know how can people order a bird buddy where can they find you and talk a little bit about that subscription tier and how that works as well
Franci:awesome yep happy to so uh bird buddy you can buy it on birdbuddy.com uh so birdbuddy.com or mybirdbuddy.com you can also find us on amazon it is a beautiful product i think that one of the key things that we really strive to do from the beginning is we want to offer a free experience. So what I mean by that, no subscription, right? No monthly or yearly subscription ties, right? That offer 90% of the experience, right? I want our customers to be able to have the core BirdBuddy experience as much as we can afford to allow it, right? Without having to pay us any monthly subscriptions. But there are things that we are offering that we just cannot subsidize effectively, right? Because like we're selling you a hardware product, right? you're using it on a daily, which is also beautiful, right? But at the same time, it means quite a bit of cost to us. So BirdBuddy has an amazing retention, right? When somebody buys it, you know, most of our customers are using it like every day for a year, two years. So there's a lot of action happening. All of it is video and images and that costs, right? So, but all of that is free, right? And then what we do is we offer the AI piece of it, which I'm super excited about. We call it Nature Chat. And that effectively means that when a bird lands, lands, you can start a conversation with it, right? You can ask it like, are you hungry? Are you sick? Are you okay? Like, you know, have you seen a mate recently? And basically based on all the data that, you know, our cameras are ingesting and using LLMs and we're testing various different LLMs from, you know, to anthropic, like basically all of them, right? To try to create this layer of interpretation, right? Where effectively we're allowing our customers to go extremely deep, right? Into a conversation and ask questions and engage and And that is something that we're charging for, like extra, right? So there's a premium tier for BirdBuddy. There's a family premium tier that unlocks that for the whole family. It's very often like a family experience, right? But the core feature set is free, and this is something that we intend to keep forever. It's really important to us that if you buy a BirdBuddy, you can have a really compelling core experience without any extra cost.
Steven:Now, that's great. We're really excited to see what the future holds for BirdBuddy, and I'm sure you are yourself. Thank you again for jumping on, joining our show. This has been a wonderful interview, Francie. Thanks to you. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Four Worlds Podcast. Until next time, you can catch up on the latest innovations shaping our world at tomorrowsworldtoday.com. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel.
