As we know, kiwee is the first seriously marketed AWES.
The topic purpose is how to keep this product in sale and in progress during next years.
Several possibilities are already discussed. In my opinion AWE companies and universities should buy some unities while they try to progress in their respective projects. And also some papers could be made in order to know the scalability, output, efficiency, comparison with other transmission means.
Kiwee could become the AWE showcase.
Kiwee to showcase awes world. Oh yes, like that. Let’s do it.
How do we proceed? There 's niches to find and kiwee to sell. Application welcomes 
Thanks Pierre, but it does not work this way. Other venture are not my customer. At kitewinder we are searching for biz developper. You sell unit, you get a percentage on sale. Simple
Looks right. On a recent post Doug indicates the low quality of small wind turbines or the difficulty to correctly use them. Kitewinder could justify a higher sale price because kiwee is an AWES, because of its expected high quality by its controled making process, and also thanks to a possible higher after sales service. Is that possible with some biz developper like Decathlon for example?
What I have done is be in touch with sports retail stores to make them aware of Kiwee. From my short experience i can tell its difficult. Growing a market aways is
Do camping or hiking or climbing stores rent out equipment? That’d be a possible opportunity. Maybe as a test give the store a unit to rent out, pay them for that, and see how often it gets rented out
Woww, I am impressed by what you did talllak! So you know how hard it is.
AWES does not sell itself. It is probably even more challenging than developing a working awes . And that is for a small 600 euros product. Imagine trying to sell a hundreds of thousand buck thing with no reference :simply impossible.
That is The reason why we did not did bigger than kiwee to start.
That is also why I think if kiwee fail on market access, other venture will have a really hard time on market access much harder than if kiwee reach its market. Because we sell BtoC. People will hopefully get to know awes. And that may unlock things for biggest product.
https://pacificskypower.com/ marketed some small AWES (a kite carrying a wind turbine).
See at 42’’ from the beginning of the video below: a manually controled crosswind flygen (like FlygenKite):
Bigger systems could prevail for two reasons:
These two groups will one day bootstrap AWE, if a working system came to existence.
It does not necessarily have to grow organically (that would have been nice also though)
Its still a hard sell for any scale and it wont come for free.
No I don’t think you could bet on investor and government funding. If you do so it means you are 10 or 20 years away from market. Either you will die from lack of money, either someone will take the market before you.
So to me size matter, bigger equal more difficult to develop and to sell on an uneducated market. There is no other grows than organic growth for a physical product, especially in the energy sector. It is not IA or big data.
Makani did not make it with millions. Thinking big money will help is not the solution, thinking it will be better when bigger too.
All this are my thinking of course.
Makani does not have a product on the market yet, otherwise they would sell a few. I would think there are some examples of this working, though I cant find any good examples at the moment
If the first installations showed promise, investors would be lining up
Its going to be hard for a small AWES developer to scale up its technology only from sales revenue when large oil and tech companies are already competing by developing large-scale AWES from their vast revenue streams.
All of the money in AWE R&D has come from other economic sectors. Had Wubbo lived, he really would have been the most likely EU leader to buy a hundred Kiwees to pass around to all teams, and that capital would most likely have been from Shell.
The Kiwee market analysis looks to be not so obvious. Perhaps let us see what are the competitors.
Other AWES (Makani, Ampyx…)?
Other wind energy systems comprising current ground-based wind turbines?
Other renewables (solar…)?
Other energies (coal, nuclear…)?
OR/AND
[quote=“Windy_Skies, post:7, topic:442”]
Do camping or hiking or climbing stores rent out equipment?
[/quote]: some goods in the categories above (camping, hiking, climbing)? What products? If there are not similar products what can Kiwee bring? What are possible problems? For example is the 5 kg weight in the backpack awkward?
kPower has offered to introduce KiteWinder to the KTAI community, including Michael Lin of New Tech Kites (Austin, TX), perhaps the biggest all-around kite retailer, and Ron Welty, kite retail veteran, of Wind World Kites (Long Beach, WA). While the specialized kite retail market is not big, customers tend to have kite skills and some sales would result. kPower also wanted to beta test a Kiwee against KiteMotor1, for basic performance (power-to-weight) and detail engineering comparison. It would be nice to donate a Kiwee to a suitable museum, like KiteLab KiteMotor1 at World Kite Museum or Pacific 40, by Dan Tracy, that’s at American Wind Power Museum. The Musée de l’air et de l’espace would be a good choice to collect and display a Kiwee, which would help raise interest.
Just a quick ebay search to see what I could have bought eg to charge my phone on a camping trip and provide power for lights etc. I am not sure if Kitewinder has some unique selling points compared to these. As I dont know I guess many customers wont either. (I hope people still buy Kiwee because its a cool project and kitw flying is fun. Perhaps it can also be the start of commercial AWE at bigger scales. I also hope Kiwee has some unique selling points to make buying them a logical choice for many)
10 NOK is approx 1 Euro
I have a Q for @Kitewinder. Could you use kitewinder for a car charging station? Ie with battery and 30 kW power in >8 ms wind?
Some roads are not grid connected.
You dont need to consider launch/land for now, though i guess a simple winch and mast system might work (depending on what you suggest as the main power plant)
Batteries are available COTS eg from Tesla
The power curve is on https://kitewinder.fr/buyProduct.php?id=1 .
It is about 80 W with 8 m/s wind speed. A 30 kWh battery would be charged in 375 hours.
@kitefreak, you might also consider let those people know kiwee exist so that they can buy one to test. We do not do this ’ try it for free’ things. That breaks all the commercial dynamic of the company. If you put a finger into this kind of things then your are stuck.
@tallakt, a friend of mine sell I3 BMW. He ask me about charging time. I tell him around 20 days! Was not that far
I’d go further than that. I’d pay people to review my product (or not to make the review more independent), or pay people to advertise my product. As an example, here is a nice video with an advertisement at the end: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohyai6GIRZg
You should be able to find people on YouTube or Instagram or wherever that have a lot of followers and contact them about cooperation, and get your product seen by many, many people. You can also just lend them the product for a while to try if you don’t want to give it away.
You should know better than us who the right people are. Here’s as good a start as any to try to find them: https://www.reddit.com/r/CampingandHiking/wiki/index/related_subreddits
Have you done any marketing? What’s your marketing strategy?
