AV News EXTRA: Getting to Know Airdog

If you've had the chance to check out our recent news story on Airdog's drone then Edgars Rozental may be familiar!

https://www.airvuz.com/video/AV-News-Meet-the-Creators-of-Airdog?id=58911c368ed7c6155863e91b

In this video we take an even closer look at Airdog and it's leader Edgars Rozental. VIDEO TRANSCRIPT: Edgar: My name is Edgar Rozentals and I am the co-founder and CEO of AirDog. If I had to share my personal story, then I would call it a romantic version. We were expecting our son to be born in a few months and my girlfriend gave me a present and said that, "Hey, Edgar. You will be a father in a few months and you will [00:00:30] need to buy toys now for your son. So here goes the last toy for you. Have fun. Grow up." Yeah, it was a small radio-controlled helicopter. Back then there were no [inaudible 00:00:44] drones and I immediately got hooked on flying helicopters. At some point, simply, I realized that drones seemed to have... there will be a [00:01:00] pretty big future and I was looking for new challenges. Then I found a couple of friends and guys who were crazy enough to jump into a drone project. And we then funded it initially ourselves. We tried to attract additional funding, though AirDog was not the original idea. And it's not my idea at all. It actually came slightly [00:01:30] later. A friend of ours came and said, "Hey, guys. Why don't you make just a small simple drone that carries GoPro and films when we go snowboarding." We thought initially that it's kind of toyish idea and sounds too simple. It shouldn't be complicated at all to make drone follow GPS signal on the smartphone. When we discovered that it is a lot more complicated than we realized, also that potentially market is there. And [00:02:00] since it wasn't that easy, it might be worth doing. Because, if it would be very easy, we wouldn't start the project because it would be too low barrier to anybody enter the same and create the same product. We started the first prototype early in 2013. It took around nine months until we got the first carbon fiber prototype. Decided [00:02:30] to go for a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign. It was a great success and since then we have been spending quite a lot of time, actually more than two years, until we actually shipped our first batch, which happened only last year in June 2016. As we speak, actually, we have reached a very, very important milestone. We are done and fully completed all [00:03:00] the Kickstarter backer shipments. This is really, really something that we have internally celebrated recently. When we started designing AirDog, we had no idea how exactly it will turn out and we didn't have single product designer in our team. And the whole product design and shape was just created [00:03:30] with the function in mind, in the beginning. It had to be foldable, compact, and et cetera. With the colors, since we were building a lot of drones and we had been flying a lot of drones, we just didn't like that they all... they might be different shapes and sizes, but they all still look the same. We wanted to be different, and since we are going into action sports, we thought, "Why not make some crazy, distinctive color scheme." [00:04:00] So there will be some that hate it, but there will be some who love it [laughter]. So somehow this combination got selected and then we never looked back and just went with it. The shape and these colors slowly became part of our brand. So, currently we are selling AirDog online only. You can get it through our main distributors or retailers. [00:04:30] Those are Amazon.com, in several countries. It is backcountry.com. It's BNH, drone et cetera, and quite a few other minor retailers.