Is This the Battery Charger We All Need?

We have another video of the startup product launches. In this video, Matt reviews a pitch on IndieGoGo for a universal power tool battery charger. Watch for his concerns for this company.

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and has seen some great products out there! 

In this series, we look at new products on the market and see if they are worth investing in. Think along the lines of Shark Tank, but with no real money involved just for fun. 

Video Transcript: 

Product Promo Video:

Ever find it frustrating that each power tool brand has its specific battery and charger? It’s like they’re all speaking different languages. But with PD Nation we’re breaking down those barriers. No more feeling locked into one brand’s products. Now you can mix and match tools from different brands hassle-free, without the headache of incompatible batteries or chargers. With PD Nation universal battery system, you’re no longer restricted to just one brand like Dewalt, Milwaukee, or Makita. Without breaking the bank you can now freely choose tools from different brands. One battery meets the needs of almost all power tools, allowing us to choose from a wider range of power tool brands. Whether I’m repairing cars in the workshop or making furniture in the studio, the PD Nation battery system liberates me from the constraints of brand-specific standards.

Matt’s Review:

Alright, cool. Well, I think you know, this is definitely a good idea. It’s – you can see why different companies wanna have their own sort of battery standard so that they’re hopefully encouraging if you buy a Makita drill, then you buy a Makita Impact wrench, or buy a Makita table saw or whatever else they have. And you don’t buy one from Skil, one from Makita, and one from some other brand. And now you got 3 incompatible batteries. So I get it from the manufacturer standpoint why they would wanna encourage each design to have its own compatibility that doesn’t work with anything else. But from the user standpoint, you may not wanna buy all of one kind of product. And so something like this is pretty helpful because you can now use – kind of combine your batteries together and use whatever one has the most charging it for whatever tool you need to use at the time. So I think it’s definitely a good idea. It looks like it’s gained some good traction on Indiegogo, which makes sense. 

My only concern with any of these, you know, small companies trying to do this – and I don’t know CEE. Well okay, here’s my other complaint is the name C E E N R is that ‘cener’. I don’t know. That’s maybe not the easiest name to say or spell. So if you’re trying to launch a big, you know, national consumer brand maybe think about a name that you know is a little easier to say or spell or know what it means. But aside from that, if you’re a small company and you’re competing in a big consumer space in electronic equipment, you may – if you really are on to something good, you’re gonna face competition. Probably from some of the bigger names in the space and maybe ultimately hard to compete. But hopefully they can you know make a dent now, build some traction, get in you know early on this compatibility issue and get a good number of consumers. I think it’s not gonna be the casual home user who only has one or two tools that’s gonna worry about this. But the professional user or the real die-hard shop guy who’s got a ton of different things that they do in their home garage that’s built out like a workshop. So from a marketing standpoint actually that may make it easier to target exactly who this is gonna be a good fit for. But overall I like the concept. I think anytime you can solve a problem, make people’s lives easier you’re gonna have some success. And these guys seem to hit on something that I think is gonna work out pretty well. So we’ll see how it goes. But I like what they’re up to.