Episode 065 | Ergonomics and Your Productivity With James Olander, The Roost Laptop Stand
For James, he found the right thing to work on by being very close to a problem that affected him personally and discovering an unsolved problem in that space. He had been working at a laptop for years, hunched over, until it put him out of commission. RSI (repetitive stress injury), carpal tunnel, constant neck and back pain.
James started his career in aerospace engineering, worked on satellite and rockets, mainly on lightweight structures. When he came across the ergonomic crisis with his laptop, he found that no one made a compelling solution, something as portable as his laptop, that could help solve the bad posture laptops put us in. He then decided to put his engineering background into practice and worked to develop a laptop stand that was indeed very portable. He put it on Kickstarter and they rest they say is history.
The Roost Stand is the resulting ergonomics-focused laptop stand. Today, we talk to James about his experience, his laptop stand and the future of ergonomics and your productivity.
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In this Cast | Ergonomics and Your Productivity
Ray Sidney-Smith
Augusto Pinaud
The Roost Laptop Stand
James Olander, The Roost Laptop Stand
Raw Text Transcript | Ergonomics and Your Productivity
Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio).
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Voiceover Artist 0:00 Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity. Here, your host Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17 And Welcome back, everybody to productivitycast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity, I'm Ray Sidney Smith.
Augusto Pinaud 0:24 I am Augusto Pinaud.
Voiceover Artist 0:00
Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life? Then you've come to the right place, productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity. Here, your host Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17 Welcome back everybody to productivity cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity, I'm Ray Sidney Smith.
Augusto Pinaud 0:22I'm Augusto Pinaud.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:24And welcome to our listeners to this episode of productivitycast where we're going to be doing another interview, and this time, we have the founder of the roost. stand with us James Olander. Welcome to the show, James. Hello, thanks. Good to be here. Yeah, so a little bit about James he found the right thing to work on by being very close to a problem that affected him personally and discovering an unsolved problem in that particular space. He had been working at a laptop for years, hunched over until it put him out of commission. That is he got repetitive stress injury RSI, carpal tunnel, constant neck and back pain. James career started actually in aerospace engineering, he worked on satellites and rockets, mainly on lightweight structures. When he came across the ergonomic crisis with his laptop, he found that no one made a compelling solution, something as portable as his laptop that could help solve the bad posture laptops put us in. He then decided to put his engineering background into practice and worked to develop a laptop stand. That was indeed very portable. He put it on Kickstarter. And they, as they say, the rest is history. So it brought us the roost stand. James, give us a little bit of background in terms of what the stand is, and how it's different maybe then from some of the other products that were out there on the market at the time.
James Olander 1:41
Yeah, certainly. There's this idea that you only will use stuff if it's easy enough to use and it's not like a huge pain. Like no one no one wants to carry more stuff or, or fidget with with bad things and not that we can execute at this level but the you know, the apples might Try that, you know, it just works and, and how it's a pleasure to use it that is really important for, for us humans to actually use stuff. And so when I was looking around there wasn't a, there was nothing that was remotely close to something you'd actually want to take with you and was was not like a fidgety QG thing to set up and didn't look pretty obnoxious. The idea was that maybe there's a way to come up with a neat linkage and some mechanisms that allow this thing to collapse really small and it's easy and we can just get past that threshold where you'll actually use it. And then and then it'll solve that problem for you because now you don't have any excuses and and it's fun to use. So that's been really the focus this whole time on designing and then been working on this problem is, is how do you keep making it easier to use and solving this problem so that people actually actually use it like that's our that's our measure of success is that you buy the product and then you, you really do use it and it becomes like a daily part of your daily habit.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:08
And so tell me a little bit about your first design. I know we're in currently version 2.0. And what did you learn between the first version and the second version? As you were, as you've gone journey to developing an ergonomic portable land, you know, laptop stand? And what did you learn? What's new about the new one that was not in the last one?
James Olander 3:28
Yeah. So this was my first time really tackling an entrepreneurial endeavor since probably since like my own lawn business and in high school. And I started this when I was about 26 or 27. As you know, as we were saying before, when that's when the ergonomic and the RSI issues kind of caught up with me. That's something I tell people to they're like, well, I don't need this thing. And, and if they're under the age of 25, I just tell them to just wait like you body will, will eventually let you know when it's time to being the first entrepreneurial endeavor, trying to make this in a fail or like a, you know, fail quick and minimize, minimize, like the major production risks, where, if you haven't like a lot of Kickstarter is fail because they have this massive design and production challenge. And if it's your first time making something, you're probably going to fail pretty miserably when you try to scale it up to mass production. So now you start getting into injection molding, and you've got a third party manufacturer that's building stuff that you don't really know what the end product is going to be until it actually comes from them. So So did not want to be in that realm. And so the production of this v one was actually with a laser cutter. And so the same machine that I was doing my prototyping on, I could actually use that same machine to make Production parts. And when you're using a laser cutter, we you know, if you look at the first one, it's actually everything is a flat pattern piece of material. So everything's cut just in 2d and then we snap it all together. And that's pretty limiting in terms of in terms of like all the functionality we wanted to get in there. So we had to really like draw a line at what you know what's the bare minimum feature here are a couple features that we want that are that's going to convince people and want them to have to know that we want them to use the product with so Sophie one was kind of the bare minimum which was you know, super portable, and it gets your screen, way up off the desk. So when we say like I level that's about anywhere from like your screen moving up. So if the laptop your screens, like on the desk, but we want that screen up at least like eight to 12 inches apart. The desk so that your, the angle your heads making is really you're not looking down anymore, you're just looking horizontal. But that is the key component for ergonomics, at least in terms of the neck. So the first one did just that. And it was actually a fixed height. So you couldn't adjust it. And I'm kind of a taller guy. So I size it for myself. And turns out not everyone, you know, that didn't work for everyone. So the v2 is it adjustable. And the two also, though, is mass manufactured. So it's a whole new ballgame in terms of production challenges and so that it was good to have a bunch of history behind us in terms of, you know, we had a customer base that was sold on the concept and now we reintroduced a more useful version. And we could actually pull off the production without tank in the whole thing. second time around.
Augusto Pinaud 7:00
I'm an iPad only guy I work on my iPad for since the second iPad, okay? The first time but I still carry some of the laptop when the second iPad came, I stopped carrying a laptop. So I remember the first roost because I love the concept and I at that time was Karen, you know, computer when when you send us the the second ruse to play I was happily surprised how, you know how much went into into the engineering into the ability to race it on lower and all that. So,
