Kolos
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
KOLOS was a Bulgarian hardware project by first-time entrepreneur Ivaylo Kalburdzhiev: 'the world's first' racing wheel for full-sized iPads, combining the established gaming-wheel concept with the iPad as the display. Development began at the end of 2011 and ran for about three years.
02 / Kolos FAILURE REASONS
Failure analysis
The failure was a textbook hardware-project mistake pattern, documented by the founder himself: he took a $30,000 bank loan at the idea stage before building even a DIY mockup, commissioned an industrial designer and 3D-printed prototypes in isolation, and spent more than a third of the money before any market validation. After three years of development, the Kickstarter campaign failed, and the project was abandoned.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Operations ended
after early-2015 Kickstarter raised ~$4k and was ended, team shut down KOLOS iPad racing-wheel operations. Entrepreneur.bg (2014) confirms Bulgarian KOLOS in BuildIt.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
At the end of 2011, Ivaylo Kalburdzhiev conceived KOLOS, a racing wheel for full-sized iPads, and took a $30,000 bank loan before validating the idea.
- 02
He contracted an industrial designer for CAD models and 3D-printed prototypes in isolation over about three years.
- 03
The Kickstarter campaign failed; the founder abandoned the project and published a postmortem describing roughly $50,000 burned on the failed hardware project.
- 04
No audited loss figure was disclosed.