2019

RAPID INVENTION WITH A NEW COOL IDEA

Martin Müller, inventor of the DR! FT Racer, founder of Sturmkind GmbH, Speyer.
Over 30.000 have already been sold, more than 100.000 racing and gaming enthusiasts are following him and his invention via social media and the crowdfunding goal of his current Kickstarter campaign "DR! FT - next level" was reached within 20 minutes: Martin Müller is the successful founder and managing director of Sturmkind GmbH in Speyer and visionary inventor of the DR! FT-Racer - awarded the German Developer Prize in the Innovation category in 2018.
The product
With the DR! FT Racers, the true-to-original driving characteristics and the sound of racing cars are perfectly simulated with the latest computer technology. The small vehicles on a scale of 1:43 are controlled completely via the smartphone and the DR! FT app.
The motivation
"The fact that the cars on my Carrera track looked like racing cars, but neither sounded nor moved anywhere near that, bothered me even as a child," says the 43-year-old product developer. Martin Müller has had the vision of driving exciting races in the living room, races in which overtaking maneuvers, many drivers at the same time and being independent of the track, since 2003. With the deep conviction that emotions can only arise if a model doesn't just look like that like in reality, but also sounds like it and moves like it does in reality.
 The idea
Just like the technologies available, the idea of ​​combining the world of virtual racing simulations and real racing cars continued to mature. Thanks to the further development of smartphone technology, the go-ahead for DR! FT was given in 2014. Martin Müller gives up his own design office and devotes himself exclusively to his invention, in 2015 he held the first prototype and thus a new genre of gaming in his hands.
 The challenge
The search for investors turned out to be difficult, Martin Müller and his wife, who now runs the company together with him, opted for a crowdfunding campaign: the first teaser will be published on Facebook at the end of September 2016; after an eight-week kickstart campaign, in December 2016 they had well over 1.300 people secured their DR! FT-Racer in advance - € 260.000 come together on Kickstarter and Crowdpilot. 14 years after the first vision, DR! FT was finally able to become a reality. Almost a year later, the first DR! FT Racers were delivered.
The current status
A 15-strong Sturmkind team that is working with great enthusiasm on the next generation of the DR! FT Racer. In total, more than 50 people from all over Germany are already involved in the DR! FT project. “Handmade in Germany” - the demands on the sustainability of the DR! FT-Racer are high and refer not only to the materials used, but also to a very good repair service and numerous options for upgrading. The first models of "DR! FT - next level" will be delivered shortly: With this evolutionary stage, the team around Martin Müller is bringing vehicles with prototypical bodies onto the market for the first time - again via a crowdfunding campaign. The next challenge is then to produce enough of the new racers to be prepared for the upcoming Christmas business. "We are still at the very beginning with this new type of gaming," says Martin Müller, who is now looking for further investors to implement new ideas and expand global sales more quickly.
“A new business idea always has to be critically questioned - is it really viable, am I 150 percent behind it? If these questions can be answered positively, then you have to go full throttle and don't look back ”, advises the trained toolmaker and product developer - not without the excellent support from the investment and structural bank Rhineland-Palatinate, the United VR Bank Kur- und Rheinpfalz eG and the economic development of the city of Speyer.

Martin Müller and his wife Stephanie gave the keynote as part of the start impulse for the 20th Rhein-Neckar Business Start-Up Day on November 23.11.2019, 10 on the exhibition stage in Hangar XNUMX of the Technik Museum Speyer.

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