Lily, A Camera Drone That Automatically Follows You, Pulls In A Mountainous $34 Million In Pre-orders | TechCrunch.

Self-driving drone Lily has had quite the success in sales and it’s not even on the market yet. The startup pulled in a whopping $34 million in pre-orders by the end of 2015, with 60,000 units already sold.

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lily is not a Kickstarter, they did it on their own, as in pre-orders (here). They are using “tilt” which is a managed pre-order service, 2.5% + credit card processing fees.

Seems like this gives the makers (lily) more control over things, if they’re late there isn’t a community of 60,000 people on Kickstarter complaining, they’ll likely set up the community on their own site.

As far as why lily is doing so well, we believe they’re one of the first drone makers to be a “cause” – by that we mean they picked one thing and just wanted to own it, it’s a camera (that follows you). A lot of drone makers are all about the specs, how far, how long, but lily is a camera, straight up this is what it’s good at is the proposition – good work lily, own that and build on it.