Dear American and Western-Based Drone Manufacturers,
After passing a House Committee vote by a landslide 57-1 tally, it is almost certain that DJI drones will be banned in the United States as a part of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2025. I say this because, historically speaking, the NDAA almost always passes when it is up for vote. If this statistic remains true to its trend (and the House and/or Senate and/or President Biden do not remove it from the NDAA 2025), DJI will likely be added to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) “Covered List,” which designates DJI as a national security risk and makes it extremely difficult for the technology to operate on American soil.
I’m doing my best to keep my anger in-check so as to move forward with the most positive disposition possible. We can either choose to lay down and die or keep pushing forward towards our goals. When I set out on my journey in 2017, my goals were simple and humble…I wanted to earn a living doing what I truly love to do and that is flying drones. While my plans have been impacted greatly and I am reeling after the decision was made to essentially brick the $15,000 worth of DJI technology I have invested in over the past 7 years (and many more are much worse off than I am in that regard), I am not going to give up the hope that I can fly drones and earn a healthy living for the next 35-40 years of my life…not yet anyway.
That said, I’m here to offer cautionary advice to you, the very people who have been advocating for (if not fully endorsing, supporting, and financially incentivizing) DJI to be removed from the US market on how you can win back the industry’s end-users in this extremely tumultuous time…
Get away from reliance on venture capitalist funds
It is far too common in the United States to see you drone manufacturers come and go at an uncomfortably frequent rate. Just as soon as a company seems to have a full head of steam, they fizzle out in spectacular fashion and end up either acquired or shuttered completely. This, in large part, has to do with the mirage of success created by investment funds from venture capitalists that initially bloat a manufacturer’s bank account.
The symptoms of a company too reliant on venture capital funding are all too common:
- A ton of marketing with little-to-no real-world data or use cases backing up the efficacy of their platforms.
- A high volume of press releases that point towards “sales,” but very little actual sales revenue being generated.
- A hesitancy to showcase or distribute product for user-feedback and/or product reviews due to either a lack of overall efficiency or even a lack of availability.
- An absence of new, tangible, and real innovations year-over-year.
Those are just the major symptoms, there may be others that I did not cover. The overarching point here though is that the reliance on venture capital funds and the charades and facades of “success” that are often displayed utilizing these funds is dangerous for the industry and creates stagnation in a best case scenario and investor fatigue in a worst case scenario. If investors grow tired of losing money when buying stock in our companies, we lose that means of opportunity at some point down the line and our industry is labeled as a financial “dead end.”
You all need to ween yourselves off of investor dollars at some point and start relying entirely on your revenue streams to generate the means necessary to running a business. If you cannot or will not do this, you are either too incompetent to be in business or you are in this business for the wrong reasons.
Start spending your capital on things that matter
Piggy-backing on my first section of advice, if any of you want to be taken seriously as successors to DJI in the American market, you all need to seriously evaluate where your capital is being spent internally. Far too often do I see manufacturers in the west inflating their burn-rate unnecessarily via frivolous spending on marketing and PR fluff without any meaningful way to tangibly expand upon or back-up said fluff. If I had a dollar for every time I saw a press release outlining how great a particular drone is only to find out that the press release outlined a case study that is exaggerated at best and completely fabricated at worst, I wouldn’t need to be flying drones for a living.
This meaningless expenditure of those precious funds you are burning at an exponentially fast rate (too fast to be sustainable, more often than not) is not only hurting your business, it’s destroying technology standards in the drone industry. Period.
You know who you are and you know that you are guilty of this, so instead of getting defensive or upset, make plans to change the direction of your capital funnel. Work to redirect that money into your research and development teams. Give them the financial resources necessary to dedicate the time needed to flesh out a truly spectacular drone. If you bite the bullet now and accept that your hardware and software engineers are going to be making the brunt of the money and decisions on your products for the foreseeable future, you will struggle less down the line.
Work to drive your prices down to soften the blow on the lower-end of the market
I say “lower-end” of the market with the best intentions…as I myself am a member of that lower-end; The upstarts who want to utilize drone technology to create, measure, and survey from an aerial perspective. DJI was not just the brand of choice because its technology and capabilities were unrivaled, it was the brand of choice because it was accessible to nearly anyone with just a few pennies to rub together. The ability to start a business and create revenue streams with a very low initial investment opened up opportunities for many thousands of people in the United States.
Looking at “equivalents” to DJI platforms (and I use that term very loosely because none of you have been able to really create an equivalent product to anything DJI has to offer), the prices are 400% or more than that of a DJI drone. You can throw examples like Anzu Robotics out there, but the fact is they’re still more expensive than their DJI-counterparts by a noticeable margin and they also lack the flexibility to provide universal utility for multimedia applications. You might then point to the ACSL Soten, but while that platform has interchangeable payloads that cover a wide variety of use case scenarios, it is 4-times more expensive than the Mavic platform.
And these two examples are arguably doing better in the pricing column than nearly anyone else in the game not named DJI or Autel.
That’s not to say that I am anti-Anzu Robotics and/or ACSL, in fact I am pulling for them both to be major players for the industry in the years to come. I am simply demonstrating that the issue surrounding pricing is going to be perhaps the most serious as we move into a DJI-less future in the United States. Do better to bring your pricing down and fast. You don’t have the luxury of developing the technology for 5 years and refining your manufacturing process in-step. You need to take the necessary steps to make the technology more readily accessible to a wider base of pilots and fast. Otherwise the industry will flounder and die without people having the ability to easily and readily purchase a drone and grow interest in the technology.
Push for government subsidization of your companies
On the note of decreasing prices and developing your manufacturing processes, it’s crucial that you put pressure on the same government that assisted in removing DJI from the American market to now step-up and provide the subsidies you need to truly scale your companies. At this point, we no longer want to hear that “American ingenuity will get us there,” because that was thrown out the door the minute the legislation passed to oust DJI. No, now you need to accept that you cannot do this on capitalism alone (because you have shown you can’t) and you need to pressure the government to grant you funding to build out your manufacturing and research & development processes.
DJI is not a self-made company by any stretch of the imagination. In DJI’s early years, the Chinese government provided it with an astronomical amount of subsidies that assisted in scaling DJI’s manufacturing abilities, filling shipping containers, and distributing them to the company’s markets of interest. If not for those subsidies, it’s hard to say where DJI would be, but it would almost certainly not be as firmly atop the food chain as it is today.
It’s time to get serious about what needs to happen. While I am sure your companies are chock-full of highly-skilled and capable people, you need to face the facts — even with DJI gone, you cannot fill the void without an incredible amount of financial help. That has to come from the government because you lack the array of products necessary to capture all of the revenue needed to scale on your own.
Finally, embrace your new responsibility as the driving force of the American drone industry…
With DJI gone, the rest of you are now responsible for taking up the mantel of the driving force in the development and expansion of the American drone industry. It is up to you to not only grow your businesses, but ensure that the industry itself also grows with them. To ensure this happens and that the interest in the drone industry does not wither away, you need to ensure the technology is accessible to not just your big-ticket military and enterprise clients, but also the people on the lowest rungs of the industry.
The banishment of DJI leads to tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people in a very difficult position. We invested in the technology that struck the best balance of effectiveness and budget-friendliness and now that option is off the table for long-term use. So, where do we turn? Some of us will learn to build drones if we happen to be savvy enough from a technical standpoint. Others will have the money to upgrade to a more expensive (but perhaps less effective) platform. However a large majority of us will run our existing DJI systems until they die and then likely either source parts for the platforms for as long as we feasibly can or leave the industry entirely.
It is up to you all to accommodate the needs of every type of drone user in the country now. Our interest, despite being invested in DJI’s technology, is what drew eyes to the industry and opened the door for your companies to begin doing business. Our experience is what allows us draw conclusions and provide feedback on the technology we use and what gives your companies the direction they need to innovate and create solutions that work and are wanted. We may not be the big-ticket sales you want, but without us this journey is abundantly more difficult for you to make. We understand you cannot develop a Mavic overnight, but it’d be foolish of you to not be working towards a platform that provides the same balance of performance and price so we may continue to develop our own small businesses and provide you the data (ironically) that is crucial for scaling your companies.
Wrapping things up…
No matter if the DJI bans are warranted or not or if you support them or not, the fact remains their absence in the industry is going to send a negative shockwave through the market. People will lose their livelihoods and the trajectory of the American drone industry will be left in a critical state. If any one of you was achieving overall equivalency to DJI with any of your platforms, I’d sleep more soundly at night; but the fact is you all have had 10 years to catch up and the best we have been able to do is create technology that is half as good for more than four-times the price.
We have to strive for better than that and it only happens if you accept that a DJI-less America means you hold all of the responsibility for the entirety of the market. Personally, I don’t think any of you are ready for that. I’ve been wrong before though and I hope I am wrong this time, but something tells me I’m not.
Prove me wrong. Make me eat crow. Leave the egg on my face. Just don’t let it be the other way around…please, for all that is good and just.
Sincerely,
Chris “The Drone Geek” Fravel
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