Limpet has sold around 15 units. By Demo Day on November 17, its founders want 100.
Outside the University of the Arts London’s (UAL) Elephant and Castle campus (London College of Communication or LCC) on a grey November Friday afternoon, a young man is stopping students with a string of questions.
Do you have an iPhone? A MacBook? Do you ever run out of storage? Do you pay for more? He then turns his phone over. Clipped to the back is a small metal block. Its name is Limpet. Its founders, Jsun Barry and Elliot Strebel, need 100 people to buy one in the next 10 days.
Jsun has sold around 15 Limpets so far. He wants that number to reach 100 by November 17, when he and co-founder Elliot present in Helsinki, during Slush week at the FR8 Cohort 2.f Demo Day in front of investors, founders, and multinational technology companies.
Until then, he is working hard to meet the target number, going from university to university across London, pitching the product to strangers one at a time.
So, what exactly is Limpet?
Limpet is a storage device that snaps onto your laptop. It docks magnetically to the back of a MacBook screen, with a flat USB-C cable that follows through the hinge of your laptop.
It is fully offline: no internet, no cloud, and no subscription. While it may feel similar to a USB stick, the point the founders make is that it shouldn’t feel like another gadget.
“Rather than having a conventional external drive dangling off your laptop, it feels much closer to an internal storage upgrade,” Jsun says.
A companion app handles the fiddly bits like ejecting your Limpet when you close your laptop, one-click photo transfers and keeping track of where files are stored.
An idea born in a classroom
Jsun and Elliot have been best friends since Reception. Both went on to study product design up until ‘A’ levels, then went their separate ways for university, with Jsun studying Geography with Business at the University of Nottingham and later working as a sales executive for Taiwanese electronics company Waferlock.
Elliot went on to study at Brunel and then UAL at Central Saint Martins (CSM), studying Industrial and Product Design before later dropping out.
Now Elliot is Limpet’s founder and product designer. Jsun is co-founder and commercial lead, handling the brand, marketing, partnerships and finding customers.
They are both currently participating in the FR8 incubator programme in Helsinki, Finland, which describes itself as a ‘hacker hotel’ where technical builders under 30 live and work for free to launch deep tech companies.
Andy Law, a senior lecturer on CSM’s industrial and product design course, who previously taught at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), taught Elliot. He describes him as “very focused, he’s very single minded, and he always knew what he wanted to do.” Students like that are rare, he says: “maybe once every few years.”
The idea for Limpet started in the classroom. Elliot was on UAL’s Apple Development Diploma, a one-year sandwich programme open to all UAL undergraduate students between their second and third year, allowing creatives from any background to learn iOS app building, Swift and spatial design completely from scratch with a focus on building for the Apple Vision Pro.
His final project there used augmented reality with custom hardware and even a hidden camera. “The Apple employees were excited to see it and even invited others to see it too,” says Joel Gethen Lewis, who leads the diploma at UAL’s Creative Computing Institute (CCI).
The problem is that building for the Vision Pro demands significant amounts of storage. Apple’s coding software, Xcode, requires more than 50 gigabytes of space just to install its 3D simulator.
Storage, Joel says, is “a wider challenge for industry and consumers.” But buying more storage doesn’t really fix the issue. “You ended up with another device, more cables and more files to manage,” Jsun says. So, they set out to make extra storage feel like it was already a part of the laptop.
Elliot returned to his home course in industrial and product design at CSM after completing the diploma and developed the idea further, setting it as his self-written final-year brief.
Physical in a digital world
Limpet is going against the grain. It is a physical piece of hardware that operates fully offline and is asking for a single upfront cost.
Most of us now pay for monthly storage subscriptions, and Apple users usually pay for iCloud+, which, apart from additional cloud storage, does have other benefits such as Private Relay, Hide My Email, HomeKit Secure Video.
Limpet asks you to pay once. The starting price for Limpet Lite (until November 17) is £99, which appears to be a protest against today’s subscription culture.
“Increasingly you don’t really own the things you’re paying for,” Jsun says. However, they insist that they’re not anti-cloud and that it is useful for syncing and collaborating, but it shouldn’t be the only solution for those working with large files and demanding applications.
Andy, who has been supporting the pair, sees the appeal of physical storage. “It’s very convenient to have things in the cloud, but it’s also very worrying,” he says, in case one day “it’ll break or disappear.”
Not everyone is sure they need one. Kaleriia, a journalism student at LCC, already pays for extra cloud storage and worries she’d forget to carry a separate drive around. Still, she’d “give it a try,” and thinks photographers and film students working with huge files would find it “a really nice idea.”
There are signs people want physical things again. Driven heavily by Millennials and Gen Z, we are seeing a massive resurgence of physical media such as vinyl records, CDs and Blu-Ray.
According to the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), “Physical music revenue increased for a third consecutive year, led by a 19.9% lift in vinyl sales”, highlighting the increased demand.
Alongside the huge revival of physical media, the demand for analogue hardware and devices is also growing. These surging demands seem to be driven by ‘digital fatigue’: the mental and physical exhaustion caused by screen time, endless notifications and the pressures of an always-on digital world.
There is also ‘subscription fatigue’ as services continue to expand into every industry; many consumers are struggling to combine the financial burdens of managing the costs of multiple subscriptions.
For Jsun it’s “less about returning to older technology and more about taking the useful parts of physical ownership and making them feel modern.”
There is also the security argument too. Over October and November there has been a wave of cyber-attacks on supermarket fridges across Europe with France in particular being heavily hit, with reports indicating more than 700 supermarkets and independent grocery stores having their stock destroyed. Blood banks in France were also targeted.
Andy agrees that “being offline is not a bad idea.” Keeping files off third-party servers reduces some of those risks, Jsun says, though he admits physical drives “aren’t immune to theft, loss or malware either.” Limpet isn’t encrypted yet, though Jsun says that’s in the works.
Why 100?
Hardware is difficult. Unlike an app, Limpet needs factories, components, tooling and shipping. The founders have already travelled to Shenzhen and Guangzhou to work through manufacturing problems, especially around their custom cable and electronics.
For a hardware product, Andy finds the target unusual. “To make 100 is actually really difficult,” he says. “By the time you’ve made 100, you may as well make 1,000.”
Most products need expensive tooling before a single one is made, often thousands for an injection-moulded part. He thinks the idea of a first 100 “must come from software” where making more costs next to nothing.
Limpet, though, is an exception: its casing is CNC-milled from aluminium, and its circuit boards can be ordered one at a time, so there’s no expensive tooling to pay for.
In their case, Andy says, 100 makes sense. He calls Limpet “a classic disruptive product”: not new technology but smaller, simpler and cheaper, in the sense of Clayton Christensen’s theory on disruptive innovation.
However, for the founders, the number matters. FR8 says its Demo Day will draw in backers from some of the world’s largest venture capital firms, including a16z and Accel, as well as big tech companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic, the companies behind ChatGPT and Claude.
“Building something technically impressive isn’t enough,” Jsun says. Investors want proof that people will pay. So, every one of those 100 orders will be hand-delivered and set up by the founders themselves.
Missing the target wouldn’t end Limpet. But they’d go into Demo Day with less traction, and Jsun says it would put their chance to present at risk.
Whether Limpet reaches 100 or not, it says something about what it takes now to build a product. A few years ago, two friends with a prototype and a laptop full of files would have struggled to get a piece of hardware made at all.
Now, as Andy puts it, what Elliot and Jsun are attempting to do “would have probably been impossible” five years ago, “but now it’s … doable.”
The harder task is getting people to care. In a world where we’ve grown used to juggling multiple subscriptions and the convenience of having everything all at once accessible from anywhere backed up on the cloud, Limpet is asking people to pay once upfront for something they can hold in their hands and see on the back of their laptops.
By the end of that Friday, Jsun has taken the Tube across London to King’s Cross, to CSM, where Elliot had previously studied.
He is following the same routine. Do you have an iPhone? A MacBook? Do you ever run out of storage?
He started the day on 10 sales. He finished it on 15 and has 85 more to sell. He’ll keep at it until November 17.