Dave Brown is the founder and CEO of South Kingstown-based Droners LLC, a website that connects professional drone pilots with clients seeking aerial photography or videography services for weddings, social events, construction or real estate surveying, and more.
Brown spoke with Providence Business News about his company’s growth since its launch in 2015 and his plans for the future.
PBN: How do clients benefit from using Droners to find an aerial drone photographer, rather than searching for one on their own?
BROWN: All of the pilots on our site are vetted to ensure that they are licensed and are able to legally operate a drone commercially. This not only helps ensure the safety of the client, bystanders and property, but also ensures the client isn’t skirting the law, potentially leading to the client being fined by the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration].
With our U.S. network approaching 10,000 pilots, our platform makes it very easy for the client to quickly find the best talent at the best price suitable for their needs and budget. We also publicly display the amount of insurance a pilot carries, which is always a good thing to check for when hiring a drone pilot.
PBN: What kinds of services do your pilots offer? Do clients tend to be private individuals, or does Droners appeal to businesses and corporate clients as well?
BROWN: We currently service both consumer and enterprise verticals. Our most-popular services are real estate, events/weddings, cinematography and construction. We also provide hyperspectral imaging for agriculture to detect the health of crops, roof inspections using thermal imaging if needed, infrastructure and utility-company inspections for power lines, windmills and solar farms – almost anything you can imagine really. To better handle large-volume jobs, though, we plan on launching a new product focused specifically on enterprise clients very soon.
PBN: How have FAA regulations for commercial drones changed since Droners launched in 2015? Have those changes affected your business?
BROWN: When we launched in August 2015, our pilots had to have a private (manned) pilot’s license to adhere to the requirements of the FAA’s 333 Exemption (the “drone license” at the time). As you could imagine, this was very difficult and expensive for pilots to obtain, with only a few thousand pilots in the entire country having it. In September 2016, the FAA released the Remote Pilot License (also called Part 107), which replaced the manned-aircraft license with a written exam instead, more geared toward operating a drone and much more attainable. Since the rollout, tens of thousands of pilots have become licensed, rapidly fueling growth in the commercial-drone industry.
PBN: What should someone expect to pay when hiring a drone pilot?
BROWN: For typical photography/videography services, rates are usually between $100-$150/hour. If you’re a real estate agent and needing some external shots of a property, for example, you should expect to pay between $150-$300, usually for unedited footage. If you’re needing a higher-end cinematography rig, prices usually start at around $200-$300/hour.
PBN: What’s next for Droners as a company? Do you have any plans to expand outside the U.S.?
BROWN: We are currently working on a rollout into the U.K., Canada and Australia in September. We’ll be following up with a few other countries (to be determined) shortly afterwards. We’ll then begin working on our enterprise product so that we can better handle large-scale clients – for example, insurance companies in Texas that need thousands of aerial inspections in a short period of time after Hurricane Harvey.
Kaylen Auer is a PBN contributing writer.
