John Mark Goeke
Move 3:
Story Development
Research
According to research from this summer, a product has to be able to answer certain questions (as determined from analysis of the success and failures of other products). These questions, along with my attempts to answer them, are summarized below:
Is it something that the casual observer would find interesting?
The belt is cheap, and the material is unique enough to catch the eye of a casual observer. The observer would find it interesting how light the belts are, and hopefully the large possibility for customization would intrigue them as well.
What makes the product, service or offering unique or different?
The main points to be used to describes the uniqueness of this product is that it is affordable, light, and customizable. From all of my research, there has been no other product like this on the market.
What value does the venture offer end consumers?
It opens up a new way for people to express themselves. People can print any design they want to wear, or just draw on their belt, something which has never been done before. There are definitely people would would place value in this fact.
What audience do you think this project was intended for?
While ideally this product would be appropriate for people of all ages, it seems that the main consumer base would be people under 25.
How big a target market do you think exists for it?
1,240,000,000. That is the number of jeans sold worldwide annually. 96%. This represents the percent of U.S. consumers who own a pair of jeans. This is just some factoids about jeans, but whether someone wears shorts, khakis, jeans, or some other clothing with belt loops built in, odds are that they need a belt to accompany that clothing. The market that exists for a fresh take on the belt is large. Just looking at other belt projects funded on kickstarters, the amount of interest they received in their concepts is emboldening. Trakline Express Belt - 7,232 backers for a total of $591,860. Magbelt - 9,707 backers for a total of $583,544. Carbon6 - 3,702 backers for a total of $319,060. The list goes on, and it demonstrates the point I am trying to make: people don’t always settle for their boring, old belt- they want something new and fresh that offers them something that their traditional belt doesn’t.
If you had to summarize the project in 20 seconds, how would you do so?
A simple, affordable belt with innumerable design possibilities, this belt allows anybody to proudly display their interests, art, or anything else that can be printed on a canvas formerly dominated by one boring color.
Good Examples
Reading Rainbow
An Hour of Code
TrapTap
Many are probably familiar with Reading Rainbow, an American children’s TV series that aired on PBS for more than 20 years and starred the Star-Trek actor LeVar Burton. After the show’s eventual cancellation in 2006, Burton came back in 2014 with a Kickstarter campaigns to make Reading Rainbow material available on practically every medium. With a great story of how it could help disadvantaged classrooms and help children learn to read at higher levels, the campaign met its goal in a mere 11 hours, going on to raise $5,408,916 from 105,857 backers.
Aiming to raise $5 million in order to bring 1 hour of coding classes to more than 100 million students worldwide, Hour of Code sought to address the problem of lack of instruction in computer science that is still prevalent throughout classrooms. Fortunately, it just reached this goal as a result of its great story of helping children everywhere learn computer science, raising $5,024,241 from 2885 backers. At Prairie, we participated in “An Hour of Code” this year, taking mini lessons through code.org. Speaking personally, I hope to continue my interest in computer science into a college minor.
People are unified by mutual dislikes for things that happen in life. One of these things is, of course, speeding tickets. Attempting to play on the huge market of people who don’t want to get speeding tickets (everyone), TrapTap is a simple device that blinks to alert people of speed traps and red light cameras. While it is a simple product that relies on a large user base to report “hazards”, TrapTap still offers a compelling argument for why $180 MSRP is worth it to avoid speeding tickets that average $120-263 per ticket. The campaign has not yet closed as of 5/1/16, but at the time of writing is already of $150,000.
Three crowdfunding project examples with particularly strong stories are:
21st Century Bible
Potato Salad
Hashkey
Bad Examples
Quite literally an example of an awful story, this project aimed to translate the bible into “modern english”, and apparently required $5,000 to do so. It didn’t get that close due to the general stupidity of the project and lack of an audience for it, causing the project to end funding with only $2. An excerpt from Genesis, which was provided as a sample on the campaign, is provided in the “pictures” column to the left, since this campaign had no graphic either.
“Basically I’m just making potato salad. I haven’t decided what kind yet.” This statement was all that there was to the story of the aptly named “Potato Salad” crowdfunding campaign, which raised $55,492 from 6,911 backers, far surpassing its original goal of $10. Yes, this campaign was successful, but there was no reason that it should have been, because its entire purpose was for some random person to make potato salad for himself.
Regardless of if the prototype actually worked, the story/idea behind “Hashkey’ is a very pointless one indeed. The world’s first one-key USB keyboard, dedicated solely to the hashtag, this product was incredibly pointless and did not reach its goal of 15,000 euros. This product just serves as a cruel reminder of what the pound sign has evolved into.
Three crowdfunding project examples with particularly weak story developement are:
Application
My own completion of this step is included along with my research in the first section of this move. While I did say that I wanted to test the product and get the opinions of others in this move as well, I wanted the belt to remain relatively unknown until my presentation to make it more interesting, so I am avoiding any surveys (though interest can be expressed in the product through this page's footer). If I was actually launching the product, I would place high value in focus groups, so that I could see what people liked or disliked about the product. In regards to testing it, this was included in Move 2, since I left the belt in water and also massed it in comparison to the masses of other friction belts made from different materials.
Summary
Seeing that there is a large market for my product and that I have certain angles to utilize in pitching my product, I believe my product avoids the pitfalls of the campaigns that I featured as being bad examples. My belt is lighter and more waterproof than other comparable belts, and customization of it works very well. Now, however, would be where I would need to consider the logistics of a crowdfunding campaign for this product.
