John Winebrenner

Date: September 8, 2014

Name: Internet Masterminds – Our Road to a $100K + Kickstarter Campaign

Presenter: John Winebrenner

Internet Masterminds is a networking group that helps business owners to connect with other business owners. The purpose of this presentation is to share business owners that growing profile and showing the world that good design can be found in Vancouver. John Winebrenner, the founder of Hurdler Studios, will share his success experience in his product of “Clug” by using Kickstarter campaign to achieve his $100K financial goal.

Clug is the world smallest bike rack. The designer of this invention is John Winebrenner. In his Kickstarter video, he uses the time-lapse technique to capture the detail of day to day in minutes and market the work in progress in his video production.

Design in Vancouver BC

Based on research, Vancouver is considered the number 9 in top 20 startup ecosystem. The list is measured by startup output, funding, performance, entrepreneurial mindset, trendsetting, support, talent and differentiation. Currently, there is no design firm in Vancouver. Therefore, Winebrenner believes in order to raise awareness in Vancouver, he needs to put design first in Kickstarter.

Designing the Campaign and the importance of video

Winebrenner uses his video on Kickstarter to show the process of phases. He captures the audience with free stuff. He also integrates 3D printing in Kickstarter to provide prototypes to engage audience. Lastly he provides email and website information for audience to reach him. Winebrenner emphasizes his video is only under 2 minute max. He captures audience attention in the first 15 second with his primary message. Moreover, Winebrenner suggests videos should present personality.

The Truth Kickstarter Myths & Realities

Winebrenner emphasizes that Kickstarter campaign is not used for raising money for equity. The campaign should be reward based. Owners should treat Kickstarter as a marketing tool. Kickstarter acts as a market engine, and it can compete with others. It is important for owners to understand that Kickstarter focuses on the startup phase only.

Rewards for audience using Kickstarter

Winebrenner suggests all owners to think over the reward process carefully before launch in Kickstarter. It is important to lay out the procedure and outline what will potentially happen when reward strategy is executed. Winebrenner learns that reward system can create massive work which can derive the primary objective in the project.

Key to Success

In Kickstarter, audience can sense the personality of the business in the video. It is important to show fun and passion in the video. Winebrenner suggests for owners to figure out the story behind the project. Public Relation is relatively important. It creates personal connection. Good public relation will drive the product to their target audience. Winebrenner wants all owners to know every creative campaign starts ugly. It needs to go through many phases of failure and redesign.

“The fail ones stop at the first stage of success. It is important to design into your story”

How Kickstarter works?

Kickstarter is to present a business idea on the website. Business owners will load up the video, describe the idea, and ask any potential investors to donate. Kickstarter is a platform to give people the money to convert idea to reality. The concept behind Kickstarter is gift concept, not sales.

Kickstarter will not market the community for business owners and it will not push ideas for business owners to community. Kickstarter builds up with the importance of “trust” element. Owners will set up an initial goal before release the campaign. If owners cannot reach the goal, all funding will go back to funders.

Kickstarter has a huge value of creating customer base. It can be used to market the new product line. The exposure of client information will only show until the campaign is successfully complete.

Winebrenner suggests all business owners to have fun and enjoy the Kickstarter campaign. As long as the message is align with the message in owners’ story, audience will support it.