How to collect a million on Kickstarter?

Today, we present an interview with the founder of Omate, Laurent Le Pen, who became famous as the creator of the cool Truesmart smart watch. They have everything from the camera to the SIM card. How did the guys from Omate manage to raise so much money to implement their ideas?

Laurent, we are grateful that you joined us in Career Hack . First, tell us a little about your Omate company.

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This is thanks to you. I am pleased to tell you what we do in Omate. So, I founded the company on the first of July 2013 - yes, we are still a young startup. Our production facilities are located in Hong Kong and Shenzhen , known as the China Silicon Valley.
Omate is a leading hardware and software design company that develops wearable telecommunications products and services, thanks to which you can keep in touch with the electronic world around you from your wrist.

The company's flagship product is TrueSmart , the development of which was funded by Kickstarter. Our crowdfunding campaign became the fifth among the most popular in the design category of the site in September 2013.

TrueSmart is the world's first waterproof "smart watch 2.0" running the Android OS. With their release, new standards in wearable electronics were set, they became the most advanced and stylish wearable gadget of this year, at least.
More than a watch, more than just a Bluetooth accessory, the Omate TrueSmart is a truly unique smart watch that can work independently of a smartphone. And, besides, this is the world's first "smart" watch of protection class IP67 running Android, for which
Omate developed the world's first software add-on designed specifically for wearable devices (Omate User Interface OUI 2.0), and all this splendor works on the basis of the MediaTek MT6572 chip, also Truesmart has a built-in 2G / 3G GSM modem, Bluetooth and WiFi modules, antenna built into the strap, and all this in a waterproof stainless steel case.

Omate managed to raise more than a million dollars on the Kickstarter crowdfunding platform. Tell us how it came out.

In fact, the Omate concept was presented a year ago at the well-known exhibition of the achievements of the mobile industry Mobile World Congress 2013 in Barcelona, ​​when I was still vice president of Umeox Mobile - the leading manufacturer of Android smartphones in China.

My vision of the problem lies in the fact that wearable devices in the form to which we are all used to, in most cases, serve as only Bluetooth-accessories. In my opinion, sooner or later they will completely go to the telecommunications industry. I convinced my former chief Jack Shao, the chief executive director and chairman of the board of directors of Umeox Mobile, to invest in my enterprise, and together we continued to work on several concepts of the Outdoor Mate project.

When we felt that the project was ready, we founded the company, which was later called Omate - in honor of my initial idea.
After that, I contacted my friend in the US, who in his startup for many years was engaged in consumer electronics and also planned to launch his own campaign on Kickstarter, but as a musical project. I asked if he was interested in running the TrueSmart project with us. We quickly signed a contract and began work on the marketing company Omate.

We received confirmation from Kickstarter on August 20th, 2013. That night I could not fall asleep, so I was excited about the upcoming presentation of the product on which we had been working for the last six months. We launched the TrueSmart campaign a day later, on August 21 at ten in the morning New York or ten in the evening Shenzhen time.
I invited our entire team to a bar-restaurant in Shenzhen with friends, and almost every thirty seconds we updated our Kickstarter page; The collected amount grew so quickly that after twelve hours our project was successfully financed. Initially, we planned to collect 100 thousand dollars in the first thirty days, but in the end we managed to complete it in twelve hours.



In order not to slow down, we made a few more statements about our future goals, which had to be invented almost on the move, since it was difficult to imagine such a success of the campaign. We improvised - and finished on September 20, 2013, with the result of more than a million dollars, having entered the elite club "millionaires" Kickstarter. It seemed to me that these were the most delightful and tedious thirty days in my life, because then I did not suspect that the next six months would be even more epic. It was just the beginning. Life after Kickstarter is, and it begins as soon as the last investor receives his package. We will forever be grateful to each of them, I will remember them to the end of life.

About Omate wrote resources around the world. How did you get noticed? How did you have to advertise a campaign outside the Kickstarter platform?

To begin with, TrueSmart is really an extraordinary project. Leading journalists whose interests are electronics and software products are well aware of this. Omate is a small telecommunications startup, but successfully competes with recognized giants, whose advertising budgets are numbered with nine zeros; we are like David, going against the Goliaths in the growing wearable electronics industry.

This also applies to analysts who have access to information from sources in corporations like ARM. All of them are well aware of the numbers of pre-orders coming to us and how we quickly became the leaders of the smart watch market.

How can ambitious entrepreneurs get the most out of crowdfunding platforms?

Crowdfunding is a fantastic tool for entrepreneurs who have a good idea, limited capital and a desire to conduct a global marketing campaign. But this is just a tool, because you have to work with the entire ecosystem of the platform at once to make it work. Kickstarter gives you the opportunity to work directly with the trendsetter community.

When it comes to Kickstarter, which is more important: product or strategy? What influences the decision of a potential investor?

Kickstarter is product centered, so to speak. Most investors pay attention to the long-term strategy and vision of the company, but all of them mostly just want to be among the first people in the world who get the product at a price significantly lower than the one they will appoint when it appears on store shelves. Their main motivation is to be among the first users, beta testers, to be at the origin of the history of industrial design and business.
Some investors give us incredible support, trying hard to help. To deserve the best developers of our Kickstarter community, we organize special hackathons. We call these guys VID (Very Important Developers or Very Important Developers).

In business, failure often becomes an indispensable stage on the road to success. Please tell us about the most serious obstacles encountered on your way, and how they prepared you for your subsequent success.

Oh, on the way we ran into a bunch of problems. Do not forget, Omate TrueSmart is a very difficult product to manufacture, it’s not just a Bluetooth or WiFi accessory. And in terms of mass production, it is even much more difficult than smartphones due to the peculiarities of the form factor and the assembly process.



We simultaneously worked with the design of watches, and with their telecommunications stuffing. It turned out to be quite difficult to combine these two areas in one product.
And, perhaps, the biggest problem was the distribution of shipments of devices. For the most part, this was due to unforeseen factors such as a new design or improvements to the device. Unlike Kickstarter, this process is openly covered on our website; this information is available to all of our investors who are waiting for their packages. At the same time, with the traditional production process, the product gets on the shelves of retail stores only after a few rounds of such improvements, the details of which remain, so to speak, behind the scenes, and remain secret to the community. It is for the same reasons that we see presentations of many new devices at the MWC in Barcelona, ​​knowing that they will not be available on the market until the summer. Product creation and production planning are still complex processes, because sometimes they take longer than originally expected.
In addition, I and my team members came from the mobile phone design industry, where most of us worked on the B2B model (business to business). Over the past few months, we had to learn a lot to become a real B2C company.

Who and what qualities in the staff were you looking for when you created your Omate team?

To begin with, I still continue to actively recruit the crew and look for new members for it, ready to join us aboard Omate.
Our motto: "Design is a way of thinking, not a department." Therefore, first of all, I would like to know what the candidates think about design and how they approach to solving problems. We are also looking for people who share our experience, creativity and optimism. And most importantly - we are looking for carriers of the spirit of entrepreneurship .
We need people who are ready to work quickly, learn from their own and others ’mistakes and repeat the path from concept to start-up, time after time, without losing sight of the established time-to-market for products that are decreasing faster in our growing industry.



We are eager to work with a huge community of developers supporting our project from the first days. We use this inexhaustible source of talent to select the best applications and developments, offering our customers a wider range of opportunities and developing the entire Omate ecosystem. This is a unique hiring experience for us. We recently concluded several deals with Android developers and now included these applications as standard for TrueSmart.