Beating the Competition with 360° Video Eyewear – AOTK169

Roy:

This episode of Art of the Kickstart is sponsored by BackerKit. BackerKit makes software that crowdfunding project creators use to survey backers, organize data and manage orders for fulfillment by automating your operations, and helping you print and ship faster. Plus, if you want to create and send surveys, offer add-ons and pledge upgrades or begin excepting pre-orders, BackerKit makes it simple. Over 2,000 projects and four million backers have used BackerKit, including many of the projects featured on Art of the Kickstart. Ready to try BackerKit? Visit backerkit.com and sign up today.

Welcome to Art of the Kickstart. Your source for crowdfunding campaign success. I’m your host, Roy Morejon, president of Command Partners. The top full service crowdfunding marketing agency in the world. We have helped raise over 70 million dollars for our clients, since 2010. Each week I’ll interview a crowdfunding success story, an inspirational entrepreneur, or a business expert in order to help take your startup to the next level with crowdfunding. Art of the Kickstart is honored to be sponsored by the Gadget Flow, a product discovery platform, that helps you discover, save, and buy awesome products. The Gadget Flow is the ultimate buyers guide for cool luxury gadgets, and creative gifts. To learn more visit the gadgetflow.com.

Let’s get on with the show. Welcome to another edition of Art of the Kickstart. Today, I am joined by Iskander with ORBI Prime. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Iskander:

Thanks for having us Roy.

Roy:

All right. ORBI Prime, this is the first 360 video recording eyewear. Please, tell us where it all began.

Iskander:

That’s correct. We’re developing the worlds first 360 video recording eyewear. That the majority began a little over a year ago when my co-owners and I have been exploring the GoPro area. The action camera market as well as the versions of the VR industry. What we discovered back then was that there is a certain group of GoPro users, frustrated GoPro users who love to use action cameras, but had extraneous issues with all the extra mounts, all the extra steps they had to take just to get a short three to five minute video on their GoPro. At the same time, there wasn’t instructional for 360 videos on Facebook, I believe it was in September or something, 15 when Facebook introduced the ability to view 360 videos on Facebook.

We realized though, that at that time and that until today, there are not many 360 videos being recorded by regular consumers. The majority of those 360 videos have either produced or recorded by professional studies using professional rigs, and the majority of the consumer version of 360 cameras were not there yet. There was not enough 360 video content. All these issues combined, have got us to pretty much an epiphany that there’s got to be a way for a regular consumer to be able to record some of the most special moments of their ventures in an easy and fun way. That wouldn’t require extra steps. That’s when we realized that our engineering capabilities, our partnerships, and all the work that we’ve done in the past will let us develop this worlds first 360 video recording eyewear. It’s built on three simple pillars, effortless recording, effortless mobile video stitching, and effortless sharing.

Roy:

Yeah. You’ve built a truly impressive product, as you mentioned, not only does it stitch and edit all of the photo and the video together, but also inside of these glasses, basically, allows you to share it with your networks, and good builtin wifi into them. I’m very impressed with the overall 90 minutes of recording time, that’s very impressive to be able to pack all of that into a recording eyewear piece. How were you able to do that and engineer it?

Iskander:

Yeah. Trying to pack four [inaudible 00:04:59] cameras into the eyewear frame was not easy at all. One of the products that our investor, our current investor has invested in is within the battery storage ecosystem. They have a new and innovative way of being able to create a battery that’s small enough, that recharges almost in 10 minutes, but has a pretty impressive capacity. That product is currently being tested by a partner of ours, I believe they’re going to be introducing it to the market early next year, and we were able to partner with them before they got into the market. That gave us an opportunity to let our users record their adventures for an extended period of time. Not even [inaudible 00:06:03] recording is plenty of time, whether you are hiking, whether mountain climbing, or just enjoying the walk, somewhere downtown Lisbon, Portugal, for example.

In terms of other issues, challenges that we had to face in order to pack all of the electronics into such a small [inaudible 00:06:31]. We had to experiment and tackle some of the issues such as heat dissipation, we’re working with a great partner of ours it’s an anomaly, it’s called Anomaly and they were able to provide us with some impressive ways to dissipate [inaudible 00:06:55] from both the battery as well as the video chips, we focused at that particular time, for a very extended period of time to be able to provide a product that is safe, and durable.

Roy:

Yeah. Looks like you’ve truly done that. I’ve got to mention, your crowdfunding campaign video is probably one of the most impressive ones that we’ve seen. What went into the overall vision of capturing all of that and the different use cases for it? Where was all of that shot? Talk about that.

Iskander:

Yeah. In terms of the video, as you mentioned, we really wanted to make sure it’s as inspiring as it could get for us, the target group, the niche, was the active sport enthusiasts, those are the ones who are willing to try new products that help them capture their wildest ventures and those are the people that we believe can become fast for our product, we want to make sure we satisfy their needs first. We wanted to make sure they love it, and at the same time we tried to direct that the entire video clip, so that it touches up on some of the most exciting types of sports, but at the same time, it touches up on the sports that require the ability to record hands free.

All that footage was recorded in my, very close to my hometown, to my original hometown in Almaty, Kazakhstan where I was born, raised. It’s a beautiful piece of land full of various natural zones whether its mountain range, it’s full of mountain ranges [inaudible 00:08:58] tells varies types of [inaudible 00:09:05], it’s a unique place on its own and we wanted to make sure that while addressing some of the most high impact types of sports at the same time we wanted to show the beauty, and the nature of our hometown.

Roy:

Yeah. You certainly captured it. It was absolutely breathtaking. Again, we’ll make sure we share a link with that on Art of the Kickstart, when we post this podcast. Truly breathtaking. When you guys were deciding to build this company, and build this product, what made you want to launch using a crowdfunding platform? What was the process there?

Iskander:

For us, it was very important to get our product into the minds of potential customers as early as possible. To get as much feedback that we could get while we still had time to iterate the product, because it is essential for a company to provide the best product possible, even with the version one, because we have a vision for the version two, an the version three, but in order to get there we wanted to get the first product as perfect as possible, and Indiegogo campaign for us was a, in a way a marketing effort, at the same time was a user testing effort. We were looking to collect all the feedback we could get all the objective, constructive feedback that we could use and see what we could implement around those most crucial for our users where it resonated the most at the same time. It was a great testing ground for us.

Roy:

I certainly agree. How have you guys gone about balancing the production of the product itself all while managing the crowdfunding campaign at the same time?

Iskander:

Thankfully, we have an experienced team of mostly engineers, as well as the operational team, but we have a solid plan in place according to which we’ll proceed everyday with every week, most of the teams what works simultaneously and for the production part we have an allocated group that we work with, that consults us, the entire team, the entire company team consists of veterans in software engineering, product development, imaging industry. We have a pretty wide variety of expertise, at the same time everyone is in love with the product, every part, every member of our team is putting 200%, pretty much 200% of their time to get the product to the market as soon as possible. To our backers first, and then to mass market. Long story, short, we have a great team solid plan in place, and everybody works simultaneously at achieving certain milestones, and at the same time understand that to get everything as soon as possible, it’s incredibly challenging and difficult. So far we been able to manage all the challenges and proceed with as much product as we could achieve.

Roy:

Absolutely. I know our team has had a pleasure of working with you, on the advertising side of the campaign, and making sure that we’re getting as much exposure for it as possible, now that we’ve reached almost a quarter of a million dollars for the campaign.

Iskander:

Absolutely. We are thrilled to work with Command Partners. To all those listening, Command Partners is a great agency with a personal touch. The representatives of Command Partners listened to our feedback, try to get a rate, and provide with results as soon as possible, on a daily basis. Communication is a amazing. I appreciate Command Partners to agree to work with us, and helping us promote our product. Thanks, Roy.

Roy:

Absolutely. It’s been our pleasure. Given that this is your first crowdfunding campaign what’s been the biggest surprise so far, for you?

Iskander:

That’s a great question. There’s been plenty of surprises for us, but it will take some time for me to pick the most impressive one, but I would say the pre-campaign work should take at least two and a half months, instead of, which in our case it was only two and a half, three weeks, I would really suggest collecting emails, and subscribers to website, to landing page as soon as two and a half, three months before launch of the campaign, because the bulk of the backers were first day come through the subscribers that you’ve collected prior to the launch, and the second most surprising thing would be the amount of response that we got, the positive response that we got was heartwarming.

It gave us enough energy to keep going, and keep pushing, trying to get as many eyeballs on our campaign as possible, we surprisingly, the whole team surprisingly was able to pretty much not sleep for a month and a half of the campaign, and that’s very impressive, no one got sick, everyone was still energized and thanks to your help, as well, you guys Command Partners, and thank you to all of our backers with support, to supply great comments inspires us to deliver on our plans as much as possible right on, to be on time, and to delight you with the extraordinary quality and value that we plan on delivering.

Roy:

Absolutely. This gets us into our launch round where I rapid fire a couple questions at you, are you good to go?

Iskander:

Sure.

Roy:

What inspired you to be an entrepreneur?

Iskander:

That’s a great question. Simply trying to add just a little more value to the [inaudible 00:16:40] system.

Roy:

Excellent. If you could meet any other entrepreneur throughout history who would it be?

Iskander:

I don’t want it to sound like a cliché, but I’d really want to meet Elon Musk. I believe he has done a incredible job over the past two decades, and it’s exciting to see what comes next.

Roy:

How do you think you Elon could accelerate ORBI Prime?

Iskander:

That’s a great one. I believe he would push for our third version of our product as soon as possible, because the third version of our product is even more exciting. It caps a broader audiences and it can, it goes beyond just hardware. I believe Elon Musk would push towards the third version, even before the second version of our product.

Roy:

I’m sure. What’s your favorite business book, or life book you would recommend to our audience

Iskander:

There’s one from Guy Kawasaki it’s, I don’t remember the exact title, but it’s about rules on out competing your competition. It’s like hard and rigid rules.

Roy:

Definitely. Yeah.

Iskander:

To out compete anyone.

Roy:

Got it. Yeah. That was a good read there with Guy.

Iskander:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Roy:

Last question on the rapid fire round, what does the future of crowdfunding look like?

Iskander:

One of the things for crowdfunding I believe would help the industry even more is the most likely the equity crowdfunding. I noticed that Indiegogo has launched it, already, I haven’t explored much about it, but I believe that now, after six years, since the time that crowdfunding has, the crowdfunding industry has began, I believe now is the time when we have all the backers in the US, in Europe, and other parts of the world who believe in building and bringing new products to market I believe it’s time to provide them with an opportunity to have a share in the equity, in the companies they back.

Roy:

Excellent. Yeah. No. We’re really looking forward to migrating campaigns like yours from an award campaign over to a equity crowdfunding campaign where these first customers are going to be our biggest brand of evangelists …

Iskander:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Roy:

Where they can now potentially own the part of the company, as well as own part of the product. It’s going to be certainly unique going forward. Iskander, you’ve been awesome on the podcast. Please give our audience your pitch. Tell us what your all about, and where people should go, and why they should go by an ORBI Prime.

Iskander:

Hey, everyone, again. This ORBI Prime one of the worlds first 360 video recording eyewear. We’ll let you effortlessly record, video stitch, and share the most amazing moments of your adventures, instantly. Please find us on Indiegogo where [inaudible 00:19:54] to life, but you can also find us on orbiprime.com.

Roy:

Iskander, thank you, so much, for being here. Audience, thank you, again for tuning in. Of course make sure to visit artkick.wpengine.com for all of the show notes, a full transcript, links to everything we talked about, including the campaign link, plus, links to BackerKit, and coupon code to the Gadget Flow. Iskander, thank you, so much, for being here.

Iskander:

Thank you, Roy.

Roy:

Thanks, for tuning into another episode of Art of the Kickstart. The show about building a better business, world, and life with crowdfunding. If you’ve enjoyed today’s episode, be sure to visit artkick.wpengine.com and tell us about it. There you’ll find additional information about past episodes and our kick starter guide to crushing it. If you’ve loved this episode, leave us a review at artkick.wpengine.com/iTunes. It helps more inventors and entrepreneurs find the show. It helps us get better guests on here to help build your business. If you need a more hands on crowdfunding strategy please feel free to request a quote on commandpartners.com. Thanks, again, for tuning in. We’ll see you soon.