A Shape-Able Sunhat & How to Build a Product From the Ground Up – AOTK202

For this episode of Art of the Kickstart, we spoke with Damien Henning, creator of the Shape Flexer Sunhat. Give it a listen to learn more about how to successfully launch a product on Kickstarter without any previous experience or connections.

Shape Flexer: The world’s first shape-able sunhat

Key Crowdfunding Takeaways

  • How to get started when you are launching your first product
  • How to find manufacturers for your product
  • What it looks like to go to Asia and work with manufacturers
  • How to decide if Kickstarter is a good fit for your product
  • How to use your Facebook friends to help gather support for your Kickstarter campaign
  • How to maintain momentum during a 60-day Kickstarter campaign

Links

Connect with Shape Flexer Sunhat

Sponsors

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backerkitArt of the Kickstart is honored to be sponsored by BackerKit. BackerKit makes software that crowdfunding project creators use to survey backers, organize data, raise additional funds with add-ons and manage orders for fulfillment, saving creators hundreds of hours. To learn more and get started, click here.

Transcript

View this episode's transcript

Roy Morejon:

Welcome to Art of the Kickstart, your source for crowdfunding campaign success. I’m your host, Roy Morejon, president of Enventys Partners, the top full service turnkey product development and crowdfunding marketing agency in the world. We have helped startups raise over $100 million 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 you take your startup to the next level with crowdfunding.

Art of the Kickstart is honored to be sponsored by BackerKit and the Gadget Flow. 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. The Gadget Flow is a product discovery platform that helps you discover, save and buy awesome products. It is the ultimate buyer’s guide for luxury gadgets and creative gifts. Now let’s get on with the show

Welcome to another edition of Art of the Kickstart. Today I am joined with Damien Henning with Shapeshifter. Damien, thank you so much for joining us today.

Damien Henning:

Hey Roy, it’s my pleasure. Thanks a lot for having me.

Roy Morejon:

We just concluded our Kickstarter campaign working together on this one and Shapeshifter being the world’s first shapeable stiff brimmed sun hat. Please tell our audience where this idea started. What’s the back story here?

Damien Henning:

It goes back to my first time I bought a sun hat on one of my first trips abroad back in late 2001. I went to Australia and I was sick of globbing sunscreen on my face all the time and it was so hot and humid there that it would just sweat off the second you put it on. I thought I’m just going to try a sun hat and see how that works. When I bought it it looked great, it didn’t look great but it looked good, the brim looked nice and stiff, it looked like a fedora, I looked like Indiana Jones or Paul Hogan from “Crocodile Dundee.” I was like, “Alright, now I’m a proper Aussie bushman.”

Unfortunately after a little bit of time and surprisingly little time with humidity there and then I washed it a couple times by hand, the shape just started to turn to mush. The stitching was still fine, there was nothing really structurally wrong with the basis of the hat and it still basically protected me from the sun. I went from looking like Indiana Jones to looking like 1930s hobo talking about the crash around a campfire. I’m not a vain person but you don’t want to look like a complete dork when you’re out on the trail and hiking around. The fact that it was just so mushy too it never worked all that well in the wind. If it was ever windy it just blew all over the place.

Next time I went to … On my next trip abroad where I was doing a lot of hiking, or bush walking as they say in Australia, I was in northern India in 2006, in the Himalayas. Before I went on this one I remember how bad the first sun hat that I bought collapsed on me. I decided to just stitch in a regular piece of copper wire to a sun hat that I bought at an army surplus store. It worked pretty well, it worked for about six weeks. It held up against the wind, I was able to fold it up and put it in my bag, which is something I never could do with the other sun hat or most sun hats in general. I thought this is pretty great, but of course in six weeks you bend it in the same spot over and over, it broke.

I just kept slowly … It’s not like I decided in that moment, okay, I’m going to try to sell these, there’s going to be a huge market, boom. It just happened organically. With every trip I went on I improved the design a little bit, I made the wire a little stronger, made it a little bit more resilient [inaudible 00:03:28] in a different way, got different types of sun hats to experiment with. I’d be cutting them up and I’d be sewing, sometimes I’d sew things with dental floss for extra strength. One of my versions, worked pretty well for a while actually, I used one of those gear ties, a relatively new thing from this other entrepreneur, they’re really handy actually, I own some myself. I sewed one of those in there and that actually worked for a while but after a few months even that broke. Everything kept breaking

Then I finally decided after enough people asked me, “Where did you get that hat? I’d like to get one like it.”

I said, “I made it. Unless you want me to make you one you can’t really buy one.” Usually they were a little disappointed.

They thought, “Wow, that’s a shame, I’d buy one of those.” That’s when I thought maybe there’s a market for this, maybe I could do something with this.

I kept talking myself out of it, I thought what do I know about sun hats, investors, manufacturing and advertising and the internet? I got to do a website, we’re selling it … That’s not me. I’m not an entrepreneur. The more I thought about it the more I thought why not. I got to at least give this a try or probably end up … I’d rather try and fail than not give it a go and two or three years down the road I see somebody else thought of the same idea and is doing very well.

Roy Morejon:

Absolutely. Let’s talk about that leap of faith that you took. Many entrepreneurs, especially a lot of people that listen to our podcast and read our content, are always like, “I wish I could do that, I wish I could leave my desk job or my comfort zone and really try it.” I know there’s a lot of information out there on the internet, but what was that process for you in terms of going about trying to find distributors, manufacturers, building out a website, all of that process, how long did that take and what did you do to get there to this point today?

Damien Henning:

Wow, it was a long process. The first thing that I had to … Once I finally found a cable that was resilient enough to my likings I spent months just in front of the TV bending cable back and forth, writing down how strong it was until it broke and experimented with all sort of different stuff. Once I finally got my basic design right trying to find a manufacturer, it took some time.

I figured with the fact that the internet exists is the reason that I could do this. I wouldn’t have been able to do any of this without the internet. I figure I’ve got the world’s information basically at my fingertips, virtually everybody does. Even if you don’t have a computer you’ve got a library card, you can do the research yourself too.

I just tried to find out how do people find manufacturers, where should I go as a person who’s never done it before. I found my way to Alibaba. Alibaba had a lot of great manufacturers listed on there, and some bad ones too. You’ve got to sift through them all, you look at reviews, you do your due diligence, you email them, see if they get back to you, see if other customers are happy with them. That’s how I found the manufacturer that I’m going to end up working with now.

There were a couple of other ones I was going to work with as well that I also found. One way to find … One of the manufacturers I wanted to work with wasn’t even listed on Alibaba but I used another company that was able to find me the information from another sun hat.

There’s a sun hat, I don’t want to name it by name, but another sun hat from another store. It was a pretty good sun hat but I thought I’d like it look similar to this, I’d like a lot of the basic structure to be like this, but of course I’m going to make a lot of changes. I want to find out who actually makes this thing. They weren’t on Alibaba and I went through every single sun hat on Alibaba, it took me about three days looking at every single one to see if I could find it. Then eventually I hired this information data company, I think I paid about 150 bucks to find out who manufactured this for me. They got back to me with it and then I was able to find their email. I sent them some emails, talked to them on the phone and I started doing things over mail.

I found another supplier too and I was deciding between the two from Alibaba. Between the detective company, me going backwards from a hat that I found, I just wanted to find out who made it so I could try to make some modifications and make my own version, and then another company that I found through Alibaba. I was doing things through the mail at first and it was just not going very well because they kept screwing things up. Every time you want to make a change … I was doing emails, taking photographs, every time you send it to them it’s another 50 bucks because sending internationally through couriers, FedEx or DHL or UPS, they charge you a pretty penny. I had to keep doing that.

I decided if I’m going to make this happen I have to just go there. I’ve done a lot of traveling in my life so I’m no stranger to new crazy environments and being able to adapt to them. I went to Asia to work with these … To look at some of these manufacturers. I was able to talk to them face to face, find out what they could do, what they couldn’t do.

We made some designs together, I know what was possible as far as mass production because you think something’s possible just because you can do it yourself in your home and make little modifications, that doesn’t mean it can be done on a massive scale, at least not cost effectively. Quite often they say, “Yeah, you can do that on your own but our factory we can’t do that with our machines, it has to be done by hand.” I just thought yeah, I’ve got to go there and talk to them in person. That was a big … I took that leap of faith when I went to Asia and that was the first really big investment that I made. It’s not cheap to go there and spend a month-and-a-half, which is what I did back in this past February I think.

The reason I did all this is just because I believed in the idea. I believed that it would be … There was a market for it, I believed people would like it. I knew that if I liked it, and I don’t buy that much stuff personally, and if I do buy it I want it to last a very long time. I figured if it was something that I would personally spend my money on, there’s a very good chance a lot of other people would too.

Yes, going to Asia was the big leap of faith. I thought even if it didn’t work out, hey, I still went to Asia and got to look around a little bit.

Roy Morejon:

Yeah, cross it off the travel bucket list, right?

Damien Henning:

Exactly. I’ve never been to some of the towns that I went to. The first trip was a little bit of a half-business, half-backpacking exploration trip. I thought I might as … If this whole thing goes belly up and doesn’t work out at all, then at least I did a little bit of traveling and the trip wasn’t all for nothing.

Roy Morejon:

Let’s shift gears and talk about the crowdfunding campaign. When did you know you wanted to launch this product using crowdfunding and what were some of the things that you did to prepare for the launch?

Damien Henning:

I don’t know exactly the time when I decided when I was going to use crowdfunding, but the more I thought about having to do with this I knew I was going to have raise some significant capital. I had been familiar with Kickstarter and Indiegogo but I wasn’t always … I had heard about the “Veronica Mars” thing, a friend of mine is a huge fan of that film and I think he contributed as well and they offered prizes. I thought that’s a pretty good idea.

I heard some of the bad things about crowdfunding like what happened with the laser razor and that cooler that had a lot of problems. I heard about it on the news that way. Then after just through media, not the newscast but on the internet, I heard about a story here and a story there.

I thought I’d look a little bit more closely, look at the campaigns, look at videos. I thought I think my product would probably be okay on this because I can really get the word out about it. If I can make a good video … Whenever I told people about it they didn’t really … Sometimes they said, “Yeah, that’s cool,” and sometimes they said, “Whatever.” I knew that I really had to get a visual out there to show people exactly what I was talking about. You can do that much better with this product than just explaining it. Crowdfunding I figured would be the perfect way to do that. I looked a lot more into Kickstarter and Indiegogo and after doing a lot of the research decided to go with Kickstarter. I thought if it doesn’t work at least I gave it a shot.

This way I’ll also be able to test market and find out if people are actually interested in it. If nobody wants it on there I’ll decide maybe I’m wasting my time and I shouldn’t pursue this any further, not get any patents or anything. I took the leap of faith and I decided to go with Kickstarter and I’m very happy I did.

As far as preparing for the launch that was another … That was weeks, maybe months, in front of the computer. The main thing I did, I tell people I went to YouTube University. YouTube University is basically just me saying that I learned virtually everything I know not just from YouTube but a lot from YouTube and also from other blogs about what crowdfunding people … People that have done it, advice they give, people that are asking questions and other contributors give advice like CrowdCrux and Krowdster. Even Kickstarter had its own blog about lots of questions they ask.

I just sat in front of the computer trying to do as much research as I possibly could and I got a lot of great information from Sal Briggman’s site, I got a lot of information from some other people. All you have to do is type in on YouTube, “keys to a successful Kickstarter campaign,” and you’re probably going to get thousands of hits. Now you can’t watch every single one of them.

One of the problems was I started to overwhelm myself, I started to get what I call analysis paralysis. What happens with analysis paralysis it just gets so much information and trying to process it all. I was taking notes, I was pausing, I was watching things again, seeing what people said, seeing what sources they utilized. Between press releases and getting email lists and building a tribe and all of those things came from me watching YouTube and finding all this out on the internet because I don’t have any friends that have done anything even close to this.

Do you want to know exactly … There was one main thing that I did before I launched to try to get a good launch because based on all the research that I did getting a good launch was very crucial to having a successful crowdfunding campaign. Do you want to know what the main thing that I did for that?

Roy Morejon:

Build your email list, right?

Damien Henning:

You’d think so. However, unfortunately with email, I hadn’t used email socially in over 10 years with Facebook. I’d had some email addresses, I had a few, but aunts and uncles and friends that don’t use Facebook and people that I hadn’t been in touch with for ages, email list probably wasn’t good anyway. I thought I don’t have that email list but I’ve got a lot of friends on Facebook that I keep in relatively regular contact with. Even I don’t I’m sure a lot of them will get back to me if I send them a message out of the blue. I thought, how can I utilize my Facebook friends instead of an email list? I would have liked to have used email list but I didn’t have it. The best way … I could have Facebooked all my friends and asked them to send me their email address but it seems like it was a little counterproductive.

I went with this thing called Thunderclap, which was a huge help for me to get a good launch. You can find more information about it online, there’s a good YouTube tutorial about what it does, how it works, lasts a minute, minute-and-a-half, two minutes. Basically you’re just sending a message to people asking them … You start a Thunderclap campaign and what Thunderclap does is they post things to people’s walls, whether it’s on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram or maybe even Tumblr, they posts things to people’s newsfeed at the exact same time when you ask them to do it. Of course you have to get your friends to agree to let that post go up automatically. All those posts go up at the exact same time, it can create at least a little bit of a quasi-viral buzz, not just nationwide but worldwide.

I was hoping that’s what would happen and that is what happened with me but I did spend about three-and-a-half, four days in front of the computer sending messages personally to every single one of my Facebook friends. I didn’t just post on my wall and I didn’t just send one big bulk message saying, “Hey everyone, please join this Thunderclap.” I sent a message to every single person and I’ve got about 700 Facebook friends, that took the better part of four days. This wasn’t just eight-hour working days, it was from when I woke up and I stopped basically to go to the bathroom and eat until I went to sleep. For three-and-a-half days I was just doing nothing but telling people about the Thunderclap campaign and asking them to join it and then I did it all again. I got about 250 people to join that Thunderclap campaign.

As soon as my project went live, when they agreed to have it go on their wall, a preset picture and message went up on their wall saying, “Hey, Shapeshifter sun hat is now live on Kickstarter, check it out.”

Sometimes my friends would do, “Hey, I watched this video, it’s pretty cool. My friend made this, check it out.” That really helped me get a good launch. I got just under $5,000 my first day. I know it’s not much for a lot of the standards of a lot of the people on crowdfunding, but for one guy with no team coming out of nowhere who has no reputation for being good or knowing what he’s doing I was very happy with that. Thunderclap was the key for me to getting a very good launch.

Roy Morejon:

Yeah, solid advice there. I know you put forth a lot of different marketing efforts on this project and hired multiple companies like our agency Enventys Partners. Can you talk about where you saw the biggest return on any of those investments?

Damien Henning:

Yeah, definitely. I started out with … For about the first 20 days or so I just went it alone. I got pretty much up to my goal, maybe $2,000 before my goal, but I still had a lot of time left. I started researching who to use and then I did some little stuff with Backer Hub, that worked okay, Backer Club worked a fair bit better, Backer Club worked very well. It was a few hundred bucks here, a few hundred bucks there, just a relatively small investment for a relatively small return. They did their thing, I got some more numbers for a couple of days.

Then I thought if I really want this thing to get more eyes on it, because I was getting a lot of great feedback about the video in particular and about the product in general. I thought if I could just get more people to see it, I think I can get a lot more traffic and generate a lot more interest in this product because it really is unique and a lot of people really do like it all over the world. How can I do that?

I did some research online as what big companies work with crowdfunding campaigns to really get a lot more eyes on them, get them a lot more exposure. I actually came across first it was called Command Partners, and I saw some of their stuff, but then I saw that they merged with Enventys and became another company called Enventys Partners. Then I actually got in touch with one of their representatives, and this was in early July some time when I was thinking about what to use, who to use. They said, “We’re all booked up for the month of July with other clients.” That alone told me they must be pretty good if they’re all booked up and they’re turning me down and I hunted them out.

I told them, “Actually my campaign is going to very long.” I also made a 60-day campaign against the advice of everything I saw on the internet thanks to my father, who is a very wise and experienced individual.

He recommended that I go the full 60 days because time would be on my side if I did that. [inaudible 00:16:45] I understand but he said, “You do it as long as possible.” I thought why not, I’ll regret if I don’t.

I did make it last 60 days and I’m glad I did because in July, when Enventys came back and told me, “We’re busy for the rest of the month.”

I said, “My campaign doesn’t end until August 19, can we work together the last two-and-a-half weeks of August?”

They said, “Yeah, we can do that, that would be great.”

I got everything set up with them, but then I thought for July I’d still like to work somebody and I don’t want to just be piddling around. I was still doing about $1,000 a day, which for me was great but I thought I could do a fair bit more if I could get more eyes on it to really spread the word. I worked with another company that I was considering before called Funded Today, and they did have time to help me in July. I was able to work with them for the rest of the month of July. The last 19 to 20 days of July I worked with Funded Today. They gave me some good returns, had some good ideas and I was very happy with what I had from them.

Then when I switched to Enventys my numbers went up even more significantly. They were doing very well with Funded Today but then with Enventys the numbers for my campaign don’t lie, they took a … I wouldn’t say it was a massive surge but it was a very significant uptick in pledges from August 1 until the end of the campaign. Enventys did a great job.

Roy Morejon:

No, we were glad to be involved with that project and really rock it out there for the last few weeks. I know we were pulling in anywhere from $7,000 days to $12,000 or $13,000 days there towards the end. It’s all about finding the right audience. It’s not necessarily just about driving a bunch of traffic, it’s about driving the right traffic. I think that’s what we were able to find is really your audience that you’re going to be able to tap into now for future products, future campaigns and really build the 4,000 or 5,000 people that backed this campaign, those are going to be obviously your best test subjects using it, promoting it, sharing it on social and then selling it to all of their hiking or outdoor friends as well.

Damien Henning:

Yeah, that’s what I’m hoping. Initially I meant this to be primarily for the outdoors person. I meant for this to be the tricked out Land Rover of sun hats. Not the Ferrari of sun hats, not the status symbol, not the expensive … Not the really sleek sexy great looking one. I want it to be durable, I want it to be super wind resistant, which it is. I want it to be waterproof at least in the sense that water won’t hurt it or hurt the cable, doesn’t keep your face dry, but it definitely keeps the rain from pounding your face and the cable doesn’t buckle in the rain.

I thought that that was my main audience but the more I looked into it, I was getting a lot of people that weren’t really avid outdoors recreational enthusiasts, but they just wanted a good sun hat that they can manipulate and carry around easily and they liked the look of mine and they liked it for the look. I was quite surprised pleasantly. [inaudible 00:19:21] more audience than just the hiker group, the outdoors group, the camper group, they were really my core audience, the core people that I’m trying to market this to and that’s who Enventys seems to target pretty well.

Roy Morejon:

Absolutely. What would you say is the biggest thing you’ve learned through the whole process of launching your first crowdfunding campaign?

Damien Henning:

Wow. It’s don’t ever kick back and sit on your laurels. Don’t celebrate until the pipeline is finished and that campaign is over. Even then there’s no rest for the wicked. You’ve got to stay on this thing, like a good friend of mine says, like white on rice. If things are going well, that’s great, but you get a lot of backers you’re going to have a lot of people with concerns, a lot of people asking you questions, you have to be there to answer every single question. You have to treat your backers as your investors, because that’s what they are. You’re working for them, you want to keep them happy. I really learned that. I was pretty sure I was going to do that anyway but really that lesson was really hammered into me as the campaign was going.

I was in Asia actually for about the last month of the campaign, thankfully I had a good wifi connection, but I was always on the computer almost every single day answering questions. I got questions on the Shapeshifter’s email address, I got questions on the regular Kickstarter message board and I got questions on regular comments on my campaign. I got questions on the comments to each individual update that I put up. I got questions and comments on the Facebook page for the Shapeshifter sun hat. I’m trying to keep all of these straight and then just hunt them out and make sure that everybody that has a question I get back to them as soon as possible and I post a lot of updates and I made sure that I’m not going to forget about my backers, I’m not going to leave them in the lurch.

I’m really humbled and flattered and honored that all of these amazing people took a chance on a nobody from nowhere that had no reputation for even being able to tie his shoe let along make a really solid outdoors product. I just had to make sure that I was on top of all of their concerns. I listened to them.

Thanks to their feedback I decided to go a little bit faster at making new colors. Initially I was only going to have the original color you see on the photo and in the video. Thanks to all the feedback that I got, basically I just felt like I was designing this with the investors, with the backers. That’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to see what the people want. Based on that now I’m going to have three total colors. It’s going to come in a light khaki and a very dark charcoal gray as well as the original adventure mix, as I call it, which is a very neutral color.

Yeah, your backers are your … You’ve got to keep them happy. Do all that you can to make sure that they are not forgotten about. That’s probably the biggest thing that I learned while I was actually in the midst of the campaign.

Roy Morejon:

Solid advice there, Damien. This gets us into our launch round where I’m going to rapid fire questions at you. You good to go?

Damien Henning:

Alright, we’ll see what I can conjure up. Let it rip.

Roy Morejon:

What inspired you to be an entrepreneur?

Damien Henning:

In a lot of ways my father, he was an entrepreneur and he worked very hard. He didn’t have very much money and he just through hard work, innovation, keeping his customers happy, he was able to make a very good living by working very hard, providing very well for himself and his family. He’s probably my biggest inspiration to become an entrepreneur.

Roy Morejon:

Nice. If you could take a hike with any entrepreneur throughout history who would it be?

Damien Henning:

Surprisingly, as much as I’d love to say one of the big names like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk, I’m going to say that lady, Joy Mangano, she’s the one that invented the Miracle Mop and a whole host of other things. I saw that movie recently with Jennifer Lawrence in it, and her story is incredibly inspirational. I did a little bit of homework to see how accurate it was and she was just able to pull off something absolutely incredible. I didn’t have a family that I was raising and a full-time job I was working while I was putting this together and I had the internet. She had none of those things. She had a family, she had the no internet and she had a full-time job she was working and she was able to pull it off. That was very inspirational. She just keeps doing it and she never seems to let it get to her head. I don’t know if she likes to hike but I think it would be Joy Mangano, I would love to meet her someday.

Roy Morejon:

Yeah. Funny tidbit, we’re actually working with Joy. We do all of her product development and she may like hiking, we just finished her luggage line, which just achieved incredible success upon her launch. We might be able to hook you up there, Damien.

Damien Henning:

That would be fantastic, she seems like a really positive energetic person, my type of person. Yeah, that would be great.

Roy Morejon:

What book would you recommend to our audience?

Damien Henning:

As far as crowdfunding?

Roy Morejon:

Or marketing or life in general.

Damien Henning:

Book. I’m not the biggest reader, I read sometimes. When I get a good book I can’t put it down. As far as marketing and life in general, just some great tips for books, I can’t really … You caught me for a lack of something to say, which is normally not like me. What did I read recently that was just fantastic? It’s not really … It was very entertaining, but it wasn’t really a great life lesson. I wish I had had more time to think about this, I sound like an idiot. Let me just say watch the film “Joy,” and also watch that film called “Tucker,” it was done in the late 80s with Jeff Bridges. Those are two stories about entrepreneurs that really had a dream and a vision and risked everything to make it happen. They had different degrees of success but it just shows the perseverance and the dedication of the human spirit against all sorts of crazy odds. I actually did watch that.

Another one I actually watched was “Hustle and Flow,” a film about a rapper who wanted to make his dream happen against all sorts of odds. He was living in a slum in Memphis, was able to get a relatively large amount of record success by just persevering and becoming a musical entrepreneur just like me out of nowhere and nobody with no contacts, just based on talent and hard work.

Sorry I couldn’t give you a book but I’d say that film called “Joy,” the film called “Tucker” with Jeff Bridges, and that film called “Hustle and Flow.” Sorry I couldn’t give you a book.

Roy Morejon:

No, it’s hard out here for a pimp, right? That’s that old Terrence Howard [crosstalk 00:25:31]

Damien Henning:

That’s the one. It’s a great film, it’s just a great story of perseverance with the human spirit and to not give up and not quit even when everything looks like it’s stacked against you.

Roy Morejon:

Absolutely. Alright, last question, Damien. What does the future of crowdfunding look like?

Damien Henning:

I think it looks very good. Especially showing … I was a little bit discouraged by all the successful stories I’ve seen on crowdfunding by companies that were already established and had a lot of … They already had financial backing, they had a lot of followers, they had finances that they could put up and they were putting great campaigns together but they had color graphics designers, they had photographers, they had marketing directors, promotions coordinators, logistics teams, all these people that knew what they were doing and had done it several times. I thought, how can I possibly compete against these guys? What do I know about this stuff?

The fact that I can do it alone and I just believed in myself and I believed in the product, that gave me a really … A lot more hope for crowdfunding in the future for just the little guy, for people … Nobodies coming from nowhere with nothing but an idea. That gave me a lot of hope for Indiegogo and Kickstarter. Basically I think if I can do it, I’m not a talented entrepreneur, I never claimed to be. If I can find success I think anybody can if you just do your homework, do your research, do your due diligence and don’t give up.

Roy Morejon:

Solid advice, Damien. Please give our audience your pitch, tell them what you’re all about, where people should go and why they need to go buy a Shapeshifter hat right now.

Damien Henning:

Basically it’s good for anybody that either enjoys or has to spend a reasonable amount of time in the sun. You can find it on Indiegogo InDemand. The Kickstarter page is still there but the campaign isn’t live anymore, but there’s a link if you do want to go that route, to take you to the Indiegogo InDemand page. If you just google Shapeshifter, one word, Sunhat, one word, and either Kickstarter or Indiegogo, one of those pages will come up and you can order one. I got them on Indiegogo now for less than what they’ll retail for. I’m offering free shipping within the United States for up to five hats per pledge, and we might be able to work out something else too. If you’re interested send me a message on Indiegogo or to damien@shapeshiftersunhat.com and I can get you more. I’ve done that with a couple of people.

It’s super wind resistant, it’s waterproof, you can fold it up, shape it a million ways. Watch the video, it can explain it a lot better than I can, it’s about five minutes long. Even if you don’t like the video, even if you don’t like the product, I guarantee you’ll be at least entertained by the video. If you don’t want one of these hats I guarantee you’ll know somebody who could use one.

Roy Morejon:

Absolutely. Damien, you’ve been awesome. Audience, thank you again for tuning in. Make sure to visit artofthekickstart.com for all the show notes, a full transcript, links to everything we talked about today. Of course thank you to our crowdfunding podcast sponsors, the Gadget Flow and BackerKit. Damien, thank you so much for being on the show today.

Damien Henning:

Thank you, Roy. I had a blast. Appreciate it.

Roy Morejon:

Thanks for tuning in to another episode of Art of the Kickstart, the show about building a business, world and life with crowdfunding. If you’ve enjoyed today’s episode, awesome. Make sure to visit artofthekickstart.com and tell us all about it. There you’ll find additional information about past episodes, our Kickstarter guide to crushing it and of course, if you love this episode a lot, leave us a review at artofthekickstart.com/itunes. It helps more inventors, entrepreneurs and startups find the show and helps us get better guests to help you build a better business. If you need more hands-on crowdfunding strategy advice, please feel free to request a quote on enventyspartners.com. Thanks again for tuning in and we’ll see you again next week.

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1 comment
  • Great podcast. I don”t know Damien from Adam but I stumbled across his kickstarter blog and became a backer. Can’t wait to see the finished product. Have to protect the bald dome.

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