In June, Startup Grind Ottawa hosted Ali Zahid from Vanhawks.
Ali is a 3rd year bio-medical engineering student who came up with the idea for a connected Smart bike with his brother and friends during summer 2013. The team then met with FounderFuel accelerator in Toronto before being accpted and moving to Montreal in spring 2014.
Twelve days before Demo Day, they launched a Kickstarter campaign for their product and within 30 hours, they surpassed their main objective of $100,000. Thirty days later, the campaign has raised more than 8x it's original goal, getting featured in different media outlets like NBC, TechCrunch, FastCompany, Mashable, Uncreate and more.
Here is a full video of the event.
The most important points Ali had to share with us were:
- We built the Vanhawks Valour bike around the urban commuter. It's a product we wanted for ourselves.
- We validated the idea with over 100 consumer interviews.
- FounderFuel and other accelerators are like bootcamps for your startup. They will help you quickly find (or not) product / market fit for your idea. Then they really focus on helping you develop an effective story - which we knew we needed to take the product to the market.
- We have the perfect team to tackle both the hardware and software sides of the company. We wanted to create a perfect marriage of both sides, just like Apple.
- Ali, is a bio-medical engineering student with work in graphics design and business development, and his cofounders, Adil, a veteran in carbon fibre composite construction and manufacturing, Sohaib a medical student with expertise in biomechanics design and Niv with expertise in scaling and creating applications people love.
- Your customer is king. I didn't always completely realize this. But during FounderFuel I realized that I'm going to be the one who makes or breaks this company.
- Before the Kickstarter campaign I had a list of 20 bloggers I wanted to reach out to.
- We hired the same video production studio that Pebble (the biggest Kickstarter campaign of all time) used for their crowdfunding video.
- We were so busy leading up to the launch of the Kickstarted campaign that I uploaded the video 10 minutes before the campaign went live and I hadn't even seen it one last time.
- 90% of the traffic that hits your Kickstater page is driven by your efforts. We noticed that big sites like TechCrunch really didn't drive that much traffic and the conversion was even lower. But niche, community blogs for urban cyclists drove tons of traffic and it had high conversion rates.
- It's important to stagger the momentum. We knew there would be lulls in the campaign and based with a combination of press and a new angle we opened different markets at key moments to keep the excitement and funding flowing.
- We had spent a lot of time working with these sites, slowly building a community of engaged cyclists looking for something new. We made them part of the process and asked with we could reach out when the Kickstarter went live.
- We really wanted to build something that is human driven. Every backer has my cell number. That's my cell number on the site.
- Magic kinda happens if you're building something you love.
- Our bike is a single piece of carbon fiber. No other bike is like this and it's because of our process. But we aren't keeping these patents and IP private. We want to keep innovating - not preserving the status quo.