Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Case Study: Cheryl Kellond, Bia Sport”.
My name is Cheryl kelland, my company is bia and I am NOT the maker. It’S been a year into the project and we get together for build weekend. My team makes me test the backlight of our product in the dark bathroom to make sure it works. I’M not a lot of touches solder gun, not a big surprise at home. The family doesn’t, let me near any flame in the kitchen either, but what I am is an end user that had a problem.
I am a late-in-life athlete. I had four kids. I wanted to lose a little weight spend time with my girlfriends, so I started running running became. You know.
The first 5k became the first 10k became the first triathlon. Somehow I’m signed up for ironman later this year, but but through that journey I wanted fitness tools that met my needs, so I went out you know after ready to do my first triathlon and bought a garmin. Oh, does that thing suck hard to use huge, ordered everyone out there with my amazon prime account, because I’m a good mother shopper, they all suck nike suck the garmin suck everything sucked what we can do better than this, because, because I’m a middle-aged mother, you also Know I drink a lot at night, so a few nights of drinking thinking. We could do better than this. Well hell yeah. We can go build some consumer electronics. We can go head-to-head with Garmin. We can be where you go after Fitbit we’re going to build this product awesome, get a team together, build prototypes, getting great feedback from users and, like duh, ran out of money, and I’m talking ran out of money. I mean ran out of money like sunday morning. Drinking coffee took my American Express gold card, slid it through my square slider, awesome teams paid yeah, you know what happens when you do that.
Not so much you do it once and you don’t get a second chance. So we had prototypes, but we didn’t have money to take it to the next step. I was going to go out and raise bc money.
Well, not only did I, you know not have product market fit yet I couldn’t prove it, but I’m you know we’re getting excited about our target market right. We got Katherine here running her first miles a year. We’Ve got fair there under girlfriends at the Malaysia, woman. Half marathon there’s 50 million women just like that.
Unfortunately, the VCS we talked to weren’t, really sure about product market fit, and these users didn’t capture their imaginations. We got questions like would Lance use it? No, you know. So you know, a real choice was at that point was with no choice but to go on Kickstarter. Fortunately, you know we knew something that the market knew as well. There was a huge gap for the product, so we’ve done five hundred twenty-five thousand a crowd-funded sales.
We did four hundred and eight thousand of those on Kickstarter. I think what is really telling about those numbers is our backer base. Our backer base is not your typical tech early adopter, not your typical Kickstarter buying every project. Ninety percent of our backer base was female. Seventy-Seven percent had never even heard of Kickstarter before our project and they weren’t just showing out twenty dollars or thirty dollars or seventy dollars, but now we’re into two hundred dollars per user for their contributions. What really told us we were onto something? Is our growth trajectory curve? So this is our whatever 36 a 35-day Kickstarter.
It took us 30 days to get those first seven hundred backers. The next seven hundred backers came in four days and the final 700 k in the last 24 hours by creating the product. We wanted to use and sort of validating that with the market we tapped into something deeper than a product that was missing. We tapped into whole market sense of identity and a sense of being part of something, and that really has you know, become our most important asset. You know similar to a yob when we had tough product decisions to make. We threw it out to our backer base and you know we are going to be about four to five months: late shipping.
They were involved in the decisions that pushed out those dates, and so they have been tremendously supportive of it. In addition to being tremendously supportive, they keep ave anja lysing us to their friends. So every day our wait list grows every day.
Our pre sales grow just a tremendous asset to us all along the way because of that backer base in the packaging of that backer base. You know, after we finished our Kickstarter, we got into Lemnos labs incubator, which has been really beneficial to us. We are working with amphibian supply chain partner over in Asia, which is really adding some important resources to our team.
We’Ve got a seed round, that’s almost completely committed and we’re pulling the first pre production units off the line in China this week. So I mean, I think the biggest message here is: if you do what you know, and it applies to real users like yourself, the right stuff will happen from and that’s it .