Failed many times before raising $13M on Kickstarter

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/08/28/ryan-grepper-inventor-of-the-coolest-cooler-failed-many-times-before-raising-11-million-on-kickstarter/

by dnt404-1 • 12 years ago

95 36 12 years ago

washingtonpost.com

frequentflyeru• 12 years ago

I'm just waiting for Coolest to release an API for their cooler...

poopsintub• 12 years ago

Can you imagine going to the beach and hearing someone using a blender every 15 minutes!

I read about this sort of thing the other day. You always hear about the few successes and people who struck it rich. They kept trying and never gave up, but you never hear about the 10 million other failures. People ruin their lives trying to fulfill dreams or ideas that weren't worth pursuing from the beginning and pay dearly for it. Empty bank accounts, ruined credit, relationships, etc.

vonnik• 12 years ago

What a crazily negative comment on a cool story... So are we to conclude that people shouldn't pursue their dreams?

There are really two kinds of dreams: Dreams of arrival, which involve riches and fame and usually end in sorrow; and dreams of process, which involve the simple liberty of doing something interesting with your life. That's the kind of dream everyone should have access to -- the real American dream if you will.

I know Ryan personally. We grew up together. He "failed" for a long time and it didn't ruin his life. He had a great wife and two kids even after many "failures." But his dream was a dream of process. He was already doing what he enjoyed before you heard of him.

Actually, almost all of us are surrounded by people who haven't struck it rich yet. We're swimming amid the 10 million "failures." Some feel they are failures because they're not Jennifer Lawrence; some feel they are failures because they're trapped in an awful job; and some only appear to be failures, because you haven't heard of them yet. But they're already doing what interests them, and they don't feel like failures at all.

I'm the third kind. Ryan was the third kind until a few months ago. We should try to celebrate him, not ignore what he did.

gamblor956• 12 years ago

Ryan hasn't done anything worth celebrating until he actually ships the coolers with the promised features to backers. (This doesn't mean he's a failure, simply that he isn't a success.)

Also...why are we all commenting on a 3-week old article?

bane• 12 years ago

But I understand the OPs point.

I'm frequently reminded of Bulletball https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOOw2yWMSfk

Guy gave up pretty much everything, job, home, family, 25+ years of his life, to come up with a very mediocre table sports game.

It's hard to parse good ideas from bad ideas. I hope this is a good idea, but lots of people chase bad ideas for far too long.

It turns out Bulletball has found a niche in handicap therapy, which is awesome. But it's been a really hard road to get there.

Padding3• 12 years ago

People ruin their lives trying to fulfill dreams or ideas that weren't worth pursuing from the beginning and pay dearly for it.

On the other hand, society as a whole profits immensly. Would you really want to give up on that? Wasn't this the major argument against communism and bureaucracy?

ctz• 12 years ago

This article confuses success with raising money. Success will be raising money, and then manufacturing and shipping 70,000-odd coolers to the satisfaction of 60,000-odd people within the next 4 months.

Crowdfunding projects in general don't have a sterling record of actually fulfilling shipments on time and to spec.

spiritplumber• 12 years ago

I know I was about two months late overall with mine, and people actually told me that I was doing better than most campaigns...

http://igg.me/at/minilaser/

Small scale stuff, but it was interesting to think in 100s of units rather than in 10s.

thegenius• 12 years ago

Exactly. Raising money is not the greatest accomplishment in the world. What if all that money came from a rich uncle? It's up to the founder to correctly allocate the capital once he/she has it. That's the real challenge. Getting a sizable return on assets, and furthermore, getting a large slice out of that for yourself is the goal of the owner of a for-profit business.

Padding3• 12 years ago

I don't know about that. Isn't raising 13m $ the equivalent of receiving tenure? Even if this fails somehere along the way, it sure will be a success for the "inventor" .. and thus be a success-story for other hopeful wannabes.

vecter• 12 years ago

Not at all, unless the inventor runs away with the money, but that doesn't sound right. How is it a success if he burns through the money and fails to bring the product to market in a meaningful way? The world is littered with dead startups that have raised $10M+ (heck $100M+) rounds.

ChuckMcM• 12 years ago

While I agree with this statement vis-a-vis the value of the raise versus actually shipping, a lot of startups, all their press releases between birth and acqui-hire are how much they raised :-(. It looks like this guy has a lot of pre-made modules and so is really just on the hook for the injection molds. It will be interesting to watch. I have no idea what that Makerbot Replicator was doing in that last shot though, seemed a bit like a non-sequitor.

onion2k• 12 years ago

This article confuses success with raising money.

And you're confusing a single event with the entire process of running a project. The fact is raising money is a success, because a success is simply a positive event. You need a lot of them to successfully complete a project. Equally, failure is an event - you can have lots of failures and still succeed.

UVB-76• 12 years ago

This is just a dispute over terminology, but to succeed is to achieve an aim or purpose; unless your aim is simply to raise money, you haven't achieved success at that stage.

Even if, for the sake of argument, we take your definition of success as simply a positive event, I would dispute the implication that raising $13m in this manner is necessarily a positive event.

The inventor hasn't accrued $13m with no strings attached; he has accepted the money in lieu of an obligation to deliver product. Whether entering into such an exchange is a "positive event" or not for the inventor depends on whether he can uphold his end of the bargain.

sandaru1• 12 years ago

I funded MicroView on Kickstarter (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1516846343/microview-ch...). I think they also ran into problems with manufacturing a large quantity of devices. However, I got the device in a reasonable time frame and I'm very happy with the quality of the product. I'm not sure whether they are the rule or the exception.

In the end, it's unfair to assume that this project will fail to deliver shipments based on unrelated failed crowdfunded projects.

conanbatt• 12 years ago

What a confusing product! Its like a swiss army knife in a cooler, as in it does many things you are likely to rarely use, except everything needs electricity.

prawn• 12 years ago

Agree. I have an esky that I use a few times a year. I have never wished for compartments, a blender, a speaker or anything like that. I just wish it could fit a bottle of champagne standing vertically.

pcrh• 12 years ago

It's a bit gimmicky, but I can imagine a market for it, especially among those who like gadgets. Tailgate parties, frat boys, etc.

stefan_kendall3• 12 years ago

Go to a traditional store and look at coolers. They're all terrible.

People that use coolers need them waterproof with bottle openers, or expect to haul them long distances with children. It's the market of parents who drink beer near water.

macNchz• 12 years ago

It strikes me as something that will do a lot of things poorly, rather than a few things really well. I want a cooler that's big, waterproof, has wheels and strong handles. If I want music, or for some reason a blender, I'd much rather have dedicated appliances. Weak/cheap blenders are terrible, basically anything less than $100 winds up being more frustrating than useful. I can't imagine that the battery powered DC blender in this cooler is going to be a winner.

draker• 12 years ago

In his prototype he used an 18v angle grinder, which I think would do a decent job blending. Given the blender setup seems to be one of the key features, I think more of the feature budget will go towards the blender. If they upgrade to a higher rpm motor for production, I believe it would be sufficient for making drinks.

Prototype build: http://www.instructables.com/id/Cooler-with-Blender-and-Blue...

idlewords• 12 years ago

Probably could have stood to fail one more time.

lordnacho• 12 years ago

I'm interested in finding out about how you get prototypes made. Do you need special training in some field? I take it there are several fields. At the moment I'm only implementing my software ideas. Have an EE degree though.

yardie• 12 years ago

Prototype SMD boards are easy. Much easier than buying caustic chemicals and doing it yourself.

Molded plastic has traditionally been harder since you needed a mold injection machine and doing a prototype mold is hardly cost effective. But with 3D printing even the local Staples can print you prototype now.

The complication for most people has been the 3D software. They are still complex and except for the most basic of shapes requires days of intense training and practice. A lot of people have a hard time converting a mental 3D image, to a 2D display, and back to 3D.

SilentDirge• 12 years ago

Exact opposite for me. Getting fabbed boards where I live takes forever (and is expensive) so I etch my own. Populating an SMD PCB takes forever, but, no interns for me as a small indie so I work in my basement till 3am with tweezers and a hot soldering iron.

Injection molding is actually super cheap in volume -- the expensive part is the metal mold which costs an arm and a leg. Mess up a mold and, bam, your project is no longer profitable (or breaking even, if you were lucky).

3D modeling is actually easy now with packages like Sketchup. If you have the dough the pro's use Solidworks or Inventor (my fav), which abstracts the development process to 2D sketches which can then be pulled, extruded, cut etc... analogous to what you would do with your hands on paper or with clay (or legos or whatever). It's really best to have a vision and use a designer to bring it to life but when you don't have that option it's still possible to get _something_.

You didn't mention it but setting up and running a crowdfunding campaign is time consuming, difficult and crazy stressful. I'm about to launch mine in a few days and am basically not sleeping.

Props to Ryan -- what he has done is NOT easy and he deserves all the success he as achieved so far.

JVIDEL• 12 years ago

Just saw the ks video, is just me or did anyone else get a big infomercial vibe from it? is like I was waiting for Billy Mays to show up and say "Hi I'm Billy Mays and this is the Coolest!"

Aside from that it's a relatively simple product that harks back to the age of all-in-one solutions like Tvs with VCRs built-in, microwave ovens with toaster and coffeemaker, and who can forget that boombox with a Sega Genesis?

illumen• 12 years ago

Boombox with a Sega Genesis?

Want.

ForHackernews• 12 years ago

https://imgur.com/a/SMb74

smackfu• 12 years ago

I'm surprised none of these break-out Kickstarters have sold their product to an established consumer products company, who would handle the Kickstarter fulfillment and then sell the product at retail

Because it's pretty clear that the people who run these products generally have no idea what they are doing when they get 100x the money they wanted.

giarc• 12 years ago

I'm sure this guy has been approached by Coleman or other camping related companies looking to purchase the product. I imagine the inventors think "I've had success up until now, I can keep going." And I would agree with them. Why not continue to try and go on your own? The nature of Kickstarter is that you have to try, but if you fail, you don't really owe anyone money.

VLM• 12 years ago

Those product sectors are not known for compensation of inventors, and presumably he would like more revenue than the $1 unit cost Chinese assemblers or the $8/hr walmart shelf stocker. Not a high margin business.

I don't think that supply chain has the institutional memory and skills to ship anything other than large quantities of traditional, by the standards of their field, commodities.

The primary effect of getting a big company involved would be giving the gray market Chinese a big head start, so people can buy the product for 50% off on dx.com and related sites.

These reasons probably are what discourages the megacorps from entering this small field, or rephrased, those are the reasons why he's got something new instead of competing with existing mfgrs.

Failed many times before raising $13M on Kickstarter

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