

Failed many times before raising $13M on Kickstarter - dnt404-1
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/

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ctz
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.

~~~
onion2k
_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
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.

~~~
jmathai
I don't understand this line of thought at all.

For this guy a step to get to whatever his goal is was to raise funding on
Kickstarter. He was successful in that.

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poopsintub
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
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.

~~~
bane
But I understand the OPs point.

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

~~~
kingnight
2 minutes into that video and I am incredible stressed out.

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conanbatt
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.

~~~
macNchz
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
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...](http://www.instructables.com/id/Cooler-with-Blender-and-
Bluetooth/?ALLSTEPS)

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JVIDEL
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
Boombox with a Sega Genesis?

Want.

~~~
ForHackernews
[https://imgur.com/a/SMb74](https://imgur.com/a/SMb74)

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smackfu
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
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
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.

------
lordnacho
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
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
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.

~~~
jkestner
Fabbing boards: Why does it matter where you live? As for cheap, try sharing a
panel: [https://oshpark.com](https://oshpark.com)

Parent's talking about prototyping, so injection molding ain't going to work.
A good path is to test with 3D prints, iterating with cheap consumer-quality
stuff until you need to test mechanical/fit more accurately, then get a shop
to print your forms with a professional printer.

I've never heard of anyone going from Sketchup to injection moldable files,
but I suppose that's... possible? Rhino for Mac is in free beta right now -
not ideal, but easy enough to learn as far as these programs go. 3D modeling
really is not that easy to get a handle on, and then doing it for
manufacturable parts is another thing. Uploading your files for Protomold to
auto-analyze is a good way to learn about what's manufacturable, at a really
basic level (because Protomold can only make basic parts).

But physical prototyping depends on what you're making, of course. The above
makes sense if you're just making a case for electronics, and it doesn't have
to have any particularly interesting performance characteristics itself. If
you're prototyping something flexible, for example, that's really hard to
prototype with a 3D printer since the likelihood of finding a printed material
close to your final is small. In that case, you may have better luck with
casting silicone, etc.

For Coolest, I guess you'd want to prototype the novel user-manipulable
features, but a cooler is a cooler and presumably his partners know how to
make those. If he hasn't prototyped the novel features, I predict there'll be
a delay if he's got a reasonable standard of quality, and at least, the final
will look different from what people have seen so far.

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

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idlewords
Probably could have stood to fail one more time.

