A Kick-starting experience of SectorQube
A group of young lads, who also happened to be tech enthusiasts started working on a project during their final years of engineering. By the time they finished engineering, in the year 2011, they had two options a. Work for another company or b. Start a company and work for themselves.
Obviously they went for option b and they also happen to raise around $125,000 in their first crowdfunding experience. Now the question would be who are they? How did they go about it? What worked for them? And at last what is the story behind their success?
Vision J.A.R.V.I.S
SectorQube was born in October 2011 with 6 founders — Nibu Alias, Ani Abraham Joy, Sabarish Prakash, Binyas VL, Arjun S and Midhun Skaria. Their vision is to create a system like J.A.R.V.I.S (an AI character that assists Iron Man) or even better than that.
They didn't start working on their vision directly. They started off by integrating some of the consumer electronic products with software.
Their first product MAID was the beginning of their journey towards reaching their vision. MAID (stands for Microwave Android Integrated Device) is a smart kitchen assistant and a multi-functional oven which knows what to cook and how to cook. In other words, MAID is a smart butler.
Now, What worked for them ?
Angel Investor
Being a hardware company, it was tough to find investors to fund the company. But SectorQube with their hard work and a little bit of luck found a friendly angel investor Dr. Ritesh Malik, Founder of Guerrilla Ventures at their initial stage of startup. Ritesh is one of the young angel investors with a focus of investing in innovative hardware companies. His initial investment of ₹25 Lakhs in SectorQube turned out to be the stepping stone for their Crowdfunding success.
Crowdfunding Platform: Kickstarter
Kickstarter is a global crowdfunding platform with a focus on creativity and is one of the best platform for hardware startups. As a result of launching their product in Kickstarter platform, SectorQube gained more media attention.
Product Visibility: The main advantage of Kickstarter platform is that it allows the startup companies to feature their profile in the main page for one whole day. The objective of this is to provide high visibility to the companies. It worked with SectorQube as well and gave a lot of visibility to the product. Within the first day of the kickstarter campaign they were able to achieve 20% of their $50,000 goal.
Video Pitching: They used videos to explain how MAID android app works with the MAID oven. They outsourced the video development part, which turned out to be a huge hit for them.
They even showed a video in which, the user talks to MAID oven and tells the ingredients. After listening to the user the smart oven starts prescribing the spice rubbed chicken dish based on the huge recipe list it has and goes on explaining step by step process of cooking it with video/picture demonstration for each step. This video pitching attracted a lot of investors for the product.
Media attention: Since SectorQube’s product market is focused mainly in USA and Europe, they also appointed a media agency in US for gaining media publicity for their company and their product MAID. They started contacting people who used to write about smart home appliances or technology products like Mashable, Daily Mail etc., and they gained their attention soon after launching the kickstarter campaign.
Outcome: SectorQube had a goal of achieving $50,000 from the Kickstarter platform. But with their strategies of gaining media attention, Video Pitching, etc., they were able to achieve that goal in just 4 days of starting the campaign. By the end of the campaign they were able to attract $123,920 investment all over the world from 303 backers.
Out of the 303 backers, 273 were Returning backers -backers who had backed a project on Kickstarter before and the remaining 30 were New backers -backers who had never backed a project on Kickstarter before.
Cold-mailing Vs Cold-calling
Some of the startup founders think that cold calling/cold mailing is a nuisance, but it actually works. For SectorQube, cold-calling has higher conversion rate when compared to cold-mailing.
A Cold-email followed by a warm call gives the prospect an idea of who they are talking with. SectorQube started cold-calling the companies to acquire them as clients.
One of such examples is how they acquired one of the biggest home appliances manufacturer as their client just by cold-calling them. And they cold called right to the Customer Care of the company and explained their product. As the first level executives couldn’t understand what they were saying and as it was not a product issue they escalated the call to their manager. This went on and on for about 45 minutes until they reached the product development team of the company who understood just what they were trying to explain. That client had already read about SectorQube in articles/blogs and was able to apprehend their concept. The product development team gave them an appointment and the company later got converted to a major client.
Future Plans
SectorQube is currently focusing on diversifying their product categories into various smart home appliances. Going forward, the startup will create a line of devices that will give the consumer a smart home experience (J.A.R.V.I.S like experience). Currently the company is working on developing new products by following the core mantra, “Identify and solve the existing problem, don’t make something and try to fit it into some problem.”
