This week on Art of the Kickstart, we’re talking with John Stanley, Harsha Venna and Harshit Aggarwal from the RoadWayve team. Check it out and hear more about how they designed their product, what they did to prepare for their Kickstarter campaign and what they’ve learned from the entire process.Topics Discussed and Key Crowdfunding Takeaways

What to consider when designing a future-ready productHow to overcome product design challengesHow to choose between Kickstarter and IndiegogoHow long it takes to prepare for a crowdfunding campaignHow to determine your target audienceHow to choose a crowdfunding marketing agencyWhy it’s important to make sure you are production-ready before launching a crowdfunding campaign

Links

RoadWayve on KickstarterJack: Straight from the Gut by Jack Welch

SponsorsArt of the Kickstart is honored to be sponsored by The Gadget Flow, a product discovery platform that helps you discover, save, and buy awesome products. The Gadget Flow is the ultimate buyer's guide for cool luxury gadgets and creative gifts. Click here to learn more and list your product - use coupon code ATOKK16 for 20% off!TranscriptView this episode's transcript

Roy:Welcome to Art of the Kickstart, your source for crowdfunding campaign success. I’m your host, Roy Morejon, president of Enventys Partners, the top full-service, turnkey product development and crowdfunding marketing agency in the world. We have helped startups raise over $100 million for our clients since 2010. Each week, I’ll interview a crowdfunding success story, an inspirational entrepreneur or a business expert, in order to help you take your startup to the next level with crowdfunding.

Roy:Art of the Kickstart is honored to be sponsored by BackerKit and the Gadget Flow. BackerKit makes software that crowdfunding project creators use to survey backers, organize data and manage orders for fulfillment by automating your operations and helping you print and ship faster. The Gadget Flow is a product discovery platform that helps you discover, save and buy awesome products. It is the ultimate buyer’s guide for luxury gadgets and creative gifts. Now let’s get on with the show.

Roy:Welcome to another edition of Art of the Kickstart. Today I am joined with three guests. I think this is probably the first time we’ve had three guests on the show, but I want to welcome everybody with John Stanley, Harsha Venna and Harshit Aggarwal with the RoadWayve. Thank you so much for joining us today.

John:Thanks so much for having us.

Harsha:Excited to be here.

Harshit:Yeah, likewise.

Roy:You guys have come up with this really beautiful, bright led display that produces a super hi-res message for other drivers, and also hopefully facilitates a safer environment on the road. Let’s talk about the RoadWayve and where this idea came from, and what inspired you to create it.

John:Essentially it was a road rage incident when I was a kid with my mother. As road rage incidents go, it was fairly benign, but this kid got out of his car and started yelling obscenities to my mother. She was a beautiful person, but she happens to be a bad driver. I wasn’t necessarily afraid, but I looked at her face, and she was. There, that gave birth to decades of trying to figure out what can we do to try and help this epidemic, to quell this epidemic. That’s very basically the incident that gave birth to what is RoadWayve today.

Roy:When you were creating RoadWayve, what did that process look like, and how did you go about deciding what features to include and how to design it for multiple different vehicles?

Harsha:Right, so the idea started off, when I was on this project, we knew that an LED display in your rear windshield is a good solution, but we actually questioned to see the actual problem here. The problem here is communication, so we tried to go really high-tech with it and see if you can actually co...