Camping Reaches New Heights with Opeongo

Art of the Kickstart

In this episode of Art of the Kickstart, we interviewed Andrew Gardner, founder of Opeongo, creators of the tent and hammock crossover, AERIAL A1. With the ability to maintain a flat, stable sleeping surface in the air, this camping product suspends between two trees like a hammock while providing all the features of a traditional tent. Listen in and learn about Andrew’s past product development journeys as well as his crowdfunding experiences. Topics Discussed and Key Crowdfunding Takeaways Andrew Gardner’s background in product design The story behind POLAR Pen, the first product he successfully crowdfunded The challenges that came with prototyping AERIAL A1 The surprising place Andrew found AERIAL A1’s target audience Advice he would give up-and-coming project creators Links Opeongo AERIAL A1 on Kickstarter POLAR Pen POLAR Pen on Kickstarter The 4-Hour Workweek By Timothy Ferriss Sponsors Art 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! Transcript View this episode's transcript Roy Morejon: 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 $100,000,000.00 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. Art of the Kickstart is honored to be sponsored by Gadget Flow. 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 cool luxury gadgets and creative gifts. Now let’s get on with the show. Roy Morejon: Welcome to another edition of Art of the Kickstart. Today, I am talking with Andrew Gardner founder of Opeongo. Andrew, thank you so much for joining us today. Andrew Gardner: Yeah, pleasure to be here. Roy Morejon: So Andrew, you’re a Kickstarter OG. You’ve done multiple campaigns on Kickstarter, so I’m really excited to dive into when you ran your first campaign a few years ago, now you’re back with your second campaign in a completely different category. So really inspired to hear your story and where it all began creating new products. Andrew Gardner: Yeah. Yeah. I can dive into that. So I guess the tent is where we are now. It’s a tent that suspends between two trees creating a flat surface. So it’s a bit of a longer story, I suppose, but I used to work for a life jacket company as my original job. Actually, it was a co-op position coming out of school, industrial design school. And from that job, I actually ended up launching the Pen, which was a bit of a random story. It was sort of a… The POLAR Pen was a Kickstarter campaign that I launched in 2013. It was a pen made out a bunch of magnets that snap together and actually took me out of designing life jackets and full time into selling this bit of a ridiculous little pen, but we were able to sell… We had a campaign that was over 800,000 with 14,000 backers. Andrew Gardner: And every year now I go back to my old school and I talk about this project to my old industrial design program. And each year I pick a student out of that program to go back to my old job at the life jacket company for that original internship. Anyways, I picked my co-partner in the tent company to do the internship. I randomly picked up another job designing a military life jacket for my old boss, just for a side job. Jacob and I just happened to be at [South 00:02:58] at the same time...