25-Year-old Dropout kid entrepreneurial dream: let quirky folk ideas to become

Quirky, a start-up company based in New York, will be the next star. The company mainly operates creative products community and E-commerce site, and focus on the creative product segmentation market, such as kitchen gadgets, digital equipment accessories, children's toys, sports and travel assistance equipment. It recently received a 68 million-dollar C-round financing, valued at more than 150 million dollars. Since its inception in 2009, Quirky has received 91.3 million dollars in financing.

Quirky founder is 25-year-old Ben Kaufman (Ben Kaufman). He dropped out of school and chose to start a business, first starting a company that produced the iphone's protective shell, and then creating quirky in March 2009.

Quirky founder Ben Kaufman

What quirky do?

Users can submit their product ideas (each 10 dollars) on the quirky, or they can vote, score, and make changes to other people's ideas. The company picks up the best product ideas submitted on the Internet every week, and after a 7-day evaluation period, quirky will pick one out of all the product ideas presented in the week and turn it into reality. From naming, logo selection to packaging, quirky will participate in every aspect of product development. The final product will be sold by retailers such as Sofitel, Bath & Beyond, Staples, Target, and Quirky's own website.

In the first year, Kaufman's team turned 4 ideas into products and sold them. In the second year, the figure was 20, and in the third year it turned out to be 40. Since its inception in 2009, Quirky has launched more than 200 products and its best-selling products include collapsible power boards, hubs, etc.

It can be said that quirky took a different path. Now the mainstream E-commerce sites are the price, the number of varieties, logistics speed as the core, leading to the homogeneity of shopping experience. and quirky to product ideas, stories and ideas to attract people, bring people different shopping experience.

Operation Process

Let's start with a relatively complete operation of the quirky product from the idea design to the final shelf sales:

Quirky products from the idea design to the final sales Operation flow chart

As a first step, users submit creative ideas to quirky at a price of 10 dollars. Quirky now receives about 2000 ideas a week, up to 75,345 so far, with 30 in the first week of the company's establishment.

In the second step, quirky selected hundreds of creative ideas for design, and a design conference will be held every Thursday, with 250,000 members and their product experts fine-tuning those ideas. Quirky's product experts have served in the company of Procter and Gamble, Royal Philips Electronics, OXO, etc.

The third step is to select some products to produce. Quirky has a complete studio to produce prototype products, including painting and 3D printing. In Asia, a team is responsible for producing products that are vertically integrated. At the same time, 316,208 community members provide evaluation information throughout the design process, ranging from color to price points. If their proposal is accepted, they will share some of the sales.

The fourth step, after the production of finished products, quirky to 35 countries export products, sold in 35,000 retail outlets. The average number of days is 180 days from the design concept to the completion of the sales process.

At present, Quirky has launched more than 200 products, many of which are sold in retail stores. Its best-selling product is pivot power, a newly invented strips that can be used in any direction. The company has paid an authorized fee of more than 2 million dollars to the inventor. This year, the company expects revenue to reach $200.03 billion trillion.

A good example is that after the new specs on the iphone 5 were exposed, quirky users began submitting their new ideas and submitting nearly 2000 new pieces within 24 hours. Through the screening of Kaufman and other experts, 50 pieces were selected. Over the next week, designers and engineers made prototypes, laser cutting and 3D printing, launched 15 iphone 5 accessory products and sold them on the creative flash site fab.com.

How do you make money?

Quirky revealed that many of its members made 10,000 dollars last year, and one member even earned more than 100,000 dollars. The company says it will have more than 100 members who are earning tens of thousands of dollars this year.

Quirky offers lifelong membership to people who make ideas. This person can get 30% of online sales (wholesale price calculation) and 10% retail sales (in Sofitel Bath & Beyond). Inventors share these sales commissions with people who have helped the idea in the quirky community, but they can still get the bulk of their income.

It is not hard to see that the quirky model is very different from the idea of the hardware business. The company bears a lot of costs: it must be responsible for the production, delivery and sale of each product, while also abandoning situable sales. But there is no need for a large in-house research and development business. And the company can bring about economies of scale in production, which is never available to small inventors.

Kaufman says his team can make money just by selling thousands of items. Since his goods were sold in 35,000 retail outlets, many of the goods have been sold well.

Quirky's recently completed C round of financing was led by the Anderson Hotz Fund (Andreessen Horowitz), which also has a significant share of Kleiner as a new investor. Quirky therefore added two board members: Scott Wess from Anderson Hotz (Scott Weiss) and Kleiner from Meeker (Mary Meeker). Wes's most famous title may be the 13th employee in Hotmail, where Hotmail has not yet been acquired by Microsoft. Wes, a co-founder of IronPort, was later bought by Cisco. Mikel is known as the "Internet Queen" and initially served as an influential Internet stock analyst at Morgan Stanley. In Kleiner, the famous companies that Mikel has invested include Groupon, Square and Spotify.

Despite the booming business and the smooth financing, Kaufman thinks differently. He urged people not to congratulate those entrepreneurs who have been financed. "To congratulate the entrepreneur on getting financing is like congratulating the chef for buying the raw material." Don't congratulate a person for getting financing. Because the ultimate goal is to create a successful and meaningful business. If an entrepreneur gets a raise, wish him luck and his work is just beginning. ”

Indeed, quirky's revenue is not high, but it is growing quite quickly. The company sold products for 2010 years, with a revenue of 1 million dollars. The figure climbed to $7 million trillion in 2011, and Kaufman expects the company to achieve revenue of $20 million this year.

Kaufman intends to use the new capital to open up vertical markets and activate more creative communities such as Quirky moms and Quirky Eco. These "Mini invented machines" make every ordinary person an inventor. Under the current screening process, quirky will launch 2 products a week and will rise to 10 later, and the company plans to go into retail.