JohnBysinger
Active member
- Joined
- Jul 18, 2016
- Messages
- 33
mcain said:
I appreciate the words of support, and do value your input on crowdfunding. I hope you don't mind a bit of a humorous reply, but I wish that a successful crowdfunding campaign was only as simple as hiring a millenial! I and my team have done extensive research on crowdfunding and what it takes to build a successful campaign, and really there are two components to success with that tactic. The first is you already have significant social traction and brand recognition prior to even beginning the campaign. Thousands of followers and dozens of committed influencers ready to push your campaign at the outset. The second is a compelling and quality product/pitch video. There are of course other factors, one of which is product cost. In searching through 100's of campaigns we found very very few successes with products over $500-1,000 i cost, and absolutely zero successes in either EV or vehicle development in general. And finally, we found very few successes that relied on a reward structure where the rewards weren't much more than schwag (t-shirts, stickers, hats, etc) while trying to fund a product beyond a traditional cost model as mentioned above.
That said, we're not actually ruling out crowdfunding, not at all! We actually have a campaign architected to coincide with our buildup prior to launching installations, and have allocated headcount to build a media campaign based on videos from product testing as well as a video blog documenting the development of the Corvette conversion. You'll begin to see our youtube and other channels start to populate with videos later in the spring, and we anticipate launching a crowdfunding effort in parallel likely mid to end of this summer. Our goal here is to build some social momentum with our current efforts and evangelism, and then leverage the crowdfunding as something of an excitement accelerator, a form of advertising if you will.
I also want to address the comment just above about Vehicle to Grid (V2G) or using EVs as backup power. Just from a technical standpoint, there's no physical reason why we won't be able to support that kind of EV use. An obstacle currently is right now with the LEAF, that's not currently enabled in US vehicles, and from what I've seen is only being used in specific trials in the UK and the EU. I can't say who, but we are working with an outside group who is involved in V2G efforts here in the US, what this means is when the LEAF and/or grid(s) can support it, we'll be there and ready, and we'll likely have already completed testing before then.
And finally, in case people here have missed it, last week we announced a new business partnership! We're working with ChargeShare, an EV charging network startup that has a similar subscription model for their customers and a unique crowd-funding model built into their platform. We're working to integrate their system with ours so that our customers will also get charging access as an additional feature for their Fenix subscriptions. We're thrilled about this partnership as it will provide our customers with one less worry with their EVs. We have other business partnerships in the works, and look forward to sharing those as soon as we can as well. Be sure to join our mailing list to keep up on the latest news: http://fenix.systems/subscribe
-John
Pipes would freeze before I would have problems in the winter, though...
