How one guy successfully crowd-funded his start-up idea

When William Miller launched a crowd-funding campaign late last year for a new hoodie, he reached his target in just one hour. The selling point was the integration of headphones into the strings of the hood, giving birth to the STX Hoodie. Miller, the founder of Street Technology Experiments (STX), is part of the new generation of Aussie entrepreneurs capitalising on a growing demand for the fusion of fashion and technology to create “wearable tech” items.

The 26-year-old was in China when he first came up with the idea for a hoodie that featured built-in headphones. He noticed people around him wearing ‘shoelace’ headphones, which he thought could be “pretty cool, if they had a usage”. Miller recognised that, on their own, headphones that looked like shoelaces were a gimmick, but headphones that could be integrated into a hoodie could genuinely be useful. He built a prototype with headphones replacing the drawstrings of the hood and “the rest is history”, he says.

Let’s be honest: the endless battle to untangle headphones is one of the great contemporary struggles of our time. So who wouldn’t want to buy a hoodie that stopped this from happening? Well, Miller was cautiously optimistic. He told his team that “if you can’t sell five-thousand dollars’ worth of any hoodie a month, there’s no point in doing it”. Originally slated for a target of $50,000, Miller decided to lower the goal to $10,000. He calls the lower target “a more accurate litmus test” of consumer demand. Clearly, the test yielded positive results.

Since the campaign to fund the hoodie ended, Miller has been contacted by many other young entrepreneurs looking for advice. He says that generating enough awareness for a concept is often the hardest part of the process. “You can have really, really good ideas, but if they don’t get the right awareness, they won’t work,” he says. According to Miller, when young people entering the start-up world have a great idea but get nowhere with it, they often abandon the concept altogether and move on to the next project. But this can be a mistake, he says. Sometimes, perseverance is key.

[quote]You can have really, really good ideas, but if they don’t get the right awareness, they won’t work.[/quote]

He admits, though, that crowd-funding wearable tech in Australia is an uphill battle. “People just aren’t as aware of Indigigo and Kickstarter [as they are in the United States],” he says. Consumers think they are going to be ripped off, or that the products they’re backing will never arrive. “It can be difficult, in some ways, to bring attention in Australia to the right product,” Miller says.

Tech start-ups aren’t as familiar here as, say, in Silicon Valley, but the rewards for launching a successful campaign in Australia are well worth the effort according to Miller. He says that some campaigns are only successful on the third or fourth attempt. “We heard of an Indiegogo campaign for a jacket that raised 10-million [dollars], and it was their fourth campaign,” he says. “So it takes a bit of time to garner good success.”

The team also sees Australia as a great place to trial the success of a product. “We knew that if Australia even half-latched on to this hoodie, then America would take it,” Miller says. The directors of Headtrax Technologies, a company founded by Miller with an office in New York, are adamant that successfully launching the hoodie in Australia will pave the way for expansion in the US.

Miller is excited for the future of young entrepreneurs in Australia, especially when it comes to the wearable tech sector. “It’s about a game of continually innovating products,” he says. “It’s not a case of making things that are flashy and cool … it’s a new industry, a new type of technology. And as soon as people start seeing how well it can work in their own lives, that’s when we’re really going to see this boom.”

Ben Rice

Ben Rice is a law student who writes a lot of stuff that people don’t read at bennywrites.com. Or, you can find him on Twitter @benny_writes.