Sung Kim ·
At midnight, we finally launched our Kickstarter campaign. Quite a bit of people who were following us backed us in the first day, and we raised around $1,000 in less than a day.
If we can maintain this for the rest of the campaign duration, that would pretty awesome!
Sung Kim ·
I was invited to talk about the future of mobile design and interactions at a local conference. I checked out my presentation room before my session, and it looked pretty awesome. It looked like a college lecture hall.
In the waiting room, I ran into a guy name Brandon Oldenburg from Moon Bot Studio. At first, I didn't realize who he was, and then something clicked in my head. I realized he was the guy who produced the Chipotle game and animation that went viral. It was pretty awesome talking to him about his projects, and you wouldn't believe how humble he was.
Then my time came. I went into the room, waited for the previous presenter to pack things up, and waited for everyone to sit down. I felt like a professor in a class room. It was a pretty sweet feeling.
As I started to flip through the slides and talking, I noticed people smiling, nodding, taking pictures, and recording videos. Even when I noticed all these reactions, I didn't stutter or get distracted – I was on a roll. I don't think I've ever felt more confident while doing a presentation.
When I mentioned that we are about to launch a Kickstarter campaign for the GESTURES camera app and displayed the URL to our Kickstarter page, literally everyone in the audience started typing away to check out the URL.
After the presentation, a number of people came up to talk to me. Some people just wanted to complement me; some asked me to help them with their projects; and some gave me their business cards to contact them (Some of them were from Samsung and Microsoft.)
Overall, it was a pretty amazing and humbling experience. I hope I can do it just as well at the SXSW next year.
Sung Kim ·
I met up with a pretty well known Angel investor in town today. I thought I had a pretty good business plan and revenue model figured out. I even had a prototype of the GESTURES camera app to show him, so I was pretty excited.
But as he asked more and more questions about the project, I was having trouble answering some of them and made me question things myself:
Despite all these questions, he still seemed to like the project. I just had to come up with a better revenue model and plans to protect my intellectual assets.
Sung Kim ·
I just got the news that I've been selected as one of the panel speakers at 2014 SXSW!
Sung Kim ·
I don't know how this happened, but when I opened my Kickstarter page to check everything before submitting it to Kickstarter for review, I found out the deadline has been changed back to January 16... 1919
Anyways, I had to click 1,128 times to bring it back to 2013 because Kickstarter calendar only allows you to change it one month at a time by clicking the arrow button...
I had to take a break in the middle, so I took a screen capture...
Sung Kim ·
Apparently the delay caused by Amazon Payments account was a good thing. I met with a number of people and got some great feedback on the Kickstarter rewards we were offering.
So I went from having 14 different complicated, gimmicky, and time consuming rewards to just 9 simple rewards that are more manageable.
One thing I didn't think about was using my UX/UI design and my partner's startup business experience to offer consulting sessions as rewards.
Now all the rewards sound much more relevant and have a little more substance than having bunch of meetups, parties, dinners, etc.
Sung Kim ·
LegalZoom asked me to sign the SS-4 document for EIN confirmation and send it back to them, so I sent it to them via USPS first class mail.
After a week later, I emailed them only to find out they never received it... I asked them if I could just scan it and email it to them, and they said yes. So why didn't they just say that from the beginning?
I guess I'll never use LegalZoom or USPS for my business.
Sung Kim ·
In order to finalize the Kickstarter campaign page, you have to have a verified Amazon Payments account.
Originally I had my personal Amazon Payments account tied to the Kickstarter page, and it only took 5 seconds to verify it. But when I tried to switch over to Business Amazon Payments account, it said it would take about 7 days to verify it.
Plus it kept saying all the company information I entered wasn't correct, just like what happened with D-U-N-S number, so I had to scan and fax my incorporation and EIN documents to them.
It was a bummer because I was completely ready to go, and now I have to wait for almost a week to launch the Kickstarter campaign.
Sung Kim ·
Here is the first rough cut of our Kickstarter video.
Sung Kim ·
I was trying to get an Apple Corporate Account, but apparently you have to have something called D-U-N-S number.
So I tried to get it by registering our company at http://fedgov.dnb.com/webform, but it kept saying I didn't enter the right information, so I had to scan and send my incorporation and EIN documents to prove that I have the right information.
I waited for about 3 days to get the D-U-N-S number, and it asked me to wait for 14 days to use it to get the Apple Corporate Account.
Since my developer needed an Apple developer account right away to share his development progress with us, I just had to get a regular developer account with my personal email address while waiting for 14 days.
Sung Kim ·
A local developer I've been talking to just emailed me and told me how he's interested in helping us out. He's an expert coder in both iOS and Android, and he also has a lot of game animation background, so we could get a lot of work done and fine tune complicated animations with his help!
Super excited!!! XD
Sung Kim ·
Out of the blue, this one guy emailed me and wanted to learn more about the company. So we met up and talked about what we can help each other out.
It turns out he has a pretty good experience in social media and public relations, which is exactly what we needed to drive the Kickstarter campaign we are about to launch!
Yay!
Sung Kim ·
I finally got the incorporation documents from LegalZoom, and it's all fucked up...
On page 1 of "Certificate of Incorporation of Gestures, Inc" document, it says there is 1 million shares of common stock and 9 million shares of preferred stock, which is what we asked for.
But on page 17 of "corporate bylaws and resolution" document, it says:
"Resolved, that the officers of the Corporation are hereby authorized to issue and sell shares of common stock of the Corporation, $0.0001 par value (the "Shares"), which the Board hereby determines to be the fair market value of the Corporation's common stock as of the date hereof, to each person named below (the "Stockholder"), in the amounts specified opposite each time in exchange for cash or contributed property as follows"
And then it assigned 2 million shares of Common Stock to my partner and 2 million shares of Common Stock to me...
Am I reading this wrong?
How can we get 2 million shares of Common stock each when the whole company only has 1 million shares of Common Stock?
And we asked for Preferred Stock, not Common Stock.
A couple of weeks ago, I spent an hour with a "specialist" at legal zoom on the call to make sure we get the Preferred Stock, and they said they fixed the problem, but apparently they didn't.
Plus there were no "83(b) Elections" document for us to file to IRS.
And most importantly, there were no mentions of 4 year vesting period or 1 year cliff anywhere in the documents they sent us.
This is all fucked up...
Sung Kim ·
Here is the revised app animation.
Sung Kim ·
My partner and I were using admin@thegestures.com to redirect all business related emails to our personal email accounts, and my inbox was getting a little too crazy.
Also I had to email back and forth with various service providers, but when I email them from my personal account, they don't answer my questions because my personal email address is not the one we used to open those accounts.
So I suggested using Business Gmail account to my partner and started the registration process, but then he said he already has a Business Google Apps account for free. So I canceled my registration process, and he tried to register our company domain name through his Business Google Apps account. But it said our domain name was already being used for another Business Google Apps account.
I looked up the FAQ section, and it said I have to wait for 7 days for our domain name to be released from the previous registration process I was going through even though I cancelled it.
So we waited for 7 days, and he tried again, but it still didn't work. I tried to call the help line, but it kept telling me I don't have access to the help line unless I were a paying customer.
I was trying to pay for the service, but for some reason, the payment section wasn't showing up on my screen when I signed in.
Anyways, I don't even remember how I exactly resolved the issue. Only thing I remember is that it took me about 5 phone calls, 3 Google representatives, and 3 weeks.
I ended up creating a separate Google Apps account and paid for it.
Sung Kim ·
I've been preparing this 20-min long speech for last one month, memorizing every word and practicing it over and over.
I begged the event organizer to double, triple check my presentation file to see if it works on their computer and projector so that I won't have to go through the nightmare I went through at TEDxSMU event (The projector didn't work at the TED event, so I gave my visual presentation without visuals.)
I stuttered a number of times, but I think it went really well overall. During the Q&A session, a lot of people asked me questions and gave me complements. It was really flattering.
Now that I think about it, this is the longest I've ever talked without taking a break in my life. I know that this is not the biggest event in the world, but the fact that I was able to deliver a 20 minute long message in front of a live audience made me feel like I'm finally evolving from a shy, soft-spoken kid to... something greater.
Whatever it is, it's gotta be better than what I was before. XD
Sung Kim ·
Here is how we broke down our app features to 3 separate milestones.
Prototype Phase 1 (86 hrs):
Prototype Phase 2 (80 hrs)
Prototype Phase 3 (72 hr)
Sung Kim ·
So my partner and I have been going back and forth on what the logo should look like. Originally it looked like this:
Then like this...
Then like this...
Then like this...
We decided on this one for now. We will see how it goes and review it again later.
Sung Kim ·
Here is the initial rough animation of the app.
Sung Kim ·
I've been reading a lot of articles and researches on other campaigns. And below is the plan I came up for the Kickstarter campaign plan.
Key dates:
I've based the dates on the following factors:
Sources:
Until the campaign starts I'll get as many people as possible to sign up on our emailing list and join our Facebook fan page:
