The problem and solution
Traditional watches have shown time without personal context to individuals and our mission is to enable people to live more fulfilling lives by changing their perspective on time. emit is a smartwatch that shows time as a countdown to your most important tasks, events and goals of the day, week, and even year.
The team
As course mates, we walk back home together and discuss a range of different ideas. Over such a conversation of how we could develop a tool that gave us more time to do all the things that we wanted to achieve, we realised the answer lied in influencing our mindsets more than anything else. We set out to develop a seamless and simple tool which helped us become more productive and value our time more. Playing on the psychology of scarcity, we created a smartwatch that inverted our perspective on time to make us more proactive with it.
We founded the company in June 2018, and have developed a working prototype of the watch. We have also contacted manufacturers to identify potential partners, including having worked out timelines and costs. We require funding in order to manufacture a minimum order quantity of 1,000 units with our required specifications, for which we require $50,000 USD. We intend to fundraise through Kickstarter, for which we have developed social media pages and a website. We have been collecting emails from potential backers, for which we will need around 700 to 800 on Kickstarter. We are also looking to raise around $30,000USD to spend on marketing in order to ensure a successful Kickstarter campaign.
Following the Kickstarter, we will take 4-5 months to deliver the watches to our backers, after which we intend to raise further funding in order to produce a better version of the watch and sell at a higher scale on Kickstarter in summer 2019. Post round two of Kickstarter, we intend to sell emits through retail channels, as well as incorporate analytics that allow users to see sleep patterns as well as the quality of adherence to their schedules.
Successes and setbacks
Our biggest successes so far have been developing a working prototype of the hardware and software, building a portfolio of aesthetic brand assets, including the name ‘emit’ (time in reverse) and growing an online community of supporters through organic and paid social media engagement.
Since starting emit we have had a few challenges, including underestimating the marketing budget required to run a successful Kickstarter campaign, not making enough prototypes to spread around the blogger and press community and not having fund-raised which makes it challenging to hire employees.
Advice to aspiring entrepreneurs
Our advice would be to be excited by the prospect of learning, as you will learn vast amounts of new things on a daily basis. Don’t worry about not knowing enough – get comfortable with making quick decisions with incomplete information.
