Bootstrapping Kickstarter

ABSTRACT

Mark Noonan, a successful entrepreneur and resident of New Canaan, will offer insights to the topic of licensing versus building a brand and business. Mark just finished his new Kickstarter campaign, selling $19k worth of dog leashes. His presentation will use his actual case histories to illustrate the challenges of building a business from concept inception to the global marketplace, ensuring to note various landmines facing those intent on starting a company or even licensing IP. His first major success was the “Wovel”, a wheeled snow shovel now sold globally under its current brand "Snow Wolf". His most recent new product is the unique "Leaf Loader" which gained market entry only 18 months from inception. Mark will include some ‘tips’ and relate some of their experience in using crowd funding and how it fits into their business model and plans and how they are planning to use crowd funding for other products. ['tips' for those committed to product development and marketing.]

Doug Lyon will offer insights into outsourcing using Freelancer. After 73 freelancer projects, we will look into average cost, follow up tactics (is there life after freelancer) and the success rate. Lessons learned from freelancer and how do get prototypes and limited pre-production runs built are a key element to the commercialization of innovation.

About The Speakers

Mr. Noonan is president and founder of Nootools LLC which conceives, designs and launches a variety of consumer home and hardware products. He has built a product concept portfolio of over 50 products, with 5 in the market at various stages, from test-market to selling the Company's new Leaf Loader through Walmart. Mr. Noonan currently has, through the Company and other companies he controls, over a dozen patents awarded or in progress in product areas ranging from hardware, home, pet products, electronics, infant products and defense-related technologies.

Mr. Noonan holds a BA degree in Economics (with significant studies in physics and mathematics) from Duke University and an MBA degree in Marketing and Finance from the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Business. He has spent the prior 6 years developing and launching new (mostly consumer) products, and nearly 20 years in corporate finance and investment banking, designing products and marketing to "Fortune 100" companies both in the U.S. and abroad. Over five years of that tenure was in corporate treasury management, corporate money-desk funding, developing sale/leaseback programs, interest-rate risk-management/hedging (with futures transactions and other interest rate hedging tools) and a wide range of other corporate transaction and project work.

Douglas A. Lyon is chairman of the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at Fairfield University, in Fairfield Connecticut, a licensed professional engineer, a senior member of the IEEE, President of DocJava, Inc. and CTO of Lyon-Ratafia and President of the Inventors Association of Connecticut. Dr. Lyon teaches Engineering Enpreneurship and has brought one successful kickstarter project to market. He received the Ph.D., M.S. and B.S.degrees in computer and systems engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (1991, 1985 and 1983). Dr. Lyon has worked at AT&T Bell Laboratories and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Dr. Lyon has authored or co-authored three books (Java Digital Signal Processing, Image Processing in Java and Java for Programmers). He has authored over 49 journal publications. DocJava.com

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