Anti-Theft Backpack idea → $55k/month

Hello Rebels

🏖️ Creative Entrepreneur fun one-liner:

Why do entrepreneurs love the stars? Because they're always shooting for celestial success!

Onto Today’s story….

Tom Worcester loved attending music festivals, but he was facing too many problems,

like pick pocketers, long lines at the water stations and other problems.

He decided to solve these problems for festival goers and created a backpack which addressed all these problems.

Now he is making $55k/month with his business Lunchbox.

Here is how he did it.

As a child, Tom lost 70% of his hearing due to a pre-existing condition and an unfortunate accident at the kitchen table.

Growing up, songs and high-frequency sounds were almost impossible for him to detect.

However, it was at Ultra Music Festival in 2013, his first music festival, when he first felt the vibrations of the heavy bass, the ultimate low-frequency sound, which he could hear!.

Not only was he able to finally hear the music, Tom could truly feel it.

He started attending Ultra Music Festivals every year.

At one of these festivals, long water lines forced him to miss the act he was most excited to see.

Coupled with this, the security took his bag at the gate for being questionably oversized,

and pickpockets targeted many of his friends, putting a damper on the whole event.

Inspired by these unfortunate events, he decided to provide a solution to these festival issues for festival goers.

Tom began to research, conceptualize, and engineer what would eventually become Lunchbox.

He interviewed hundreds of people to fully understand how they experienced festivals.

He asked questions about how they think about theft, water lines, and everything in between while at an event.

He wanted to create an anti-theft backpack equipped with specialized inward-facing zippers to thwart pickpockets,

plus an insulated hydration reservoir to keep water cool 3x longer.

Using the results of interviews from festival attendees, they took all the proposed ideas and selected the most essential to create a theoretical Lunchbox.

Once they created the product, he tested it with many festival goers and took feedback and kept improving the product.

While they were building the product, he decided to build an audience.

In the beginning, their website was mostly just a way to build up an email list.

They created a video in the style of festival recap videos and put it on the homepage, along with a subscribe button.

They also started an Instagram account.

At that time it was mostly filled with festival-related memes to attract an online following.

Then he started a campaign in kickstarter.

The response was incredibly enthusiastic and he raised almost double the amount he wanted.

Even after the Kickstarter campaign stopped, customers came to the pre-order website and kept pre-ordering their backpack.

Since they had emails of their customers, they sent regular emails.

In both social and in emails, they shared their favorite music,

invited them to meetups at their favorite festivals and also recommend other products that might be useful for festival goers.

Authentic and genuine communication with their community and audience was one of the biggest drivers in Lunchbox's sales.

The also took instagram and Facebook Ads.

An engaged Facebook group of "Lunchbox Fam" and hundreds of brand ambassadors kept sales steady.

They got featured by publications such as Ashton Kutcher's media arm, 'APlus', and music industry publications like Dancing Astronaut.

Tom says “Get started. Fail fast. Learn faster.“

The continued to grow.

Now they are making $55k+/Month.

Tom says… “When it comes to motivation there’s no substitute for passion”

He adds “Be so passionate about your product that you can't sleep at night. Don't ever give in to your doubts.”

6 reasons why he succeeded

1. Solved a common problem he himself experienced.

• Tom attended music festivals and personally experienced problems there.

• He felt the issues firsthand of missing performances due to long water lines and having friends targeted by pickpockets

• This motivated him to solve problems he personally encountered at festivals

2. Get feedback directly from target customers.

• Tom interviewed hundreds of festival attendees to deeply understand the problems they faced

• He asked wide-ranging questions to learn how they experience festivals and key pain points

• He used this feedback and created the Lunchbox product.

3. Built an engaged community and email list before he had his product.

• He created interesting festival-related video on his home page and a subscribe button below it to get email signups.

• He posted meme content on Social media to attract followers pre-launch

• In both cases, he used content which resonated with target users rather than direct product pitches

4. Checked Demand

• Checked Lunchbox concept by raising double his Kickstarter campaign goal

• It gave him the ability to raise funds while also demonstrating demand for his product.

5. Kept constant connection with his customers

• He sent genuine emails with music recommendations and other relevant info

• Hosted meetups at music festivals to connect with followers and create his community

6. Focused on solving one core problem for one target audience.

• Tom focused first backpack product solely on solving festival goer’s problems.

• He addressed pain points like getting through security, theft, long water lines vs trying to build a general backpack

• Starting narrow allowed him to succeed.

🧁

Hope you liked the story and the strategies which made them successful.

Keep Rocking!

Yours “Anti-Stress” Vijay Peduru