Finding something you love that you’re also good at is the old adage for how to be successful. Patrick Steusloff seems to have done just that, combining his experience as an entrepreneur in the medical device field with his love for the game of golf to launch Kinetek Sports’ first product, ClubHub.
The face of ClubHub is sensors that attach to the golf club that speak to the technology behind it to analyze shots and track swings. Steusloff, also the CEO of Kinetek, brought in John Melican to be the President of ClubHub in no small part because of his background at Nike and Callaway Golf. Melican spoke with me over the phone about how they succeeded in campaigning on Kickstarter, the technology behind ClubHub, and how it hopes to be the first of many products from Kinetek.
Thanks to Kickstarter’s transparency and metrics that are refreshed daily, one can see that the percentage of projects that get funded on their site falls just below 40%. That number seems reasonable enough to not give any pause one way or another. What may or may not be surprising to many though is the category that has the lowest success rate: Technology. Of the fifteen categories Kickstarter designates to their products, technology campaigns meet their funding goal just twenty percent of the time.
Despite all of that, Kinetek decided that Kickstarter would be the platform to raise money for ClubHub.
The team first utilized their internal networks to get the word out, and then advertised on social media platforms (Facebook, LinkedIn and Twtter, in that order). Melican says that this strategy helped them hit their funding goal 36 hours after launching ClubHub on September 1.
With a funding goal of $50,000 this was no small task, especially considering that over a third of successfully funded technology projects on Kickstarter don’t even make it to five figures. Melican credits the combination of old-school (write-ups in golf publications) and new-school (social media) marketing to the success of their campaign. Above all though, it delivers on being a differentiated technological tool from competitors in ClubHub’s space.
After the Kickstarter campaign ends, ClubHub will retail for $499. For this price, the consumer will get fourteen sensors (one for each club in a set) that screw into the end of each iron, wood, or putter. Additionally, the purchase price includes all of the analysis and data these sensors push to the app via Bluetooth. There, the customer can consume the data from the cloud via iOS devices and Android come first quarter of 2016. And here is where the differentiation occurs because, according to Melican, “we can completely analyze the swing and track the shot. Other companies do one or the other. Until ClubHub, nobody did both.” ClubHub has used GPS technology to allow the user to geo-map holes and determine distances to different parts of the green for over thirty thousand courses worldwide (16,000 of which are U.S. based). The true utility of ClubHub comes off the course though.
Melican best described the biggest advantage of ClubHub to me as a “tool that will be helpful in the golfer/instructor relationship by bringing data back from the course.” He had me visualize an example of a golfer who gets instruction twice a week, and plays with his friends on the weekend. Typically, at the lesson after the weekend the instructor may ask the golfer how the round went, and it’s hard to say anything outside of playing well or poorly, and reporting a score. ClubHub removes the anecdotal part of this relationship and actually shows your instructor how it went via the data provided in the ClubHub dashboard.
Melican also stated the case for golfers who don’t use an instructor, citing that “avid golfers are self-taught or self-diagnosed, and ClubHub gives them the why and the result.”
As the Kickstarter campaign comes to a close, ClubHub has easily doubled their funding goal and hit the six figure mark of pledged dollars. It’s worth noting that of the almost 3,500 technology campaigns funded on Kickstarter, less than 700 have hit this milestone.
The next steps include following up on the Kickstarter pledges and start shipping ClubHub before the end of 2015. And as mentioned before, ClubHub is just the first product of what Kinetek hopes to establish as a premiere platform based on expertise of kinesthetic knowledge. Without giving too many secrets as far as what’s to come, Melican did mention research into an addition to ClubHub called Balance in Motion. This will expand upon using the club for swing analysis to also measure body mechanics for weight distribution, balance and path.
Growth is also on the horizon for Kinetek, as they aim to meet the demand for their products that was displayed in this campaign. Despite the nationwide and even international (Europe and Asia had significant Kickstarter pledges) support for Kinetek’s first product, they remain committed to being based in San Diego. Recently named as the city with the 6th highest amount of tech jobs in the U.S., San Diego is up and coming in the tech scene relative to their competition upstate, and ClubHub hopes to be a player in this movement.
It doesn’t hurt that the golf scene isn’t too shabby there either.
