How Lumo Back Makes Money

What a cool little invention!  Lumo Back is a little sensor of sorts that you strap to your lower back and it vibrates every time you slouch.  And since awareness is the number one solution to posture problems, you got to say the 3 Stanford grads behind this have nailed it.

The product takes it up another level when you hook it up with theirpurpose-made iPhone App, which shows you how your posture tracked for the day.

Now admittedly, these guys had to spend some serious time upfrontdesigning and manufacturing the product, but with all that done things are starting to look nice and passive.

But how did they get over the initial big hurdle?

To get started they hit up Kickstarter and raised $200,000+, which was basically double what they needed.

As you can see, this case study is a grrrrrreat example of using Kickstarter to validate your passive income idea; in most cases, a physical product works best on Kickstarter.  With KS you literally reduce your risk several fold since you get both proof of demand and the money to pay for all the development costs and initial (expensive) manufacturing run.

Now obviously Lumo packed some serious technology into their product, which allows them to charge a delicious $149 price tag and make 1000s of sales within months of launching.  But the idea is still inspirational even for us mere tech mortals. Just ask yourself…

What problems do you face day to day and what solutions can you come up with for them?  By the way I’m just talking about what can you dream up, not necessarily what can you go into the shed now and physically make.

Also, you should know that inventing is a lot easier than you think once youstart focusing in on your problems and those of your friends and families.  No one else.

Coming up with solutions is easy too if you think in terms of elegant simplicity. I mean who was the first person to come up with the heatable bean bag for sore backs! That’s Ben Stiller simple.

Or those ‘massage’ balls physios give their clients to press into their back on the floor to get rid of knots between appointments!  Someone literally modified a rubber ball, renamed it to something sciencey and sold it for 10 times it’s normal price.

Heck, even those stretch bands for people in recovery from muscle injury…it’s just a piece of rubber, but it solves a real problem.

But obviously think beyond health.

Actually, this brings up a point I’ve been wanting to make for ages…go toKickstarter and check out all the super cool ideas out there.

Follow all the new listings and see what people respond to and what they find lukewarm (also look at the past listings that were successful). You’ll quickly get a good idea of what products will fly and which will bomb.

Do be aware that the majority of people who ‘donate’ on Kickstarter are often people like us – online, business-y sit-behind-a-desk people. Hence why something like a posture correcting device would be so popular.

Visit Lumo Back or check out Kickstarter where case study originally spotted