(Editor’s Note, English is not the first language of the interviewees so answers have been edited slightly for understandability.)
Welcome back to the Conversation! Today I’m joined from the other side of the planet by Nitzan Shafat and Aviv Rozenfeld in Israel to talk about a wonderfully simple product called TWEAK. Thank you for joining us today good sirs.
Thank you for writing about us.
They day I discovered TWEAK I had just finished dealing with a backed up kitchen sink due to it not having a garbage disposal so of course your product spoke to me. Would you tell my readers all about it?
We invented Tweak just because of what you just described. We all hate to dispose of leftovers from the sink or hairs from the bathtub and Tweak allows you to do so easily and gracefully.
What gave you the idea of making a squeezable strainer system that also doubles as a way of ejecting the leftovers out of it and into the garbage?
We are both industrial designers, and during our studies we got a design brief, to design something to deal with the kitchen garbage.
I (Nitzan) always hate cleaning the sink and that time I lived with a roommate, which made the task even more unpleasant, so immediately I knew I was focusing on trying to solve this nasty problem I lived with daily. After few mockups, I came up with the flexibility concept and everybody liked it so we focused in on developing it to a nice looking product, that worked perfectly. We got a lot of help from Ani Dwilanski (product designer as well) in the design process, and she was the one who thought about doing the Tub-Tweak (woman input). We think it came out very well.
What is your two’s background and how did you get involved in this kind of design work? Where did you learn to work with thermoplastic materials as that doesn’t seem like something any hobbyist would just find lying around?
Like we said before we are both industrial designers, we are dealing with product design and development on a daily basis, so it quite natural for us.
Where did the name TWEAK come from?
The ‘Tweak’ name came at the final stage in the design process, and obviously describes the user action with the product.
I enjoyed the video to your project quite a bit as it was humorous and informative which is a pretty hard balance to pull off. How many iterations of that video did you go through before you got it just right? Did you two come up with it or did you have help?
We got great help from our talented friend Elad Stein, who wrote the script, shot the movie (in one weekend) and did the editing.
We knew we wanted to make the movie short, informative, and fun to watch. If you think about it our movie is more like a commercial on TV, than a standard kickstarter movie.
Let me just congratulate you on blowing past your initial goal of $14,000 it goes to show that Kickstarter backers really like simple yet effective ideas. With that said I always tend to look for a budget breakdown to see what a project has planned for the money, yet I don’t see one on your campaign, why is that? Is the Kickstarter only going to produce the TWEAKs ordered in through the campaign or is it going to fund an entire production run?
The main function of the money is to produce the injection molds and the first 5000 units.
What are you plans once you have the start up costs covered by this campaign? Will be seeing TWEAKs in stores worldwide? Just in Israel?
We got so many responses from all over the world, even from places we didn't knew existed, so we hope to get Tweak to all these places and more.
How did you discover Kickstarter?
It’s very familiar platform in Israel, especially to people with our background, that uses this tool to actualize their ideas.
A key part of successful Kickstarters is backer participation and how to convert a potential backer into a full backer. How are you engaging your backers? What kinds of things do you have planned for updates to give notice to those who just hit the “remind me” button and surf on? Interviews? Videos? Stories from the project?
All of the above! For now its going pretty well, but even interviews like this one, contribute to expose our project, and that is one of our key element to success.
What kind of media attention have you received with your project? How are you spreading the word? Facebook? Twitter? Google+? Youtube? Advertising? Are you using Kicktraq to track your progress?
Most of our support comes from Facebook. We got some attention from local media. We also use kicktraq, and its a great tool to monitor the project.
Do you have any tips/advice would you give to anyone looking to start a Kickstarter?
The one big advice is to find a way to tell your story.
Thank you for spending your time with us! Do you have any final thoughts for our readers?
We like to thank all the backers community, we think they are responsible to a blessed change in the traditional retail market.
Thanks again and I hope to hear good things from your Kickstarter!
very much
bye bye
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