• Qblinks Company Limited

Abstract

Qblinks was established in 2014 by the serial entrepreneur Samson Chen with the business vision to develop electronic devices for the Internet of Things and also to provide cloud services. Qblinks has launched three projects on the crowdfunding website Kickstarter. Their first two projects were failures, meaning that the funding from backers (also the funders) were not up to the pledging goals during the campaign periods. Thus Chen and the team carefully examined all the aspects of the two fundraising failuers, including the product design, hardware manufacturing, video filming, product photos and descriptions as well as the spending on the public relations associated with their PR strategies, etc. With more thorough preparations, Qblinks then launched their third crowdfunding project on January 2015 and obtained about two hundred and twenty thousand dollars an amount more than ten times the pledging goal of twenty thousand dollars. This case presents two teaching objectives: students can learn (1) the characteristics of crowdfunding projects as well as the campaign operations, and (2) the lean startup methodology reflecting the entrepreneurial spirit of Qblinks.

Keywords: Crowdfunding, Lean startups, Internet of Things