Startup Wednesday held at VERN – Vitastiq

When you launch an innovative technological healthcare product you expect a reaction on the market, but you also have to be ready for resistance and scepticism, even when the product is based on methods more than half a century old.

This was emphasized on Startup Wednesday at VERN University, opened by Davorin Štetner, President of the Croatian Business Angels Network – CRANE, and after him, Dean Vranić, cofounder of the Vitastiq start-up, and Irena Lešković, Vitastiq’s Indiegogo campaign manager, took the floor.

VitaStiq-Startup-Srijeda-VERN-26-11-2015-18It is the first personal device in the world used to check vitamin and mineral levels in the body by electro-acupuncture method. Vitastiq acquired more than 210,000 dollars of investment through a crowd funding campaign, instead of the planned 49,000, and recently, in the finale of the Central European Startup Awards in Vienna, it won recognition in the category of the best user experience.

”We had two milestones. The first one was starting a campaign on the Indiegogo platform, and the second one was appearing at Vitafoods fair in Geneva this year. Although we had planned to gather 49,000 dollars, we reached that amount in only fifteen days. The next goal was 79,000 and in the end we reached more than 210 thousand,” Dean explained.

He mentioned that it was important to maintain communication with the so called backers, and every time they had set a new financial goal, they also had to come up with a novelty to entice interest for investing. First they offered three different colours of the product, then a discount on purchase, then a discount on recommendation, then present for backers, etc.

Even though the crowd funding campaign brought them many benefits for the promotion of the product, Dean emphasized that it is important to continually create content around the product, such as news, articles for newsletters, PR material, etc. ”Every time a medium would publish our article, we would see a jump in sales, and we had the biggest jump after a press release on Indiegogo newsletter. All in all, we have received over two million Kuna worth of PR.”

Appearance at the Geneva fair was important to them for making a step towards distributers, and out of 180 gathered requests, they have realized thirty so far. ”So far, we have distribution in Australia, New Zealand, Holland, Turkey, Ukraine, Hong Kong, etc. The biggest asset for us would be entering the American market, but there we expect much more testing and satisfying strict regulations of their Federal Drug Association, since our product belongs in the healthcare category. In the European market we also meet with sceptics who doubt the credibility of electro-acupuncture, even though that method has been practiced in medicine for over 50 years.”

In the end he emphasized that their goal is to keep the production in Croatia, but it will be greatly determined by future demand