As you probably know by now, we at SENS decided to take on this little task of changing the western diet. In the “behind the scenes” series we want to share our progress with you because, let’s face it, it might take a while. Also it’s healthy to have a place where you can cry about your failures and celebrate those small wins along the way. So, how did we get from an idea to a successful Kickstarter campaign?
We first got the idea from this group of strange looking individuals that call themselves early primates. They said they started eating insects about 50 million years ago, so it seemed legit. We talked about it more and it turns out, crickets are the same quality protein as meat but they are 12x, 15x, 100x, and 2000x more sustainable?! Ok, take our money now! They weren’t selling. When we asked why, they just kept repeating, we can’t, we are extinct. So, we thought, someone has to introduce insect eating to people. We can’t keep this just as a hobby, this is too good.
So much writing again? I thought I left school…
Do you remember all those annoying writing assignments you hate at school? Yes, we do too. That’s why we were so happy to move on to do real business. Wait, what? That is what real business looks like? Yes, turns out that getting the consumer at least half as excited about insects as us consists mostly of writing, planning, presenting, and writing some more. Ok, skip 20 000 unexciting, mostly writing based tasks and Kickstarter, here we go!
We are all in!
There is one more very important part of this story. Our commitment! Radek gave up his studies at London School of Economics, sold his first company to have the time and money required to really make SENS work, and finally convinced his mother that putting crickets into bars is a real job. Daniel gave up his studies too, PhD in algorithmic trading and he quit his job as a data analyst. We don’t look at this as a side project, we are all in!
Can you imagine how nervous we felt at the start of the Kickstarter campaign? Our years’ worth of work was about to be evaluated: either a total waste or a successful start of our new journey. We are happy to say we raised €10 000 in only 16 days and €13 000 in total surpassing our initial goal by 30%. We cannot be more grateful for this result. Thank you!
Raising money was just the beginning. We will have more news soon. See you next time!
