Kickstarting New Tech Products — from Kiev

(Kickstarter/Lunecase)

A few days ago, a product called iBlazr appeared in Apple’s online store. It’s an LED flash attachment for the iPhone (and other smart gizmos) that plugs into the device’s headphone jack and can improve i-photographers’ results in low-light situations.

The iBlazr’s appearance on Apple’s website represents a milestone in an unlikely-sounding story of a budding entrepreneur who had a hand in not one but two highly successful Kickstarter campaigns for techie gadgets now working their way into the marketplace.

Oh, and also: The entrepreneur’s home base is Kiev, Ukraine.

The campaign for the iBlazr had a $58,000 Kickstarter goal; it raised more than $150,000. A more recent campaign for Lunecase — an “intelligent” iPhone case — did just as well, raising $155,000.

“The world is round,” Vlad Tislenko, who is 25 and head of the outfit that launched both products, reminded me recently, via Skype, from Kiev. In other words: Sure, there are advantages to being in Silicon Valley or London or New York. But there are ambitious and smart information-technology thinkers all over the world. And some — like him — find ways to break into the global tech marketplace from surprising locales.

From iBlazr Kickstarter video. (Kickstarter/iBlazr)

Still, most Americans who hear the word “Ukraine” probably associate it with chaos and war — as opposed to, say, clever gizmo-making startups. In other words, it’s hard to imagine a more surprising home base for launching popular Kickstarter gadget campaigns than Kiev.

So how did it happen? Here’s Tislenko’s story.

“Who is this guy?”
While he did not grow up surrounded by technologists, Tislenko told me, he always had an interest in making things. And while spending two years in London earning a master’s in international business management from King’s College London, “I was dreaming about starting a technology company.”

He explored the UK job market but also came up with several startup ideas and concluded that there were advantages to pursuing them back home. “I can’t say I’m a big patriot,” he said. “But Ukraine has great potential — the potential is in the people.”

That is, Tislenko said, the country’s technical colleges have produced many smart graduates. There’s also an openness to visiting workers from abroad, and business and living expenses are far lower than in a city like London. When he settled on the iBlazr as his first project, “I wanted to make it a reality in this country.”

(Kickstarter/iBlazr)

There were hurdles. Many Ukrainians simply didn’t identify with the need for a gadget that improves smartphone photography. In an economy where many were just getting by, it seemed like an absurd luxury. According to World Bank figures, per capita annual income in Ukraine works out to about $3,900.

Plus, he was unknown, with few connections. He heard a lot of: “Who is this guy?”

Through dogged local networking, he eventually found a designer, and other collaborators, working together as Concepter. He’d seen successful product launches stemming from Kickstarter and sensed it could be a viable alternative to Ukraine’s limited investor community.

Technically, Kickstarter projects could emanate only from the U.S., UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the Netherlands, so another member of Concepter’s group launched it. (More recently, Kickstarter has added Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Ireland to the list of nations where it is officially available to creators.)

Funding came through last September; there were some logistics hiccups in the fulfillment process, but that was worked out by this past January, Tislenko said, and his group brought product samples to the Consumer Electronics Show. They started making distribution deals and to date have shipped 15,000 iBlazrs. The product is now available, online and off, in 16 countries.

The recent inclusion of the gadget in Apple’s online store is a particular validation, Tislenko says: “It’s not a project anymore.”

Life (and business) during wartime
There are plenty of examples of Kickstarter projects crossing over into retail products: the Pebble Watch, GoldieBlox, olloclip, and so on. But in the Ukraine, iBlazr’s success attracted a lot of press attention. Soon, instead of asking, “Who is this guy?” lots of people wanted to work with Tislenko.

The most interesting pitch involved an iPhone case designed to display visual alerts of messages a phone is receiving. (So if your ringer is off while you’re with friends or reading, you can still decide if you want to take calls but ignore text messages, for instance.) According to the pitch, it’s powered by electromagnetic waves emitted by the phone itself. Tislenko was into the idea, and the Kickstarter campaign hit its goal in June.

Since then, he’s shifted is own focus back to the iBlazr and other personal projects. The Lunecase team recently promised to ship the device by November (although it remains to be seen how the form factor of the iPhone 6 might affect that plan).

Time will tell how these products fare in the marketplace. I should underscore that I haven’t tried either one myself, and if you scour the comments on the Kickstarter pages you’ll find some of the backer umbrage that seems to bedevil many Kickstarted tech products.

But obviously what seems most remarkable is that these particular efforts are happening at all — and that a country that appears in the news mostly as a site of armed conflict, global brinkmanship, and a potential geopolitical flash point also happens to have a tech-entrepreneur subculture.

(Kickstarter/Lunecase)

“People in developing countries also know these big stories about, I don’t know, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg,” Tislenko observed. “And people are still dreaming about becoming that kind of person.”

That said, he’s frank about the challenges. A lot of Ukrainians aren’t dreaming about such things and seem more inclined to move their savings into a mattress than into new products or investment opportunities. “It’s more difficult psychologically. Everyone is talking about the war; there’s no good news at all.”

And particularly when the conflict was affecting Kiev directly, he and his globally focused colleagues were pretty much the only ones still using the co-working space they’re based in; anyone working on businesses tied to the Ukrainian market stopped showing up.

Understandable. The Ukrainian situation is serious, and nobody knows how it will play out.

Least of all, it turns out, Tislenko himself.

“I stopped reading the news about two months ago,” he told me. “I don’t even know what’s happening. I live in my own IT world.” Toward the end of our Skype conversation, he paused to find the right words in English: “When you’re not thinking about bad things, bad things aren’t happening in your life,” he finally said. “Something like this.”

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