Jan Sapper grew up in Guatemala, did his Bachelor in engineering in Vienna, completed his Master's degree in Business Management in London and is currently working on optimizing the iPad.
In 2012 Jan started "Sapper Limited" with the intent of creating the MacDock; the most awesome docking station for the MacBook – ever. This journey brought him through all stages a startup goes through market research, building a community, filing patents, managing teams remotely, sourcing components in Europe and Asia, launching and managing a successful Kickstarter campaign and so on. All in all; Jan built an awesome product and in that process acquired competencies and gathered insights that anyone freshly out of the uni can only get by having his own startup. This adventure ended in tears, but what Jan learned in the process defined some essential foundation blocks for his later entrepreneurial path.
Jan joined Protonet's ranks in the Marketing & Sales team by the end of 2013 and ended up becoming Product manager there. As product manager at Protonet he created a product he is pretty proud of: Protonet's On-Premise-Warranty program. He also managed pricing & HW-product line and brought Protonet's private cloud servers to market. In his last months at Protonet he managed the phase-out the Indiegogo campaign for the ZOE home automation hub. The campaign hadn't run as hoped and Jan was assigned to refund 300k USD to over 1000 worldwide supporters. A side from crowdfunding he hadn't experienced before.
In 2017 Jan launched the PaperLike crowdfunding campaign with the goal of raising 2.000€, which ended up raising over 60k€. This "Hobby" back then has now grown to be Jan's main job, and he and his small team of decentralized people make PaperLike work.
In this episode, you will hear more about Jan's best practices on winning crowdfunding campaigns, how to multiply sales with YouTube marketing and much more!
