About
About
info@comprest.ca
Step 1. Go camping with a leaky Air Mattress in May 2014.
Step 2. Sit at the fire thinking, "Wha? How do I?... what the... WHY do I even… Why go to bed if I’m just going to wake up cold and grumpy -in an air mattress taco- at 5:27 in the morning? Not enough air, not enough mattress, and too much ground.”
THEN you think, “My bed at home is awesome. It never pops and it never leaks. All that goodness and it’s thanks to foam. I really do appreciate foam, it's a bummer foam is just too big for camping.”
“Man, it'd be sweet if you could vacuum-pack it.”
THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING.
Step 3. Get obsessed with the idea of the world’s greatest camping bed. Experiment with foam, pumps and vacuum bags. Have a crude prototype built in 2 months.
Step 4. Go camping again. Realize the vacuum packing sucks, and not in the good way. But foam is darn comfy. Get some beautiful people to sleep with it and show off some Vacuum-Packed-Action.
They like it. I mostly like it. My mom definitely likes it.
Step 5. Finish your Project Management contract and instead of looking for another Engineering job - give yourself 1 month to source parts, some from China, some from Canada. The dollars seem to make enough sense, there are some uncomfortable unknowns, but you’re an entrepreneur now and you can figure it out. So you start working part time jobs all of 2015 to give yourself as many CompREST-days as possible.
Step 6. Use freshly picked parts to build 3 battery powered pump prototypes. Build 10 vacuum packable beds and get 80 friends to sleep on it. After they've slept on it they still like me.
Step 7. After a few months of design, start 3D-printing sexy plastic components. Very exciting. Get quotes for injection molding. $$$! Dayum! Hop in your hammock to ponder the meaning of life, what is money anyway? But then regroup immediately.
Alright, let’s do this.
Step 8. Throw your first Kickstarter. You make the goal $95,000 because that's how much it costs for the first production run. You've never marketed anything except for good parties. But you don't care, it's $95,000 or nothing.
Step 9. You get NOTHING.
shit.
Step 10. Build a new website, get a small business loan, learn how to find more great people who like cool beds. (Thank you ”cool bed people”.)
Step 11. Launch again on Kickstarter with everything you've learned and hit your funding goal.
It was AWESOME!
Step 12. Deliver 480 of the world's first vacuum-packable camping beds to 16 countries.
The AMAZING backers that supported your Kickstarter are now in turn comfortably supported by CompREST.
They say admitting you have a problem is the first step. Our solution is a 12 step program called “Starting a Company.”
My name is Sawyer and I hate air mattresses. And I’ve been air mattress free for 24 months.
This is our Kickstarter Video. We didn’t do too shabby. 178 backers bought 250 CompREST beds and we raised a total of $42,388.
We continued taking sales on Indiegogo through 2017 and finished with a total of $53,666 in pre-orders.
You can check out the video below and our campaign page here:
How to set up your vacuum packed CompREST camping bed.
How to vacuum pack your CompREST camping bed. Smooth jazz included.
25 second video.
2 minute video.
4 minute video.
Use of air mattress often leads to:
Are you an air mattress user or do you know someone who is?
Have an air mattress problem? Are you ready to take the first step?
CompREST Kickstarter 2.0