My name is Jennifer Pratt, and this is my first blog...ever.
Last year my husband and I came up with a really neat little tool for our back yard garden. Our first year of gardening hadn't gone very well. Our lack of experience, basic gardening know how, or tools to make the job simple...made for a very weed filled, space wasted, helter skelter looking garden that didn't give us much of a yield at the end of the season. So, we did some research on Square Foot Gardening and came up with a jig that would plant our garden quickly, easily, and in perfect grid formations. Actually we came up with A LOT of jigs. But in the end we managed to create a tool that lets gardeners plant all their seeds at the optimum number of plants per square foot in a grid formation...which incidentaly gives the highest yield possible and makes weeding a breeze! With our little invention comes a colour coded User Chart. By matching the User Chart with the Seeding Square (jig) and poking holes accordingly, gardeners are given the optimum spacing for each plant pre measured for them. Instead of painting-by-number we're planting-by-colour! Friends kept exclaiming in wonder at the orderliness of our garden and loved the fact that we constantly sent them home with bags of produce. (Because there was so much that we just physically couldn't keep up with it.) Then they started borrowing our jig...again and again. We decided we had something that could be a sellable product, so we got to patenting. So as of today we now have a Patent Pending status for a 20 year utility patent, a manufacturer ready to make the molds, and a bank account that can't support the launching of a product. This is where the blog comes in...
We've decided the only way to get this tool out to the world without giving a big chunk of our equity to an investor is to launch a project through Kickstarter. (Kickstarter is a crowd funding platform that helps entrepreneurs raise the funds they need to make their projects a reality.) And the best way to succeed at Kickstarter is to dive into the world of social media and try to get ourselves in front of as many people as possible. Ironically I've avoided most social media outlets to this point in life as I've never been terrible tech savvy. This has left me in a full on crash course on everything Social Media. In the past two weeks I've set up a Facebook Page https://www.facebook.com/TheSeedingSquare, a website (www.seedingsquare.com), two twitter accounts https://twitter.com/SeedingSquare and https://twitter.com/JennyGirl1979, an Instagram account (seedingsquare), a Pinterest account (Jennifer Pratt), a You tube account (Jennifer Pratt), and a Google+ account (Jennifer Pratt at seedingsquare@gmail.com)...oh and of course this Blog account. Talk about a learning curve! (Heads up...I haven't launched them all yet, so some of the links aren't live...as they say, "Rome wasn't built in a day".)
My aim for this blog is to post my thoughts on the whole Kickstarter experience, share how my garden is coming along and what tips I can throw out there to help other new gardeners, and of course; expand my social media network to raise the funds on Kickstarter to have the molds and a first run of product made. If you've come across this blog, like what I have to say, and want or like our invention; the Seeding Square... and would like to help us on our journey to getting our product on the shelves, please feel free to share this blog, and/or any of my various accounts and pages that I just mentioned. The amount we need to raise to make our invention a reality is $79,900. And we're going to try to do it in 40 days! EEP...so intimidating! But for all my enthusiasm to get this going...at this point I'm playing the waiting game. I've submitted the Seeding Square "project" to Kickstarter (two days ago) and am waiting to see if they'll let us onto their crazy and amazing ride. So here's hoping they like our idea!
I hope that was an okay first blog post. I'll enter more as things progress. Thanks for following along and all your support.
Cheers,
Jen
P.S. I had originally blogged this a couple of weeks ago, but am switching to blogger.com so am reposting it. Thx.
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