I tried to find a solution so people could just click a ‘mailto’ link and it would fill in the info in their mail client, but since passing html into a mail isn’t really secure (or recommended) so it just can’t easily be done….

Suggestions please!

Twitter has a ‘find friends’ feature that allows you to search email addresses for twitter users though, so it’s quite easy to follow people on your list.

Export your mailchimp list and import it into a new email account. We use Gmail.

Now ask twitter to search this account, click the box in gmail that allows it and twitter will check the list for matching accounts.

We found over 400 people who had signed up but we weren’t following.

This is a useful extra point of contact since some people might have signed up but not realised you also had a twitter account.

As a bonus tip you can also import this list into Angel List to easily find out who might be interested in investing capital….

This time I though we’d try something new. Apparently the best time to send mails is around 10am, I guess more people are at their desk and more likely to open them but this is tricky to time when you have a massive list of mails.

MailChimp does have a “Send with Timewarp” Feature and also “Let MailChimp optimize time for maximum engagement” but these are both paid for options….

Instead what I did was export my list to excel and reorder the list by the recipients time zones. This idea isn’t perfect and about 2/5 of my list didn’t have that as an option, but it was a start. I suspect a lot of these were due to the fact that I imported my list from another program.

I wrote my campaign as a template and then was able to schedule each major time zone list to land at approximately 10am. The unknown timezone addresses I sent at 6pm GMT, which was 10am on the US west coast. Most of the list are Americans and Europeans so this is a reasonable guess.

The last three campaigns have had a 50% open rate over all, so I will report back in a week or so if this has improved. It took about 10 minutes to paste in all the values but if it drives up the engagement it might be worth the extra effort.

So how do you provide a reward or incentive for a thousand people to give £10 each?

Well, we have a ‘lowest investment competition’. Simply put, if you put in the lowest unique amount you’ll get a simulator after the Kickstarter. There are a couple of issues, first Seedrs might not allow it and secondly, even if they did, each campaign lists each investment amount, so we would need to ask them to hide all amounts under, say, £30.

If allowed this could be a nice way to encourage more people to invest a small amount with the change of a more tangible reward along the road.

We got some great feedback, they loved the idea, they liked the team and they liked the traction they saw we were getting online. We’re now on over 4400 Twitter followers, which is pretty great for a six month old account, about a dozen people are signing up on our website each day and we haven’t really started any promotions yet. We’re hoping that lot of you guys are potential customers and not just hoping to win a free sim.

Now we know that not only is VR going to be huge in 2015 and the first affordable motion simulator that hits the market will be huge. Perhaps you know this too.

Sadly the guys at HAX were not quite as convinced, but they had a lot of applications and it seems we just missed out. They also had several re-applications that they rejected last summer, which were offered a place this time around, and the message we heard was to “keep working on the project” since they want to see it move forward. We’re still in touch with them.

Getting into the program would have been a huge shortcut and we’ve spent the holidays reassessing what we need to keep going. Some people have urged us to start an Indiegogo campaign and fund the project that way, but we think that would be a little premature.

Instead we’re thinking of heading to China anyway to prototype, recruit some more staff and begin looking at partnering factories. We may reapply to HAXLR8R for the summer program but this is yet to be decided, they give not only $100,000 for a 9% slice of equity, but provide mentoring and support. We’d like think that we can perhaps go it alone but we’re humble enough to know when a helping hand is a good thing.

Instead we’ve decided to try a small campaign with Seedrs, an equity crowdfunding site in the UK. We say ‘try’ because they vet every application, so it’s by no means guaranteed but we think we shouldn’t have a problem. This gives our friends, family and a few interested angel investors a route to show interest in the project, while keeping everything legal and easy to manage.

So we’re planning on trying to raise a small, quick round to take us forward to China and this also lets us show our neighbours at HAXLR8R something amazing if we decide to reapply. Nothing beats a pitch for a hardware device like being able to try it in person.

If our campaign is approved then there will a lot more information about the market and our strategy, plus you can ask private and public questions. You’ll also see a video of the team and be able to check our facebook/linkedin pages etc.

But like anything to do with investing money I urge everyone to do some proper research, and if you don’t understand something, don’t invest. Seedrs is a very transparent platform, and we picked them because they’re more concerned with protecting investors than entrepreneurs. Right now they’re limited to Europe but they’re also about to accept funding from the U.S., hopefully in time for our campaign.

If this sounds like something you’re interested in then head over to Seedrs to see what they’re about. If you sign up with our referral code : G5QBJMC8 you’ll also save 50% on any fees, instead of them going to us. It also lets them know that we have people interested in our project which might push our approval through a little quicker. We’ll be letting you know when the campaign is ready.

Even though you can put in as little at £10 be aware it might be years before you see a return on your money, and while we don’t anticipate any billion dollar acquisitions…. you never know If you’re considering putting in a little more than that we’d like to hear from you, so we could plan a little better and hopefully keep the momentum going. Feel free to email us with any questions.

We think we’ve got a great project and we hope you do to. We’re still aiming to launch the Kickstarter this year and your name is still in the hat! Please remember to spread the word and feel free to forward our updates to anyone you think might be interested!

Aaron B ‏@Mr_Aaron Nov 6 10
Aditya B. ‏@legorobotdude Dec 3 10
Alex Achorn ‏@SquirlyFear Oct 28 10
Andrey Kim ‏@KimAndrey Nov 28 10
Angel Zamaki ‏@AngelZamaki Dec 1 10
Brilliant ‏@healthbis Dec 5 10
Cian OD ‏@cian4thewin Dec 4 10
David Guez – vrlab ‏@davguez Oct 28 10
davidgee888 ‏@davidgee888 Dec 1 10
dustinwish ‏@dustinwish Dec 2 10
Eric Yang ‏@Eric754 Dec 2 10
Facef Bookl ‏@FBookl Dec 3 10
FantasticBooks ‏@Fantastic_Books Dec 3 10
Jay Kawz ‏@JKawz Nov 30 10
Joerg Mosthaf ‏@Joerg_Mosthaf Dec 2 10
Joschka Rick ‏@JoschkaRick Dec 3 10
Josh Harmon ‏@TheJoshHarmon Dec 3 Virginia, US 10
Kit Fisto ‏@Kit_Fisto_swe Dec 3 10
L ‏@louise001001001 Dec 3 10
Lord Brimstone ‏@BrimstoneofBA Dec 4 10
Lucid Trips ‏@lucidtripsgame Dec 3 10
Mark Kane ‏@my_kane Dec 5 10
matias vivanco vega ‏@matash89 Dec 2 10
Michael ‏@xStealthLord18x Dec 3 10
OpenSpace3D ‏@OpenSpace3D Dec 5 10
Patrick Kay ‏@PATRICKJKAY Dec 5 10
RealityCheckDev ‏@RealityCheckDev Dec 4 10
Relaxis ‏@Relaxis Dec 3 10
Rennan Whittington ‏@Morthion Dec 3 10
Ruthalas_ ‏@Ruthalas_ Nov 28 10
Ryan Maskell ‏@unmaskRYAN Dec 1 10
Simulator Trends ‏@SimulatorTrends Dec 4 10
Spearhead ‏@Spearhead_Int Dec 3 10
SynthesisUniverse ‏@OlivierJT_SU Dec 3 10
Timothy Aspeslagh ‏@_66alien99_ Nov 29 10
Tom Ranson ‏@TomkinsonR Dec 3 10
VirtualRealityGamers ‏@GamersVR Dec 2 10
Никита Киосе ‏@crotopus Oct 26 10
Amnesys Gaming ‏@AmnesysGaming Dec 1 10
Annette Mary Moody ‏@AskAnnette Nov 27 10
Bobbit da Hobbit ‏@BobbitHobbit Oct 19 10
George Elliott ‏@shuflie Oct 21 10
Henrik Eriksson ‏@arkemiffo Dec 1 10
Jeff Barber ‏@DrawnKiller Dec 2 10
Johan Rydén ‏@Mr_Karmeck Dec 2 10
Kevin G ‏@kevnician Nov 3 10
Martin Godfrey ‏@MartinGD3 Oct 29 10
Reinhard Auer ‏@Aidan_Abacus Nov 17 10
Shade ‏@SinsationalsX Nov 27 10
Simon Champion ‏@GenericRage Nov 27 10
Thomas Neptune ‏@CTNeptune Oct 21 10
Zulkurnain Othman ‏@zulothman Nov 29 10
FitzZZ ‏@TheFitzZZ_YT Dec 3 50
George Elliott ‏@shuflie Nov 27 50
John Virgo ‏@Kerrrash Nov 27 50
Marco Melloni ‏@SirMehr Nov 27 50
Okona ‏@Okona Nov 28 50
Portal VR ‏@IzhVR Nov 27 50
Sascha Otto ‏@Kanie1978 Nov 27 50
turningtechy ‏@turningtechy Dec 3 50
野生の男 ‏@yasei_no_otoko Nov 28 50
Anvil Aerospace ‏@AnvilAerospace Nov 15 50
Beck András ‏@AndrasBeck Nov 15 50
Charles Cordova ‏@VR_kinects2_AR Nov 20 50
Duncan Cameron ‏@thedc950 Nov 27 50
Jason ‏@Carandiru Nov 15 50
lrosXXX ‏@lrosXXX Nov 16 50
Marvin Bentley II ‏@truevox Nov 27 50
MK ‏@MK84 Nov 27 50
n!Cola ‏@n1kolax Nov 16 50
n!Cola ‏@n1kolax Nov 28 50
Paul Pob ‏@lucyferror Nov 15 50
Simon Champion ‏@GenericRage Nov 16 50
Syrius de Goratrix ‏@SyriusGoratrix Nov 15 50
Taha Ozdemir ‏@tahaozdemir Nov 15 50
Tomas Mariancik ‏@Frooxius Nov 15 50

It flitted around the 13-15 position for a few days but then today I tweeted quite a lot of followers telling them about the raffle and perhaps that bumped up my position. I’m using quite a large screen so I’m not sure I’ll appear on everyone’s search but it’s moving in the right direction.

Twitter is weird, look at the #1 hit, they have 20k followers but only 150 tweets… someone snapped up @oculusrift and apparently abandoned it… Oculus really should take it back since they have a trademarked name now.

44.9% of the recipients opened the mail (11% is average for games) and 7.4% clicked one of the links (1.6% is average) so they’re both great figures. 22 people went to the haxlr8r website and 44 people clicked the twitter link. I’m guessing some people didn’t have twitter accounts because if you search twitter for #feelthree and then ‘find’ in the page the word ‘China’ you only see 24 tweets…

4 bad addresses and one unsubscription… at least I know it works now

I posted a few threads on reddit too to try to get some more support which probably generated a few extra tweets since we also had 50 more people sign up. Google analytics is also amazing for figuring out where much of your traffic comes from and what they actually do on your site.

I also took the liberty of putting the signup form on the bottom of all the fixed pages since people might miss it… lets see if that helps.

No word from HAXLR8R yet, but they were interviewing today too (which might have been a nicer spot) but we were pretty busy…

Name suggestions please!

Feel Three is still in the running for HAXLR8R…

Our pitch went well but the competition is fierce

Two of the founders spent an hour yesterday morning pitching to one of the HAXLR8R partners via Skype. It went well, but they have a hard job picking just 15 entries from nearly 400 applicants. At lot of the initial batch have already been rejected, so we cleared the first hurdle. We also asked you guys for your support on Twitter in the last update last week, and quite a few of you stepped up magnificently, but we’ve found out a lot of our mails ended up in spam boxes due to the unsubscribe link being broken. So we’ve moved over to MailChimp in the hope that Gmail, Hotmail and the rest won’t be so harsh. We’re now legal in every country and the unsubscribe button works perfectly.

So we’re asking again for your support, let the guys at HAXLR8R know that the FeelThree is on your shopping list for Kickstarter next year and we’ll show them that we have not only an amazing project but the backers to make their investment worthwhile. Once again, we’ll put your name into the raffle hat 50 more times if you help out before the end of November. Retweets also count so your followers also get to play!

So please spend 5 seconds letting twitter know about the project and pushing HAXLR8R to keep us in mind while they’re still interviewing and picking projects for the second round. This really makes a difference guys!

Link : #RT if you want to see the amazing #FeelThree VR motion sim get a second interview @HAXLR8R and get made in China ’15 j.mp/_FT

Remember that if we get in we’ll be blogging all about the experience, our progress and answering any questions, so this is a great resource if you’re thinking of applying to the program yourself in the future.

So if HAXLR8R doesn’t pick us is that the end of the project? Of course not, it would be a really great shortcut to the kickstarter and production but we’ve got plenty of other options to explore that we’re not able to share… yet.

We’re at 1800 followers on Twitter, email sign ups are still pouring in and the website get more traffic everyday. Something tells us that this is something you guys want.

As you’ve probably noticed we redesigned the base. It looks big but it’s actually the same width as the sphere, so it doesn’t take up any more space. It not only looks far cooler but means the part count is reduced since the four sides are essentially the same. It will probably be split too so it’s smaller to ship.

Thanks for your support guys and please spread the word!

Mark & the Team

@feelThree

Edit: Here’s a 30 second video of the feelThree in action

I think the only other way to improve it is to get more followers, improve the follower/following ratio, tweet more or put ‘Oculus’ in the title (we can’t put it in the user name now :p).

“FeelThree Oculus Sim” fits but it seems like cheating to do that… I might give it a week or two and try it as an experiment.

I’ve played with Facebook ads before for a previous failed start up so I have some experience with it. My initial disgust with paying for something I should be getting for ‘free’ wore off before when I realised that even though I have several hundred friends on facebook not all of them are really interesting in my projects. They might think they’re cool, but not enough to actually want to pay for them.

Instead we can use the demographics built into facebook to reach out to our ‘perfect potential customers’. So, men, living in the developed world, 18-35, single and interested in VR and simulation games. Putting that into the facebook ad generator gives me about 2m people who might want to give me their email for the raffle. I supposed I could include women as well but if my google analytics figures are reasonably accurate the feelThree is a 97.7% male interest. The prices for 1000 impressions isn’t to outrageous, about £0.24-£1.30, or they let you just pay for ‘clicks’. One of the best things though is the ability to use different pictures and see which is the most effective, plus trying the same advert with some slight variations and seeing which is more effective.

All you need is cash! :p

One of the more important things I can do to promote the project right now though is to create a decent 2 minute video explaining how it works and why it’s so amazing, but that will have to wait until I reinstall my broken Windows 7 installation. Then I’ll have to finally figure out how to properly animate the omnichain since that’s what people will want to see rendered…

I also added some tweet and like buttons to each post, at the top and bottom, just making it a little easier for people to share any posts they like and hopefully spread the word a little easier. I also got rid of the ‘DISCUS’ comment system, since I added it I’ve only had a few comments since you have to sign up to write anything, it looks like people couldn’t be bothered. I reimplemented the old system and added a ‘math-captcha’ so you have to solve an easy math problem to post, that should be enough to ward off the bot-spam my site is now attracting….

I also changed the ‘about’ line on out twitter account to read ‘Oculus Rift’ rather than #oculusrift which has moved us up to position 21 (from about 150) when you search for ‘oculus rift’ in twitter. I’m not 100% sure how they organise the list but I think it’s a combination of ‘oculus rift’ in your name, how many followers you have and where ‘oculus rift’ appears in your desciption, since a few people are higher than us and have less followers… It now reads ‘Oculus Rift Motion Simulator! ‘ and will take Twitter about a week to rejiggle the names. I doubt it will give us a million extra followers but Oculus get quite a lot of followers everyday, about 100, so if they search for them and click follow on us too just below them it’s a simple way to pick up potential customers.

Still no word from the HAXLR8R organisers, although they moved the deadline to the end of the month. My email to our mailing list asking for support was moderately successful, 14 people tweeted their support to @haxlr8r, nothing amazing but it shows we’re trying.

In the meantime I decided to do a little research in to KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators. Basically you head over to www.similarweb.com, type in the URL of your competitors in your field and it throws a bunch of information back at you such as the estimate of their traffic, where most of their links come from and where they advertise…. it’s really very neat, and free. A great way to check out other simulators.

It’s pretty hard to know exactly how many sales the other companies are getting but comparing our traffic to most of the others puts us in a pretty nice position already, despite only having a website for a short time and still have no product to sell. it seems most of the other sim makers out there are resting on their laurels and we’re going to swoop in and pick up all their potential customers!

Since I have my freshly revived skills of video editting back in use I think it’s time to put together a proper video of exactly what the feelthree is, how it works and why it’s so cool. This is long over due and means people will have a 5 minute visual demonstration of all the cool ideas we have and how we’ll manage to put it together so affordably…

Watch this space!

Today is the day we applied to the HAXLR8R hardware acceleration program in Shenzhen, China!

This is a great opportunity for us to kick the development into high gear since not only do we get a substantial amount of funding but we’ll be working on the project full time in the hardware and hacking capital of the world…

We’d ask you to wish us luck but there is something else you can do that would help even more.

It’s not enough to have a great design and presentation, we also need to show them that there are people in the world crying out for an affordable and awesome motion simulator. You.

So if you want to see the feelThree arrive sooner (rather than later) then please head on over to Twitter and let the @HAXLR8R guys know you want them to choose us!

Please just take the 5 seconds needed to copy this text into your browser and let them know you’re rooting for us!

https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=Good%20Luck%20with%20your%20@HAXLR8R%20application%20%23feelthree!%20I%20hope%20you%20get%20in,%20I%20want%20one!

You’ll need a twitter account of course.

As a bonus, for every #feelthree hash tag we see until the 20th of November sent to @HAXLR8R we’ll put you down for another 50 entries into the raffle.
Feel free (geddit :p) to change the text if you like but remember to add @HAXLR8R and #feelthree so we (and they) see it…

Also, the project now has a qualified Mechanical Engineer on the team, which is great news for the project (and our chances). If we’re accepted we’ll be adding a ‘Team’ listing to the site so you’ll finally be able to see who we are.

Thanks for your support guys, we’ll see you in game!

The feelThree team