St. Paul native Matthew Mogol has seen modest success with his retail computer accessory, a Kid Lid laptop cover that lets children use notebooks without wrecking the machines or their data contents.
But the Kid Lid has not been a breakout hit, even though it is for sale via the Staples retail chain, and Mogol admits his New York State-based tech startup is on uncertain footing without a major moneymaker.
That will change, Mogol believes, with his next product, an iPhone case that performs roughly the same kid-proofing function as the Kid Lid. Yet even h
ere, Mogol acknowledges his timing may have been off, and this says something about the way people’s use of technology has evolved.
“If we had done the laptop product eight years ago, it would have been a huge hit based on people’s lifestyles at the time,” Mogol said. “Now, people are using tablets and smartphones.”
Given changing consumer preferences, he realizes he should have released the iPhone case first and laptop cover second, but he got the idea for the phone case when the notebook product was well under way.
Mogol this week is scheduled to debut a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign for the new accessory, called the Kid Lid Dual Function Case with Kid Mode.
The case looks much like other hard-plastic, two-piece cases that snap onto an iPhone to envelop and protect it from hard knocks. But with Mogol’s case, the bottom piece pulls off, flips around and slips back on to cover up the smartphone’s physical Home button.
It’s that button that gets children into trouble as they exit their kid apps and wreak havoc, like deleting their parents’ grown-up apps. Rendering the button inaccessible makes the phones kid-friendly and gives Mom and Dad much more peace of mind, Mogol says.
He initially plans to release a version of the case for the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6s, the smaller of Apple’s recent-model smartphones. Prices are tentatively $19.99 for the iPhone cases and $29.99 for the iPad cases.
Mogol said he already has a big order. The Buy Buy Baby retail chain, which has a store in Woodbury, wants 500 white units and 500 black ones, taking delivery of the cases soon after the Kickstarter campaign ends in March and paying for them in May, he noted.
But to accommodate this and other such large orders, Mogol said he needs to get better cash flow. After all, certain of his expenses — such as fashioning the heavy-metal injection molds for manufacturing the plastic cases — are pretty steep.
Projected income from his Kickstarter campaign, which has a goal of $12,500, will permit him to ship in volume, while starting work on versions of the case for the larger iPhone 6 Plus and iPhone 6s Plus. A case for the iPad Air 2 tablet also is on the drawing board.
