Launching a Technical Kickstarter — Solo: Open Source Security Key

Update: Solo is available at solokeys.com. In the US, you can also buy it from Amazon.

In this post I’m going to share 3 tips for a successful technical crowdfunding campaign, based on our experience with Solo Kickstarter.

Solo is a security key that protects your online accounts such as Google and Facebook against phishing. It’s the first key to be open source and to support the newest FIDO2 standard, that offers the strongest protection.

We’ve got 100% funded in 20 minutes, just passed 2,000 backers, and got featured by Kickstarter themselves as a “Project We Love”. We’re not one of the stellar multi-million dollar campaigns, but we can proudly say that we’ve done a good job. I think it’s also worth noting that secure login is an objectively hard space to be in, as if you search “login” on Kickstarter all 22 campaigns from 2011 to 2018 have failed.

There’s no shortage of articles and how-tos for creating successful crowdfunding campaigns, so I’ll just focus on the 3 things we found most useful in launching a successful technical project on Kickstarter.

Show how it works, use less technical jargon.

Our product and campaign are still incredibly technical, but we invested a lot of energy in simplifying our…