KickStarter: Doing Versus Planning
We are live on KickStarter. To say the experience has its ups and downs would be an understatement. We want to try and capture a sense of this tumult so it might be of some use to others.
{Well, what we really want is to say something so unbelievably apt and pithy — something that so perfectly captures this moment — that it goes utterly viral and drives 4 bajillion eyeballs to our little campaign. But failing that, let’s just get down in words some things that the past 48 hours have shown us.}
FloatHub is a low cost marine electronics device and online service to enable remote vessel tracking for recreational boaters. A couple of days ago, we pulled together some thoughts on what brought us to this point. We’re really a small side project that started years ago with an itch. We just wanted to know what was going on with our boats when we couldn’t be on board.
And over those years, on a part time basis, we’ve built a really useful thing. We’re confident it’s useful because we use it all the time. We have friends who’ve installed one and begged us to try a commercial launch. Our small group of field testers have had positive things to say (along with some very helpful suggestions for improvements along the way). Fundamentally we know it’s a good product because we made it. From the circuit board to the housing, from the microcode to the web interface, this is our dog-food and we really do eat it ourselves.
There’s an engineering imperative that says, essentially, truth will out. In other words, if you create something that represents genuine quality, it will drive its own adoption. This is the school of thought that argues the iPhone wiped out Blackberry not because of slick marketing and clever ads, but because they fundamentally built a better product (e.g. it had a web browser than could, uhm, browse the web). Microsoft can spend as much as they want on advertising; competent teams are going to run mission critical infrastructure on Linux.
When we were planning our KickStarter campaign, we kept reading about clever marketing hacks or suggestions for “driving social media traffic.” And the little center of hubris in the back of our brains kept thinking, “yeah, that would be nice, but we won’t really need that because our offering is just self-evidently so good.” Like many engineers, when we really admit it, we often think of marketing as something that inferior products use to make up for shortcomings in their design or execution.
So now, in the doing of actually starting a campaign, we are realizing we were, well, wrong. Although our backer numbers are roughly on track to reach our target, they are not exactly comforting. It is agonizing to watch backers trickle in every few hours. They truly have no idea how grateful we are when they do. Between Google Analytics and KickStarter’s own tools, we can watch users arrive, see them start the campaign video, jump to some text, and then — ever so rarely — click that green “Back this project” button. Our traffic is low, and our “conversion rate” is lower still.
Of course, all of this should have been utterly obvious. But we somehow failed to fully grasp it in the planning stages. A good product is, of course, very important. But in the trenches (in the doing), we’ve viscerally realized that KickStarter is fundamentally a numbers game. The more people you get to see your page and the more people it is likely to appeal to, the more backers you’ll get. Eyeballs times “conversion rates” sounds like marketing gobbledygook. It isn’t.
To make matters worse, we face an extra challenge in that our offering is not a generic consumer product. FloatHub uniquely appeals to boaters, and is only likely to generate real excitement among boat owners that also happen to have some electronic or other technical background. That is not a massive potential audience to begin with.
Before we finally get a little sleep, we have one central piece of advice for anyone contemplating a similar path: On top of all the product details, the campaign video, the banking/legal/accounting minutiae, and all the other million things that you have to get through to get to KickStarter, spend some serious time thinking long and hard about where your eyeballs are going to come from and how difficult it might be to convert them.
And when they do come, thank them profusely :-)
