Crowdfund Your Brilliant Idea, And Launch Your ‘Thing’ in 2015
The feeling associated with birthing a physical product, a brand, website, app, logo, widget, program, finished canvas, etc. — anything that contains a small part of your personality or DNA in its essence — and putting it out into the world, is a drug; an addictive, roller-coaster ride of positive and negative ions colliding and creating invisible energy that funnels cash into your business.
Now is the time.
How do I know it’s the right time? Because the perfect time doesn't exist.
Is money the issue? “Don’t ever worry about money unless they owe you,” said Pete Farelly at the DO Lectures. And whatever excuse you use to NOT do something — don’t connect that feeling to your fear.
It’s the deathblow.
Luckily, technology can eliminate fear. Crowdsourcing on two of the most popular platforms (Indiegogo and Kickstarter) can help you slay the beast by raising money and galvanizing a community to launch your product or business.
There are so many great stories about a crowdsourcing campaign that went over the top. (If you know of one, feel free to share it.) The insights I am distilling here are from several campaigns that I’ve enjoyed as an Internet consumer, beer drinker and marketer.
Why Crowdfund?
Maybe you want to turn a hobby into a business, or you finally want to put that “million dollar idea” to the test. Here are five ways to turn your Kickstarter campaign into a Fortune 500 company, or at the very least, turn your garage into a distribution center. Follow these basic tips on how to create a successful campaign and launch your “thing” in 2015.
- Solve a Problem or Make Art
Marketing 101: When you peel back the layers, you better be doing one of two things with any business idea or product launch: solving a problem for your potential customer, or creating a product that touches their soul. Making art is NOT about painting a beautiful canvas, it’s about connection and resonance with your product or message. If you can do one of these two things effectively, the world is your oyster.
Joel Heath launched his Indiegogo campaign for FluidStance to eliminate a very real issue in our tech culture, which is that we have become professionally sedentary. “Sitting is the new smoking” is a mantra I have heard in our very own workplace, and several co-workers have taken to stand-up desks. Just this past week Apple CEO Tim Cook made reference to this “sitting is cancer” phenomena as well.
FluidStance is a design-driven idea with a great name and crowdsourcing story that hammers a simple message applicable to anyone reading this sitting down at their desk. FluidStance features a patent-pending technology that “elicits subtle, constant movement below your feet to increase your range of motion and heart rate.” By the time this post goes live, FluidStance will have achieved over $260k in funding on a $40k goal. Clearly, products like this will continue to proliferate in the market.
Another approach entirely is to NOT solve a problem, which is exactly what the North Drinkware guys did. These Oregon natives made a commodity item very cool; they made art. They took their love of the local mountains and transformed it into a hand-blown beer mug with Mt. Hood as the “reward” at the bottom of the glass. It’s the perfect craft beer pint glass for the skiing/snowboarding and craft beer-drinking class. They’ve successfully capitalized on the groundswell for locally produced products.
Hard to believe that their $15K “ask” ended up surpassing $500K.
2. Get Analog
Thank your pal Mark Zuckerburg for the new algorithm on Facebook which ensures the only way people see your posts is by forking over cash. Sure, tweet your guts out, but unless Bieber throws you a bone with a retweet, your platform isn’t going to blow up overnight. So, let’s brainstorm a few ways to stoke the fire on your campaign. Oh wait, here’s one… get off your butt and hustle.
The North Drinkware guys likely had no clue as to how popular they were going to be, so after pumping up social media, emailing friends, and generating their own groundswell, they took a lesson straight from action sports: Hit the parking lot after the event. North Drinkware’s Matt Capozzi shares, “The day before the launch, we even had our seven-year-old passing out brand cards in the mountain parking lot after a family day on the hill.”
Hand-to-hand combat is by no means scaleable, but where better to connect with your market than the base of the very mountain featured in your product? Don’t overlook the obvious.
3. Feed the Machine
PR agencies keep the lights on because they know how to game the media landscape. After all, they helped invent it. Do not forget that. Most entrepreneurs are trying to turn 50 cents into a dollar, so recognize that it’s OK to make $1 feel like $10 — by hiring professionals.
In January I went to CES and collided with a very cool Chinese brand called Jide run by ex-Google software engineers. Their idea was simple: take an android system, build an email client for the hardware, squeeze it into an interactive display and built-in keyboard, and voila, you have an instant productivity tool that can replace laptops. As they were Kickstarter-ready in January when I met them, I asked Global Marketing Director Jason Zheng from Jide how they planned to enter a market dominated by brands like Apple and Amazon. He laughed.
“We’re not trying to compete with these guys… we’re trying to build the best product we can and solve the problems we have in our own daily lives: mobile productivity. This is how we approach this. It’s not ‘Hey let’s take this space from HP, Dell, or Apple.’ We are focused on mobile productivity. That’s all we do.”
Jason explained the opportunities he wanted to create for his launch, and then his PR agency he hired translated it into a U.S. and Asian go-to-market strategy:
- Selling the American dream in China
- Tapping the entrepreneurial energy in the US
- Selling a hunger for upward mobility that you can feel across the Chinese social strata
Jason is smart enough to know what he doesn’t know, so he turned his problem into an opportunity. Yes, a PR firm costs money, but it also costs him if he doesn’t do it; a PR firm can pay for itself in one media placement.
4. Channel Your Inner Scorsese
We’ve all seen bad student films, or worse, movies involving complex female relationships.
This is not what I am talking about.
Tell a story with video. Humans are natural storytellers so write a script, keep it simple, and stick to it. Talk about the benefits of the product, not the product itself. If you need some inspiration, open your Sunday newspaper and look at the coupons. See the toothpaste ads that sell whitening? Cavity prevention? Tartar control? Those are benefits. Somewhere in an office in a large multinational corporation sits a disgruntled MBA graduate trying to figure out what benefit will ring the bell to eek out an additional .05% market share at CVS. Benefits convert to sales.
Do not cut corners on shooting your video. You might think they’re optional, but really they are not. Projects with video are 85% more likely to achieve funding. Generally speaking, 56% of projects on Kickstarter fail to get funding. That’s how important selling and storytelling are, nearly 6 of 10 projects fail. Study the messaging of the successful campaigns. The Jide team will ‘win’ if they can successfully tell a story about a niche productivity tool. North Drinkware won, because they told a great story about how the Oregon outdoors inspired them to create something unique that felt locally relevant. When you do both well, product and story, it can look like the product launch from ex-Nike designer Scott Wilson from MNML. He talks design, sport, materials, benefits, and then drops words like “fetish” and “obsessed” as he discusses his infatuation with watches. His story spoke to designers (through materials), athletes (specifically runners as Scott shows he uses his product to integrate with Nike +), watch nerds and Apple fanboys.
Product connects, story converts.
Tell a story, keep it simple, sell benefits, and be authentic to who you are.
5. Sell the Why
This seems logical right? Before you start to figure out what your positioning is and why you get out of bed in the morning to do it. Take Jason Zheng from Jide and the ultra tablet they are marketing called REMIX. He knows that Apple and Amazon are the Goliaths in his category. (Note: Jason was quick to point out that David ‘won’ that battle. However, I don’t know for sure if David hired a PR firm after he threw the stone.) But Jide is a great example of selling the ‘Why.’
Zheng continues, “Eventually people replace their devices like their laptops. At that moment we want Remix to enter into their consciousness as an option. Look the whole point is to create a system and a device for you to never have to carry a tablet and a laptop again.”
6. Be an Agency
Ad agencies, have found it necessary to evolve rather quickly since technology has completely flipped the media landscape.
But here’s what they do well and you should too: They look at objectives and goals as one cohesive platform. Plus, they use the media as the message in all forms of communication. What you say in a newspaper ad need not be the same thing you would say in an web or TV ad. Geico nailed this with a campaign that supports their “15 minutes can save you 15%” tagline. To understand how this works, just watch this to see how a large company does it.
But this isn’t about ad execution, this is about integration. Linking your PR, email campaign, street marketing efforts, video, and product messaging into a story where everyone can connect the dots.
How did the North Drinkware guys get placed in the New York Times!?
The North Drinkware guys loved snowboarding and worked in the industry so they tapped all their contacts.
They love shredding, so they took the inspiration from a lifestyle that the knew would resonate with others (snowboarders and beer, yup).
They are marketers and designers, so their passion was baked into the final product and it screams at you from the well produced, natural, and ‘need-not-be-clever’ video.
Authenticity + storytelling = a good campaign. That’s the ROI math.
Don’t Let Fear Win
I will let Seth Godin take over for a second:
“Do not reason with the troll (that voice of insecurity and self-criticism). Do not argue with the troll. Most of all, don’t litigate. Don’t make your case, call your witnesses, prove you are right. Because the troll knows how to sway a jury even better than you do. Get off the troll train. Turn your back, walk away, ship the work.”
Those three sweet words, “ship the work” is The Way.
Why? Because giving your gift to the world is why we are all here.
Get crackin’.
