Why We Decided to Crowdfund (Again)

Published in

Hardware Startup Knowledge

5 min readApr 21, 2015

Four reasons we decided to run a second crowdfunding campaign.

Last November we set out on the incredible journey of running our first crowdfunding campaign. After weeks of preparation and 6 weeks of input from the newly found community, we realized our product had become something not just built for us by us- but developed with 2,500+ new Indiegogo supporters who helped through user testing, app integration decisions and functionality of the device. Crowdfunding again will benefit our first Indiegogo supporters by allowing us to deliver them an even better product at no additional cost.

The decision to create a second crowdfunding campaign is something we have been thinking about a lot in the last few months. Why have we decided to go for it? There are a number of reasons we want to share with our current backers and those who will back us through Kickstarter. Here are the main points driving our decision to run a second campaign and what we learned from our awesome Indiegogo backers to carry us into the next phase.

1. Ship more products, Ship better products.

Everyone says hardware is hard — and we agree, but this comes down to timelines and upfront costs. Creating a second campaign is a way for us to make sure that we can distribute more products that use higher quality materials — sound counterintuitive? It’s simple, our manufacturers want to create high volumes of our product because they only have to make the tooling for it once. This means that per item we ship, the unit cost drops and we can spend that money on higher quality materials.

Since we have already done the design for manufacturing, we can place larger orders to our German-based manufacturing partners, making them happier and allowing us to put even better devices into the hands of our community.

2. User Input is a Game-Changer.

When we began the campaign, we designed Nuimo for us and people like us. This worked really well but we quickly realized that our backers had great ideas to contribute to the development. We used a number of different ways to keep in touch with our backers and let their input drive our design process.

First, we asked them what they wanted:

We surveyed 2500+ Indiegogo backers to ask what stretch goals they wanted, what they do professionally and if they want to see other integrations.
Set up a facebook group of 100 backers to help make final design decisions.
Met over 50 backers in person in San Francisco and Berlin to see where they worked and how they would use Nuimo.
Posted an application integration page for which we got 120 suggestions on what to integrate next for Nuimo.

Then we realized their needs should steer the product.

We can't wait to grow this community even larger through our next campaign, so that in the future when we expand our product line we have a pool of creative thinkers to give user feedback. We will be shipping the improved version of the Nuimo for free with additional features to our first supporters who helped us get there — and our new kickstarter supporters who will join us in the future.

3. We have a New Story to Tell.

Our first campaign focused on the use-cases we known best, centering on young creative professionals like ourselves needing a tool for more precision and speed while we work. But we had a feeling that Nuimo could be much more than an addition to your favorite programs. As we hoped, our Indiegogo community confirmed this with an overwhelming 50% asking specifically for more smarthome integrations.

In response the first integrations for smart home we will be building are the following and will quickly be joined by many others:

Connected Music Devices (Sonos Speakers, Jambox etc)
Smart Lighting (Philips Hue, LIFX, etc)
Smart Locks (Lockitron, etc)
Smart Thermostats (Nest, etc)

Additionally, we have added a number of new features that we will ship to our Indiegogo backers and new Kickstarter backers. These additions include a infrared sensor, anodized aluminum finish, magnetic backing, rechargeable lipo battery and many more.

4. We want to help bring Kickstarter to Germany.

The final reason we have decided to launch a new campaign is because we want to be part of the coming launch of Kickstarter in Germany this May. Since Kickstarter was founded in 2009, they have slowly been reaching more and more countries with the platform. We believe in their mission to bring creative projects to life and this is an exciting moment for German-based hardware projects that we couldn't miss. We hope this will push more German hardware startups into the international spotlight and promote more creativity, making and building right here in Berlin.

As one of Kickstarter’s flagship German projects we hope to spread the word about local manufacturing, seamless user interface and our plans for the future.

Who Are We?

We are Senic, a Berlin-based hardware and software startup building our first product — the Nuimo controller. We are a team of designers and engineers dedicated to building the future of interface for the home and office.