True, successful crowdfunding campaigns can be a potentially prosperous means of raising funds for a startup. However, too many people get too caught up in the monetary rewards, that they overlook the other benefits of launching a crowdfunding campaign for their product or service.
Read on to learn the other ways that a crowdfunding campaign can help you.
The blog post, "The Many Faces of Crowdfunding - It's Not Just About the Money," written by Lauren Reiterman originally appeared on Focus Product Design's blog and has been republished with permission below:
Great products are born out of great ideas and hard work, and in the case of the PantryChic Store and Dispense System, a need for better baking and ingredient preparation in kitchens where space is limited. But products like the PantryChic take strategy, expertise and little luck to launch - that’s why entrepreneur Nicole Sollazzo Lee invented her time and space saving baking appliance with the help of a product design firm - and turned to crowdfunding to support her product development.
But why should anyone do crowdfunding at all? Can this fundraising platform have other uses beyond raising seed capital for production?
Product Innovator Nicole explains why it’s not just about the money:
We want to hear what our potential customers have to say about design and what questions remain unanswered. Are there features that would justify the donation in our customers’ minds?
I’ve learned that there’s a good way to look at every part of the crowdfunding process. Backer feedback, for instance, is an opportunity to make your product better. Yes, you can get all sorts of comments and questions - but most of them voice real concerns of real customers. You can get some really strong opinions about your marketing strategy.
The comments section of your campaign is one of the most useful places to focus your attention when the campaign is live. It reveals holes in your messaging and directs you where to put your attention before taking your product to the retail marketplace.
In the case of our product, backers posed questions about the system’s design and use potential. Sometimes it’s the simplest questions that you miss when you’re designing a campaign, so it’s important to step back and let someone else in.
Thanks to our conversations with backers online we decided to design a set of all aluminum augers to meet the demands of ingredients like brown sugar, while not adding a lot of extra weight. If you’re familiar with baking, you’ll understand this common problem bakers encounter during prep, like breaking up rock hard clumps of brown sugar to measure properly.
If you had to name key elements of crowdfunding success, which ones would those be?
1. The first is your product or idea. It needs to be pretty far along or people won’t feel confident investing in it andyou won’t be able to answer the hundreds of question potential backers ask you.
2. Next is your pitch. If you have limited experience in sales and marketing you will want to partner with someone who has a strong background and can help you structure your campaign to accentuate your products keyattributes.
3. The third element is the video. If a picture is worth a thousand words a video is worth a thousand pictures. Make it engaging, short and sell yourself and your idea.
4. The fourth element would be your promotional strategy. You need to be able to connect with people beyond your current circle. With the experience of two campaigns, I've learned many campaign best-practices for preparing and launching on both Kickstarter and Indiegogo.
Nicole discusses tips and strategies for building your campaign, personal network outreach and PR media strategy in greater detail in EFactor.com’s Dec. 11th Webinar, “Crowdfunding Strategies and Challenges”. Be sure to listen to the webinar as soon as the recording is ready.
The PantryChic Store and Dispense System is now live on Indiegogo, rising to their 50,000k goal.
Inventor of the PantryChic Store & Dispense System and founder and president of Nik of Time, Inc., Nicole S. Lee now holds two US Patents and plans on filing her third in the near future.
