Kickstarted: How one company is revolutionizing product development

From the moment of its unveiling on September 1st, 2010, Scott Wilson, a self-described watch fetishist and former Global Creative Director for Nike, felt the desire to build a watch band for the 6th generation iPod nano. Not just any watch band, "Everyone is going to make a plastic one," said Scott whose goal was to make a band that he wanted to wear and maybe sell a few hundred to other watch geeks along the way. "Other people, even people in the studio didn't believe in what I was doing, they thought I was wasting my time."

A few months later, Scott took a chance and placed his TikTok + LunaTik project on Kickstarter, earning more than $6,000 in pledges on its first day. An impressive start driven by the project’s appearance in a November 17th Co.Design article written by Cliff Kuang. "There's nothing more validating," says Scott, clearly in awe that so many Kickstarter patrons would endeavor to help him bring his concept to market.  "I was coming off a pretty rough emotional partnership failure literally weeks before where I lost a year's worth of fees and development time," he laments in the matter-of-fact tone that comes from having a deep emotional wound healed with time. "It was amazing," he said, reinforcing Scott's belief that artists and designers sometimes do their best work in times of upheaval. "Let's see where this goes."

What happened next is the stuff of crowd-funding legend.

"We took a pool," said Scott, now speaking in the eager cadence more customary to this serial entrepreneur, "expecting it to hit $7,000 or $8,000, or maybe $10,000 by midnight." Feeling confident that he'd reach his modest funding goal of $15,000 well before the cutoff still a month away, Scott joined a friend at a bar for an interview. He left at 5:45pm, arriving at the bar by 6pm. Scott was greeted with a text from his wife as he entered saying the project was now at $22,000. "You're looking at the wrong project," he responded with a laugh. Minutes later the project had reached $30,000. Scott paused the interview to open the web browser on his phone, thinking "what the heck just happened?" What happened was a blog post by Kyle VanHemert of Gizmodo under the headline "The iPod Nano Watches to Rule Them All (Trust Me Here)." A few giddy drinks later it was at $50,000 and time to celebrate. "I called all the guys and we went to a bar by my house. The pledges were just pouring into my inbox, I just kept refreshing. By the time we went to bed, it was at almost $80,000." 

One month later, the project would close with $942,578 pledged by 13,512 backers across 50 countries. Thousands of people who, by way of their credit cards, said "I like what you’re doing Scott, and I’d like to be a part of it." Scott would sell 21,120 units on Kickstarter alone, selling more than 20,000 additional bands through his lunatik.com site. 

Then, on October 4th, 2011, Apple's Phil Schiller would stand in front of a 50-foot projected TikTok watch band as he revealed several new iPod nano watch faces to the world's media. "I was in the middle of a brainstorm, a client workshop, and my phone started going nuts," Scott recalled, "I was like, I have to look. One of the other guys from the studio was in the brainstorm with me, and we're like, thumbs up. I mean, holy crap!" 

Scott's now ramping his watch bands in preparation for the holiday season, even adding a new premium model and a modular watch insert in response to demand. He recently returned to Kickstarter with his second project: the LunaTik Touch Pen — it was funded after just three days into the 60 day campaign.

Studio Neat’s Tom Gerhardt and Dan Provost successfully raised funding for two high-profile projects — the Glif tripod mount and stand for the iPhone 4 and Cosmonaut wide-grip stylus for capacitive touchscreens. "It's super critical," says Tom, "The language of Kickstarter is video, text is secondary." Fortunately, Dan’s passion for film and knowledge of the tools required to produce a professional-looking video were a great asset to the team — the Glif promotion was shot in a day requiring only a couple of hours editing. "We didn’t think we’d sell a bunch so we didn’t want to spend too much time and money on the video." Glif would go on to earn $137,417 in pledges from 5,273 backers representing a 1,374 percent premium over Glif’s stated funding goal. Their followup Cosmonaut project fared almost as well.

Brendan Dawes agrees. The Creative Director at Beep Industries, the company behind the Popa (or Red Pop, as the project was known on Kickstarter) "big red button" camera accessory for the iPhone 4 / 4s, considers video the most important part of the pitch. "It's not about how slick it looks," said Brendan, "it’s that what you're saying is believable and honest. Does it come from the heart?" Nevertheless, Popa, like all of the successful projects we spoke with still created a high-quality video. In fact, the Popa team took things to a professional firm that learned of the project through Twitter. Daylight of Manchester, UK agreed to a strict budget set by the project, thus allowing Popa to shoot and cut the video in about a week for right around £1,000. By the time they were done, Beep’s Popa project had garnered pledges in excess of $48,000 (more than double its goal) from 611 enthusiastic backers.

Music is the other key element. Like the video, the soundtrack should set the right tone without breaking the budget. The team behind the popular GoPano Micro 360-degree iPhone 4 / 4S lens and video software tried, and failed, to gain permission to use "Crazy" by Cee Lo Green for its Kickstarter project. The team ended up licensing a song from an open music site instead. "We must have had a thousand people write in asking for the name of the song," said Brad Simon, head of Sales and Marketing for EyeSee360. "We only paid $15 for the song, we were going to pay Cee Lo Green a lot more but they turned us down." The Glif and Cosmonaut team went straight to the band for permission and then splashed a credit at the end of the video as compensation.

As Studio Neat’s Tom Gerhardt tells it, "Remember you're a human being trying to get other human beings to help you out. So keep it as simple as humanly possible. If you think it's simple enough, make it more simple." A sentiment echoed by GoPano’s Brad Simon who said, "For this to take off and to be as widespread as we think it'll be, it's gotta be simple." That simplicity and obviousness of the GoPano Micro design resonated with 2,685 people who pledged a total of $169,209 — 846 percent of the funding required to launch the product.

Comparing the Revolights and PumpTire projects is useful to understand how simplicity can affect funding. Both projects appeared on Kickstarter at roughly the same time, both made claims of revolutionary advances in bicycle technology, and both promised to deliver their respective products about six months after the funding was received.

In the end, Revolights — a lighting system that improves night-time illumination — was funded, PumpTire — a self-inflating tire — wasn't. While the latter would seem to be the more obvious candidate for funding, the technology behind the project raised more questions than it answered. The fact that PumpTire was still investigating the material science required to make a critical component more durable didn’t help its case.

We asked Revolights' Jim Houk why he thought his team's project was successful and PumpTire wasn’t. "I can’t say, I honestly don’t know," said the project’s self-proclaimed inspirational speaker. "The consumer really is the driver behind any of this. The market will tell you what products will work and what products won’t. I think they’re both viable products and both good ideas." After a moment of reflection, Jim added, "One of the benefits we had is the attention grabbing look of it. It’s a product that catches the eye and is something we got lucky with." Lucky to the tune of $215,621 in pledged funding from 1,442 people, well beyond the stated goal of $43,500. The fact that PumpTire set its funding goal at a seemingly insurmountable $250,000 out of the gate didn’t help its cause (the average Kickstarter project raises less than $10,000).

In retrospect, the PumpTire video pitch lacked what Revolights had in abundance: the "ah ha!" moment — an involuntary response felt upon seeing the Revolights used for the first time. It takes a full minute and 40 seconds to get there, but there’s an undeniable climax of understanding when the lighting technology is finally demonstrated.

When it comes to crowd-sourced funding, the bigger the crowd the more likely you are to reach your funding goals. This truism of Kickstarter culture is clearly illustrated by the TikTok+LunaTik project: a niche design blog picks up the story and captures the attention of a massive general interest site with millions of readers in tow. Some projects only require a spark to ignite a firestorm of funding. Others — the vast majority, in fact — require the concentrated efforts of the project team to steadfastly fan that spark into an accelerated burn of attention.

The Glif team had an ace up its sleeve for its Kickstarter launch. "When we first started, we just sent an email to John Gruber," said Dan Provost, "We were lucky because he had linked to my blog a couple of times in the past, so I wasn’t just a stranger coming out of nowhere, he at least knew who I was." Dan sent Gruber a prototype to see what he thought. "After he posted on Daring Fireball, we didn’t have to do much of anything. It just snowballed from there."

Brendan Dawes found himself in a similar position having had his group’s MoviePeg iPhone and iPad stand featured on Daring Fireball and other tech blogs in 2010. So when he decided to hinge the launch of his new company, Beep Industry, on the back of the team’s Popa Kickstarter project, John was one of the first people to hear about it. Here’s how Brendan describes it: "We were 48 hours in, with about $7,500 pledged of our $20,000 goal. I got on a plane and landed a couple of hours later to get a text message saying ‘the site is down!’ Basically John Gruber tweeted it and put it on Daring Fireball. It just went nuts — it brought the server down." The project hit the funding goal by the time Dawes completed the one hour journey home. "John loved the story of it. It wasn’t just the product, he loved that it was all about my dad. That’s what resonated with him." By the weekend Popa had amassed over $40,000 in pledges.

The Revolights team lucked out when Core77 posted a story about the project on the very morning that the Kickstarter project was scheduled to go live. "It was very fortunate timing," said Jim Houk, "Because of that we decided to get Kickstarter up now, and not wait for the afternoon." The Core77 post was only the initial wave of support. "We got pretty lucky in that the cycling community is very open and engaged," Jim said,  "People talk to people so we got a lot of secondary and ancillary reviews based on our original review from Core77. People started reposting that and putting that out to their own specific blogs and networks. It was kind of organic growth in that way."  The Revolights team didn't rest though, focusing its communication efforts on bigger technology sites until it finally landed a post on Gizmodo, pushing the project's funding over the top.

You may not know any influential bloggers but you do know how to setup a Twitter account and Facebook page. And you can certainly complete the tip forms so prominently displayed on major tech blogs. Everyone likes an underdog and technology journalists and bloggers love being first to bring attention to an inspired idea. Shrewd project leaders can, and should, exploit the very nature of tech blogging for the increased exposure they all but guarantee.

Execution

Funding is an important milestone but it says nothing about your ability to execute upon the commitments made to supporters. Once funded, the remaining 10 percent of the project will suddenly take up 110 percent of your time. And for all their help, you can’t rely upon the Kickstarter community to complete your product's material science research or work out the final details with your manufacturer, shipper, and fulfillment center. To make matter worse, you’re likely still employed elsewhere and you’ve already promised delivery dates that suddenly feel a tad too aggressive. At this stage you'd better have a firm grasp of what you and your team can, and cannot do. Then augment your weaknesses with additional people or specialist organizations.

Like many project leaders we spoke with, Brendan Dawes is more comfortable with digital design and Arduino kits than supply chain management, so he and the Popa team brought in Danny Kane of Glasgow's Meso Design to help out. Not only did Danny produce a prototype to the exacting specs required by the Popa team, he also had the relationships needed to manufacture the metal casing and plastics (in China), and the electronics and final assembly (in Scotland). "Danny is a pro and knows what he's doing," said Brendan, leaving the team to focus on its strengths of dreaming up useful new products. 

More often than not, the biggest obstacles to execution are not your known weaknesses but all of the unknowns laid bare by your relative inexperience. 

"Shipping and fulfillment is really hard and costs a lot of money," cautions Tom Gerhardt, reflecting on his struggle to send Glif to the project's backers. Fulfillment, in fact, was the bugbear of nearly every project leader including Scott Wilson, who already had some experience with outbound processing but not at the scale required for his iPod nano watch bands. "We found a good company — Shipwire — that does order fulfillment, so that worked out really well." In fact, Shipwire was the company chosen by almost every project we spoke with, partly because of its aggressive pursuit of funded Kickstarter projects but also because the project leaders we spoke with are generally happy with the service.

After the success of Glif, Dan and Tom returned to Kickstarter with their more ambitious Cosmonaut project, a wide-grip stylus for capacitive touchscreens. Whereas Glif was a rather simple piece of injection molding, Cosmonaut was an altogether different beast. "Going into it, we knew 90 percent of what needed to be done," said Tom, "It was the 10 percent that we didn't know that created the surprises." Surprises that would only be revealed through the various prototypes the team had to build — each taking three to four weeks to turnaround. "We greatly underestimated the challenge of finding a material that balanced conductivity, flexibility, and low friction." 

To complicate things further, the manufacturer the team used for Glif didn't have the machinery or capabilities required for Cosmonaut. Ultimately, Tom and Dan had to find an additional three manufacturers to assist with the final product, desperately trying to get their attention along the way. "We're amazed at how slow things can be, trying to get big companies to treat us with respect, to make us a priority." In the end, the delivery of Cosmonaut was delayed from June until December to the dismay of some of the project's 6,129 backers. Others, however — those who see themselves more as patrons than consumers — are happy to wait just as long they receive the uncompromised product that they backed.

The GoPano micro team suffered its own shipping delay, largely due to a defect caused by the "no lint" wipes used during assembly. "The wipes were leaving lint on the lens," said Brad Simon. A simple issue to solve in hindsight, but arduous to troubleshoot, and ultimately contributing to the decision to build some 500 testing rigs to search for imperfections. As a result, the expected ship date slipped from July until October with most backers receiving their units by November. "I think we could have kept people a little more informed as to what was going on," Brad, the archetypal salesman admits, "Maybe it was lost a little bit in the fact that we're tying to put this together and get it out the door."