$100k in 30 days! – ErgoDriven launch strategy for crowdfunding
Fundraising Launch Course for Raising Money for a Product Company
- Kip's crowdfunding plan. 0:00
- Introducing kip perkins, co-founder and ceo of
- Planning for the 100k campaign.
- The 10 months leading up to going public.
- Building a standing start.
- What is content generation and how does it work? 3:22
- The shotgun approach to content generation.
- How to find the right audience for content.
- The importance of being generous as a content creator.
- The psychology of influence.
- Topo is a specific solution to a larger problem set.
- Benefits of stealth mode.
- How not being stealth has helped their product. 9:52
- Early prototyping at Tech shop, tech shop and big distributor.
- Crowdfunding and community building.
- Why minimum viable product is so important.
- Creating valuable content early on.
- How to build excitement for your crowdfunding campaign. 15:38
- The biggest mistake people make when reaching out to customers early on.
- One to two months before going public, ramp up on key communications.
- The importance of asking the right questions. 18:47
- Sharing feedback from beta testers and testimonials.
- Building an email list with one blog post per day leading up to launch day.
- Three tiers of friends, best friends and non-supportive friends.
- The fourth tier, people who don't remember.
- How long should email templates be? 24:47
- The text length of some of the email templates.
- Prepping for the launch.
- No articles on launch day.
- Finding bloggers and influencers to write about the product.
- Strategies for petitioning influencers. 29:35
- A specific strategy for petitioning bloggers.
- The first time is not the only time.
Start Motion Media
Hi, welcome back. Today we have a really interesting crowdfunding expert with us. He's seen some good success. So introducing Kitt. How's it going? Kitt.
Kit Perkins
Good. How you doing today? Michael?
Start Motion Media
Doing good. Why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself and tell us a bit where you're coming from?
Kit Perkins
I'm Kip Perkins, co founder and CEO of ergo, driven make the topo. Mat. And with Topo, we raised $100,000, in 30 days.
Start Motion Media
Wow, that's really something. Was that part of your plan from the beginning?
Kit Perkins
Yeah, absolutely. You know, we were starting with basically no money and wanted to take the bootstrap route, you know, mostly to preserve ownership, actually. So crowdfunding, you know, has been on our radar since before we even knew what we wanted to build.
Start Motion Media
Okay, so when you were planning for 100k campaign, like, how far ahead of time did you actually go? Before you were going public with your your campaign page?
Kit Perkins
Yeah. So I would say we started sort of laying the groundwork, probably about 14 or 15 months ahead of time. And then in terms of, you know, real actionable steps, I would say we started about 10 months ahead of time.
Start Motion Media
Okay. Wow. So that's a great deal longer than a lot of people think of when they're conceiving of going public with a project. What was it that was happening during those 10 months, that led up to going public with your campaign?
Kit Perkins
Yeah. So, you know, obviously, creating a product, in our case, creating Topo. Right, there were tons of iterations of prototypes and testing internal and external, right, and that's, that's gonna eat up a bunch of time. So we, we thought, during that, during that time, what can we do to maximize the likelihood of success of our future crowdfunding campaign. And so the biggest thing for us, and I think, for most people, was Lead Generation, or, in our case, building an email list. So those 10 months, that was a lot of content generation for, you know, blogs in the niche, setting up our own site, quitting sitting.com Getting pages up on our website, like standing desk calculator that, you know that I encourage people to leave their email address for future updates. So we could you know, on launch day, when it was time to go, we hadn't, you know, sort of wasted all that time. And we're starting from a standing start, right, we already had been building a community, we had a community to launch into.
Start Motion Media
Wow, that's really something. So it sounds like you were you created a blog and some calculator that was kind of tangentially associated with the product that you were hoping to launch? Yeah,
Kit Perkins
absolutely. So in looking for, you know, we sort of knew we wanted to have people to launch into right. And then from there, it's just deciding sort of how focused that group needs to be and how to easily reach that group. So for us, it was, you know, we picked picked a nice, you know, sort of narrow focus on people who already own standing desks. And then we said, okay, so people who already own standing desks, what are they going to be Googling, what are they, you know, interested in reading? And went at it that way?
Start Motion Media
And so once you kind of had that information of who the audience was, who you knew would be good candidates? Can you go into a little bit more detail? Like I'm because I'm, I'm sure that when someone like not everyone understands, like, what is content generation? Like, what is it that that you can do to actually help people who are potentially your ideal candidates kind of become aware of you even before you're going public with your big idea?
Kit Perkins
Right. So you know, so a big, right, some people define a startup as just a product market fit search engine, essentially. And, you know, part of finding that product market fit is learning about issues that your potential customers have. Right. And so, oftentimes, you find issues that are too small to productize, or, you know, just sort of don't fit as a product. Those can often be great blog posts, right? So that sort of thing, when you're doing research on, you know, right, you can really just Google standing desk issues and find blog posts that people have, you know, people have their own issues in forums right there saying I have this pain or that pain or fatigue, or I can't get myself to keep doing it. Right. So that sort of stuff. You say, Okay, well, obviously, there's at least one person with this problem are probably more blog posts or are free essentially, especially when your time is cheap early on. So just for us, it was more a lot of the content was sort of that shotgun approach, right? Find, find at least one person with a problem and try to solve it for him in a blog post.
Start Motion Media
And you found that even on a new blog just by reading this content and readers were finding you. Yeah, absolutely.
Kit Perkins
So most of the time, you know, most of this sort of like big early momentum stuff. It just so happened that we would strike a chord with somebody who had a larger following. Which we didn't do intentionally, and we perhaps could have, although some of this stuff would have been hard to predict. You know, for example, we did a post about why it's better to stand barefoot. And there was a barefoot shoe company, zero shoes, who, you know, happened to see the post, somebody sent it to him, right, because they do barefoot shoes, and they thought it was awesome. And they were posting it all over social media and had a pretty big following already. So that gave us a little kickstart there, you know, there were a few of those. But I think if you're writing good, original content, that's sort of bound to happen.
Start Motion Media
Okay, so I've really loved this, because what you're showing me is that it's not necessarily like the article that does it. But it's creating an article that engages a human on the other end, and the actions that that human takes. So in this case, someone was inspired by your content, they shared it with a friend who happened to have a larger following, and suddenly, you were getting a lot more traffic to that blog.
Kit Perkins
Yeah, absolutely. And I, so I think there's a book, key Aldini, I think the psychology of influence, which, you know, we looked into that stuff, a lot really good for copywriting in general. But we try to focus on the positive, the really positive, sort of, you know, bright aspects of that. And one of the big ones is, you know, writing stuff that actually makes people smarter, because, you know, people like looking smarter, you want to share stuff that makes you look smarter, or made you feel smarter, right, that you had a positive feeling when you were reading. And the best way to do that is just content that actually helps actually improve your life.
Start Motion Media
Okay, so it seems like being generous as a content creator is a big key. I'm still a little curious about this, this differentiation. I know that there's some sensitivity in, in the startup world around development, and like, we can't go public with our big idea until the prototype is ready, and we're having our big launch. And I'm sure that was, you know, in some degree is the same for you. What was it that you did to be able to create content that was meaningful, but still didn't? Like showing your competitors necessarily what you're working on?
Kit Perkins
Right? So that's a really good question. So for, for us, we basically just broaden the scope a little bit, right. So, you know, Topo is a very sort of specific solution in what we see is a larger problem set that, you know, are, our human design is sort of mismatched to the modern environment. So if, if you take just one step back in your sort of, like philosophy cascade, often it opens you up to a bunch of topics, so you can write, we still talked about Topo, like problems, you know, pretty specific to Topo a fair amount, because we're not big on stealth mode anyway. But if you are more sensitive to that sort of thing, right, just taking one or half a step back, that cascade sort of broadens you up, and you can talk about things that you know, will be of interest to, to those, you know, future potential backers, but won't give away your secrets.
Start Motion Media
So I'm really curious about that. Like, what is what are the benefits that you've seen from like, not paying that much into the stealth mode concept?
Kit Perkins
Yeah, so honestly, I think that's one of the biggest mistakes you can make. Because honestly, if you're, if your solution is so easily copied, that, you know, you could just tell somebody at a bar or something and they'll start making it tomorrow, you're going to have trouble even once you're established, right? Even if you get there first by a year, people are going to catch up and copy you anyway. So it's not right, just starting with something that needs to be stopped. That's sort of a weak position to be in. Beyond that, right? There's so many connections that you you know, somebody asks what you're working on, and you tell them honestly, right? Chances are good, they'll know at least one person who would find that interesting or know somebody who, you know, worked with a material that might help you. I mean, we found just so many so many connections that that were really helpful to us just by being open and honest and excited to talk about what we were working on.
Start Motion Media
Wow, very interesting. So during that 10 month lead up to going public, in addition to content creation, there was a certain amount of relationship building that you saw happening. Can you tell me a bit about that side and and did some of the people who you met and connected with around your product during that time end up being your buyers?
Kit Perkins
Yeah, absolutely. So I'd say the sort of single biggest example of that is, we did a lot of our early prototyping at Tech Shop, which is, you know, a great sort of open machine shop for developers. And yeah, so we just like shot some footage while we were making an early prototype at Tech Shop posted on Twitter and big distributor in this space happened to see it, I thought it was really interesting call this in for a meeting and they ended up placing a huge bulk order for Topo, like in the week leading up to the crowdfunding campaign. So they I mean, they cut our gold down like 80%, just right there, just from a tweet, they happen to see, you know, of prototyping exercises. So that that's definitely the biggest example of how not being stealth at all really helped us a lot.
Start Motion Media
Yeah, I'd say just looking for some, some recommendations you might have, like, what is it about communicating and really being involved in the community of inventors that someone can do in order to facilitate more of those connections? happening?
Kit Perkins
Got it? Yeah. So. So you're sort of bound to be going into spaces, right. So you know, we ended up a tech shop, because we needed machines to prototype with, right? I imagine a lot of makers are in a similar position. So even just being really social with the people you run into. And you can, you know, try to push them to meet other people. If you're interested in that for us, we, we tend to focus in doing that online. So it started right before we were building lists. We were sending polls to our Facebook friends asking, right, which of these logos do you think is better? And just sort of, you know, kind of open sourced a lot of the a lot of building up to the crowdfunding campaign. And we definitely, you know, like, we include a glossy insert with every Topo shipment that asked you to visit the startup guide online. Right? So it's a little bit of effort to once you get the, to get it to go to this website. And the first, right all the crowdfunding backers, we had like 92% actually went to the website, right. And nowadays, if you just right buy from a distributor or somebody, you get the mat that that number is down below 50%. So obviously, we really fostered this, you know, much deeper connection to the product, we had a pretty bad delay in crowdfunding, and the backers were super, super positive about it. Like nobody was asking for refunds or getting upset. I think that was because, you know, we included people early and often, we built up this community and we got people, you know, we were a B testing logos, right, sending out surveys for shapes, what colors do you want to see it in? So we knew even before? Even before we hit go on the campaign? We had done some market validation, some community building.
Start Motion Media
Yeah, totally. And could you share, you know, with some of the people who might not be familiar with this idea of like a minimum viable product, or really including your, your audience in your development process? Like, what why is that so important?
Kit Perkins
Yeah, so this sort of lean development methodology, which includes an MVP, or minimum viable product. So I think it actually sort of grew out of software, because it's so cheap to iterate there. But the basic idea is, right, you're, you may have an idea, right? But the ultimate solution is going to be used by everyone else. So the earlier you can include everyone else in crafting this solution that they actually want, the better it's going to be. So the way that functions with an MVP is basically you, you come up with, you know, what's the bare minimum I need to create to test this idea. And so for us, that was you know, even before Topo it was different platforms and standing stuff, right, we were running hundreds of beta tests all over the Bay Area, getting people just testing it constantly. And that gave us tons of feedback, you know, we never would have had if we were forced to just like holed up in a room and never ask anyone what they thought, like the final product probably would have cost three times more wouldn't have come in colors and it wouldn't have electronics in it. And all that stuff would have hurt us big time.
Start Motion Media
Wow. Yeah. Yeah. And so you saw that, you know, some like some of this minimum viable concept even applied to your logo, you're like, Well, we have three options now. Let's take this to our potential clients and let them decide or with these what these questions and answers like the
Kit Perkins
surveys or surveys Yeah, yeah, so that was definitely very useful. I mean, you you have to be careful not to border on indecision, right? Like you can't you gotta be asking people to decide everything for you. But certainly, right the the big stuff and anytime you don't have like a good sort of engineering driven reason to decide that's a that's a good sign that you know might be worth a survey. And you can write segment your mailing list so you're not bothering everybody all the time. Just ask him quarter that people Every fourth question, something like that. But yeah, we did, we did absolutely use it a lot and got a lot of benefit out of that. And we still do use it a lot.
Start Motion Media
Wow, that's great. So definitely a few takeaways are, you know, creating valuable content early on, and blogs that are going to, you know, ultimately motivate people to want to share, because it's something that makes them feel smart that they've gotten this new information. And then being involved in the community, both, you know, forming these relationships for people who you're going to need to know in your industry, and also talking to your customers as early as possible.
Kit Perkins
Right? And then I would say, you also want to, right, so one mistake I've seen people make when they reach out and connect with their customers really early, is they sort of, you know, assume, right? You've answered a few surveys for me, right? You've been on my mailing list for a year now. So as soon as we launch, I'm sure you're gonna buy it. Right. I'm sure you're gonna back our campaign. And so I've seen some mistakes there. And I think you still, you still need to, like really try to build excitement for the campaign. So what what worked really well for us was, we wrote like a four part blog series that was basically like, everything you need to know about the development of Topo was the first post, right, and then two, three, and four, were about setting up crowdfunding campaigns, right, or about how we were doing it, specifically, you know, how we set up our fulfillment, stuff like that. And so it was like, you know, this is getting very real. And we're showing our cards that like, most of the work is done at this point, right? So for the people who've been following along, it's fun to share this, right? Because instead of just saying, like, Oh, here's a cool blog post I saw, right, you can post that and say, I've been following these guys since the beginning. And they're almost ready to launch. Right. And that's, that's a way more fun feeling when you're sharing it, right? Like a you feel exclusive, you feel part of it. And it's way more fun, right? You're way more interested in that, if you see that in your newsfeed to that like, oh, a friend of mine, you know, knew about these guys way ahead of time. That's cool.
Start Motion Media
Yeah, so you're seeing that people actually love feeling involved and behind the scenes, and that they wanted to share some of the growth that they had witnessed. Okay, so let's focus now on that, like one to two months leading up to going public. So you mentioned that you, you basically got a plan of ramping up on some key communications. Tell me a bit more about that. Like, what what was it specifically that you wrote about that helped people know that you were trustworthy? And then what else went into it?
Kit Perkins
Yeah, so as far as trustworthy goes, which I think that's a really big one. So I don't, I'll get back to the rest of question. But I want to sort of pick that out first. It's really important to be like your authentic voice, especially in these really early community building. And it, you know, it doesn't necessarily have to be like how you talk to your friends when you're at a bar or something. But right, choose choose an authentic voice that really resonates with you and make that your Brand Identity early on. And, and have it be, right, like, the whole point of this is that it's early and exclusive and interesting. And, you know, fast iterations, right? So I see a lot of people trying really hard to sound like big corporation at this stage. And I think that's really counterproductive. I think you want to sound more like one or two guys who are working hard to get something done. And, you know, you're being more professional than you might with your friends, but not over the top right. But anyway, getting back to the larger question, so in the one to two months leading up. So just by sort of, you know, necessity of the design process. The questions, the survey questions are sort of more specific at that point, which I think helps you, it helps you actually visualize having the product more. So that's just sort of a natural, like lead up to, to a purchasing or a backing action. But you know, so in that time, you're asking questions, like, Well, what do you think of these textures and these colors, you're starting to share feedback that you've gotten from beta testers that's been really positive. Right, and you can even share, we shared at one point, we had sort of a, you know, like, head to head match off between, like, half the beta testers liked this feature. And the other half, you know, didn't like this feature and wanted something else instead. And so we we shared that in an email, you know, the sort of face off that that we were dealing with and what we were going to do about it and why you know, and that right, that's sort of a fun story. It's, that's an easy thing to remember to sort of sticks in your head a little bit. And then again, those those last four days, I think were really big, just one one post right after the other like, you know, you can feel it building to that way. It almost like the clicking up a roller coaster. Right.
Start Motion Media
And so those four blog posts that you mentioned that was that was one per day leading up to your launch day.
Kit Perkins
That was Yeah. So we launched on a Tuesday. So we did you know, one on Monday, Sunday? I think we did. Only weekday. So we did one on Monday, Friday, Thursday, and Wednesday beforehand.
Start Motion Media
Okay. Wow. Yes. So what you're noticing is being really generous with the people who you want to be your customers with all of the specific details that you're deciding on, like, we're looking at this texture, and we had we had this question come up, and here's some new information. And then, you know, even getting to the point of sharing the positive benefits that some people who are already experiencing the product got to have. So that testimonial component was present, even before people had a chance to buy.
Kit Perkins
Absolutely, yeah, and we've actually seen continuing benefits from that even now that I totally didn't expect, but like, you know, occasionally we'll get a comment on Facebook, like, I really love it. But I wish this one little thing were different. And we'll have, you know, original backers from the campaign commenting like, oh, actually, I read a blog post about why they did that. And just like, sort of we built this community that talks on our behalf even at times.
Start Motion Media
Wow. So okay, so tell me a bit about what you did to sort of prep your lists. So we're looking at that last month, you know, you've you've been building this email list, and actually talking to it, it's not like you just had a launch page with this, this content plan, and the emails were coming in, but you were saving them until your big announcement. You know, you had this ongoing content plan. So was that the only list that you made? Or was there like other groups that you were creating in terms of friends and Family or, for instance, influencers? Or bloggers? And like, just tell me about your list building process when you conceived of Like, who do we want to communicate this to?
Kit Perkins
Got it? Yeah, so I'm a little obsessive compulsive about that sort of thing. I think. So mine was probably especially detailed, but it was certainly useful to be able to segment it this way. So I had it, I had my personal stuff separated into three tiers of friends, which I asked all our, you know, the rest of the company to do as well. Right. So that's, you know, people who are going to support anything you do. People who It's not awkward to send an email to, but you're not really close. And then people who it's like, yeah, you might get flagged as spam because you met this guy once or something, right. And then the actually, we had a fourth ring beyond that, which is like people who aren't even going to remember who you are, but you happen to have their email address in your personal email. So that's all that's all personal stuff. So as employees, we had templates that we, you know, that we sent out from our own personal accounts to friends and stuff, and then
Start Motion Media
you developed a specific template based on what that kind of like, level of relationship was. So for the best friend who you know, loves you, you're speaking to them in a different way than the person who you've just met once.
Kit Perkins
Right? Yeah. So that's it. Anytime we have a segmentation, it's because we're sending a different template, which is why this many segments can be kind of a pain. Like, why was that important? Oh, that makes sense. Yeah, so I think, right, so obviously, great friends, you know, there's right, we're enjoying this, like, it's gonna sound very robotic or something, but it's this great human reciprocal relationships, I don't want to send a friend of mine, like, Hey, we're launching today, you should buy it because XY and Z, right, I want to say, as you know, I've been working on this really hard and I really appreciate, you know, the support you've given me in these ways. Right? Whereas, you know, someone you've only met once can be, hey, this might be weird, but I happen to have your email address. And you might think this is cool. Right? It makes the person receiving it should get a very different message based on what they already know about the project and how well they know you.
Start Motion Media
Yeah, definitely designing that that direct email marketing copy to, to be equivalent to who you're talking to, you know, and I just want to share my experience. There's such a desire to get the backers that sometimes for your best friends, like I've seen people writing long emails, you know, like this is, you know, four or five paragraphs explaining the whole thing and why this is important. And it's it's kind of disrespectful to send like, what clearly is a mass email to your best friend when you probably could have just given them a two liner. Let them know that you're live and had the link.
Kit Perkins
Yeah, no, I totally agree. And that right, that's, it ends up feeling very incongruent. Right that you're right. You're supposed to be this small company fun. on an exclusive right, and then if you're just getting mass emails that don't quite apply to you it, it really really clashes with your sensibility, right? You're much more willing to accept that from, you know, someone like Amazon, for example.
Start Motion Media
So, so just a question on that. How, like, what was the actual text length in some of these email templates?
Kit Perkins
Yeah, so it depended. So actually, the way we did the closest friend ring was you have to write every email individually. No, copy pasting is I think that's the best way to keep it from sounding inauthentic. So you know, some of those were kind of long if people really helped a lot or something. Some of them were really short for people who helped a lot, but we had just talked to last week. Right. So that varied a lot. And then going beyond that this sort of the next year, those I think we're fairly long. You know, we're talking that much text, that's kind of the longest I would send to a friend. Okay, that's
Start Motion Media
still like that's on the order of like, one and a half paragraphs. This is not like, yeah. So there's something there's some way of like really respecting people's inboxes and saving your big pitch for the sales page that you've designed, rather than trying to do the whole pitch in an email and then having it repeat?
Kit Perkins
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, there's no, right. I know, for a fact anytime I open an email, and it's just a wall of text, right? I automatically have a feeling, right? Just this question flashes across my brain, like, can I just delete it? Right. And I don't I don't want to put anybody in that position.
Start Motion Media
Yeah, beautiful. Okay, so. So you've got your list together, you had the list that you had been working with people who are finding you in this highly targeted content strategy. You had your personal friends and family list? Were they for the personal friends and family who weren't on your main Topo mailing list? Were they prepped in any way? For the launch? Like, was there like a, hey, just want to let you know, this is something that's happening soon. Was that something you did?
Kit Perkins
Um, no, but that's a good idea, honestly. But yeah, if we had thought of it, we would have definitely.
Start Motion Media
Okay. So then the next question is, what about bloggers? Like, were you able to land any articles on your launch day? And just tell me a bit about that process?
Kit Perkins
Yeah. So. So we had terrible, terrible luck getting any coverage at all. We talked to, you know, write weeks ahead of time, talk to bloggers, who we knew were interested. And they covered, you know, similar products, products for the exact same demographic, everything, couldn't get anywhere. But that's okay. Because, you know, we, rather than just trying to get our message out through a bullhorn, right, we view bloggers and influencers as, right sort of outsourcing our potential customer education. Right. So we want to find audiences that will just get it right away. Because, right, because, you know, the reason they're grouped around this influencer is because that influencer gets it or right espouses knowledge that will result in you getting it so we focused on, on influencers, who, who would totally identify with the product, and that was that was pretty successful. So Katie Bowman was the biggest one for us. But we had Dave Asprey, Richard Nikoli, Rob Wolf, right. So a lot in this room, there's sort of a common thread there, and that they really identify with natural movement or natural lifestyles, and we knew their readership would too. So even though it's a much smaller readership than say, Huffington Post, right, the audience is so highly qualified that the read conversion rate, so to speak of their readership is really, really high. And it's right, you're sort of paying it forward to in the community, right, getting them that sort of the ability to mention this exclusively, or more exclusively, and keeping it that fun community thing, at least early on.
Start Motion Media
Yeah, totally. Okay, so it sounds like the more traditional news outlets, like you didn't have much success with, but when you found a writer who you knew would be really interested in it, even who had just small amounts of readers, you were able to generate some articles that way.
Kit Perkins
Absolutely. Yeah. And so the, in terms of a specific strategy there, right, so you have to do something, right. You can't that the email has to include a picture or a link to a video, right? They have to know that his real to even get interested at all. Keep it short, respect their time. And then you're ideally you're not asking anything the first time, right? You're just saying this is what we're working on. If you have any interest at all, let me know. Right and leave the ball in their court don't try to pressure them because they get right. They're getting hundreds of emails a day, from people like I have this product. You know, here's a link. post about it, please tweet about it, you know, anything. And then, right, just like any other human relationship, right, realize their people, if they're interested, and they want to talk about it, right, talk about it and have a fun conversation. And by the end of it, right, they'll just like you enough that they'll be asking what they can do to help.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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