Ok, there's a chance I'll gain some valuable insight from posting this, which beats the cost of putting myself out there, so here goes...
I just completed a 30 day hardware Kickstarter last week and spent $22k on the video ($18k for main video, $4k for founder interview) and raised $57k, which is an outlier to this data. I can tell my campaign is not in the Video Budget / Amount Raised graph because it would stick out near the bottom right. So it seems to me that something's not right.
The product is compelling and I think it shows in the video. Much of the feedback I got for the video was positive. And there are a couple near competitors that have raised $1M+. My internal goal was to break $100k and that did not happen.
Did I make a mistake with this video or campaign? I hit all of the points: early product intro, upbeat mood, 2:23, image quality, founder presence, location scouting and voice talent, and outside help.
I saw your prototype at a HDDG meetup in SF. I think your campaign was very well done. If you fell short of your internal goal, it might be price related. You are in impulse buy territory, but the product might be too niche for that price.
I ran a failed crowdfunding campaign back in July. We raised ~$25k of a $100k goal. We spent $7k on the video and another $500 on google, FB, and twitter ads.
The ads didnt seem to do anything. I felt our other marketing efforts were more fruitful. We wrote some guest articles for various tech websites and got written up by a few more that we reached out to.
In the end, we felt the price was too high, so we cut some features and dropped the price by almost half for a recent relaunch [0]. We also launched with no goal to remove all customers' doubts about receiving a product.
No offence, but that seems like an ultra niche product which may be part of the problem. Clearly some people like the idea but home automation + wood seems iffy to me. Worse only 4 buttons seems like a poor fit for home automation. One button suggest getting as many as you need, 4 is kind of an odd compromise.
I live in Lincoln, Nebraska. I'm a techie, but my house isn't.
I watch your video and don't identify with any of it. I don't have smart lights, a sonos, or any of the things you would use your remote for.
Here is the other thing. I would lose your remote about 100x a day if I had one. I live with 3 agents of chaos known as children and they would put it places I'd never find.
Last, it's $50, which as silly as this sounds... IS TOO MUCH. I balked at buying a $30 replacement remote for my Roku. It feels like as a user I'd just use a phone app for all of this or at some point tell my phone or some smart connectected Google/Apple/Amazon device like Alexa to do these things.
Worst of all, my tech friends look a lot like me and my less tech friends are even less likely than I am to want a 4 button wood remote for $50.
You built a beautiful product that is really neat, but it's really niche. Too niche for me to imagine it making more than $100k on Kickstarter.
In 5 or 10 years smart house tech might be more common, but I've been saying that for a while and it isn't there yet. I was thinking smart house startups a decade ago, so smart houses might be "the year of the linux desktop" problem...
Do yourself a favor, buy a copy of Gary Halbert's The Boron Letters on Amazon. Read it cover to cover, pay attention to his advice on selling hamburgers and your next product will sell 10x as much.
Have to concur with most; while there's some stuff I didn't like about the video (overall still a great video) - those wouldn't have held me back from buying the product.
If I wanted the product.
I have light switches everywhere I want light, and they have light switches close to them, or in sensible places. Putting them all on a remote seems useless to me, since then I'd lose it all the time, or it'd be in the other room, or whatever.
So nope; just not excited about the product itself.
What's interesting though, is that your data point wasn't in the data, and it might've changed the conclusion a fair bit. I wonder how many more outliers there were, and if 100 videos is even close to being enough data.
To start I'm probably outside the usual IoT demographic - it mostly doesn't deliver what I'd like. I looked at your campaign and thought it interesting, but didn't back it. Here's some entirely personal thoughts, make of them what you will - I don't expect to be very representative though! :)
I don't care to have my phone always around at home, couldn't care less about most apps. I even turn the phone off! Have always wanted not an Internet of Things but a local net, with a miniscule subset allowed near the net or usage slurping phone apps.
Was interested seeing MacOS app, hoping for a Pi or similar app further down. I liked that you can have say 3 remotes doing entirely different things or switching functions etc. Oh, bluetooth, iMac is usually in the other room to us in the evening (when I'm more likely to want a remote for something), so we're mainly out of Bluetooth range, and the Thinkpad is either on standby or being used.
Would have been more interested if a) the remote tethered to wifi to talk to the iMac, or better a low power Pi or similar hub so I don't need to care about iMac, phone and their apps just to remote music or lighting and b) there was a cheap n cheerful plastic option for the kitchen etc too. I'd probably look at a couple of plastic cheapies (to get dirty or lost etc) and one nice premium wooden one for the coffee table in main room.
People just do not care for home automation as much as one might think. I have bought various smart gadgets for various family members over the years, thinking that due to health/age/whatever that this smart light/whatever would be well received as a gift. You would think that having some remote to turn all the lights on/off with dimming would be very useful but someone that has their house lit up by lots of very individual lights actually enjoys interacting with the 'design classic' lights, dodgy switches and all. So you think 'better' is 'better' but it is to totally misunderstand the way it works for my relatives and friends...
So how do you reach a more picky audience and get the 'cool' that they do take on board? Not so simple. Maybe partner with another brand to get that cachet of cool, piggy back an 'ok' brand to get to market and defeat snobbishness. Or be Amazon and willing to take a big punt. Even then, with lots of advertising, it is not easy.
First time hearing about this product and watching the video. Beautiful video and well articulated, though was that guy doing yoga in jeans? ;)
I couldn't get my head around how it would work. How does selection work? Is it proximity to the thing you want to control? For me the video was a little too abstract. Maybe it would have just made sense if I was in the IoT space.
I agree the video is well made. The quality is on par with what you'd expect for that budget. And it hits on all the recommendations we derived from the video benchmark data.
Can you tell us more about your campaign tactics, other than video? eg. How big of a mailing list did you have prior to launch? did you advertise? any PR?
The video is very well done imo. However, it's only a small part of the overall marketing strategy.
What kind of marketing did you do? e.g. what kind of coverage did you seek / get?
What kind of market research did you do? e.g. did you do user studies and get feedback?
How did you determine the selling price? e.g. did you determine whether it was too low (if customers are price insensitive, then you can increase profit by increasing price) or too high (if customers are extremely price sensitive, then you have to accept lower unit margins to increase total profit)
Keep in mind that that plot is log log scaled. Your numbers really wouldn't look out of place on it. I'm thinking it would be close to the trendline, vertically above that bottom right point.
I never saw the economics of crowdfunding before, but this confirms what I suspected: crowdfunding isn't really about getting your project funded by the crowd, but about buying a structured platform to launch from.
It looks like a 10% non-refundable deposit is the entry ticket, plus a bunch of non-refundable marketing work on top. And you can't tell the truth about how much money you actually need for fear of not hitting your target.
I'm not saying there's a problem here, but this isn't how I envisioned crowdfunding in the beginning. I thought it was a promising way for makers without money to get started. But it seems it's become a place for people with money to advertise and execute market analytics.
Does anyone else feel that Kickstarter has turned from helping cash strapped startups and individuals raise funds for interesting projects into a low-risk small business pre-order system?
I feel it's a shame people are spending $20,000+ to try and convince you to donate them money, I don't feel it was in the original spirit of Kickstarter earlier on.
The little guy can still succeed on Kickstarter/Indiegogo. We saw many bootstrapped campaigns do well (60% success rate), with videos made in-house or in the $1-$3k range. It's just that the amounts raised aren't as impressive, on average, $25k vs. the Millions attained by glossy campaigns with deeper pockets and expensive videos. Getting in the crowdfunding hall-of-fame has gotten harder, but crowdfunding is still an effective tool for small projects.
Interesting information! I really like the analysis of video content, particularly the "founder presence" info. However, I think that the headline results that isolate video cost when looking at raise results is a bit of an odd way to do this analysis because it leaves out the rest of the marketing mix. I'm actually preparing a crowdfunding campaign myself (first time), and I'd think that the main levers for success would be, in no order of importance:
A: Pre-campaign support (solid email list, social media presence, etc), B: Video Quality, C: Rest of Page quality (ie: copy, visuals, etc), D: Paid advertising, E: Media Coverage, F: (Most important) Compelling product & pricepoint
Money Raised should be a function of a-f (and several other factors I'm sure I'm missing) so isolating any one of those variables on its own is not that useful. Presumably a campaign with a $100k budget for its video has also made significant investments elsewhere.
Something I'm still trying to figure out: assuming there is a limited budget, would one rather spend 20k on a video or 5k on the video + 15k more on Facebook ads? My thinking is that the 3M extra views (assuming $5 cpm) would be worth more than the marginal increase in video quality from $5k-$20k.
Granted, if there's a good ROI on online ads, the budget there should theoretically be "unlimited", but that's not always the case. Curious about other peoples thoughts here.
Totally agree. I think that's what we are seeing from the other comments as well. Video is only part of the battle, and a more complete study would look at all the variables together.
Video is interesting in that it accelerates your efforts in other areas. The time you spend making a better video should also help you reach a bigger audience (A), increase conversion thus making advertising (D) more effective, it probably helps with PR too (E) since media outlets prefer to show interesting videos, and with page quality (C) to a degree since you can reuse frames from the video for the page.
So back to your question! how much to spend on video is you have $20k budget overall. From an execution standpoint, we certainly see a sweetspot ~$3-6k for video, in that it allows you to get a clean professional video that looks legit. That's enough to hire a director with a small crew for a day and simple editing. If you spend less then you'll have to take on some of the director's responsibilities to make sure you hit on the requirements we found in the benchmark (location scouting, quality images, tight narration...) We wrote more about this here https://www.videopixie.com/how-much-does-a-kickstarter-video...
Many of the graphics here violate visual best practices, which can make them very misleading (the scatter plot in particular). The most egregious is the use of a log-scale on three of the graphics, which isn't highlighted at all. Humans don't compare and interpret log scales well (see The Elements of Graphing Data by Cleveland, etc.). I would've much rather seen percentages (say on return on investment) or break out the analysis into tiers that were more comparable.
Interesting. I've run two campaigns. The first we spent 5k on the video, and did 280k. The second campaign, we spent 2k on, and did 343k. I would say the video was negligible --- but the email list, marketing, product dev, and promos were far more important. As we prep for our third campaign, I'm thinking more about the video quality however.
It says you asked 100 campaigns. Does that mean you got 100 answers or you only 100 campaigns? I'm curious as to how the bias of who responded to you would affect your data.
Can any causality be shown? I'd think there is likely a correlation between money spent on the promo video and the amount of resources, name recognition, e-mail lists, etc that a company already has prior to running the campaign.
conesus|9 years ago
I just completed a 30 day hardware Kickstarter last week and spent $22k on the video ($18k for main video, $4k for founder interview) and raised $57k, which is an outlier to this data. I can tell my campaign is not in the Video Budget / Amount Raised graph because it would stick out near the bottom right. So it seems to me that something's not right.
The product is compelling and I think it shows in the video. Much of the feedback I got for the video was positive. And there are a couple near competitors that have raised $1M+. My internal goal was to break $100k and that did not happen.
Did I make a mistake with this video or campaign? I hit all of the points: early product intro, upbeat mood, 2:23, image quality, founder presence, location scouting and voice talent, and outside help.
You can watch the video here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/samuelclay/turn-touch-b...
blackguardx|9 years ago
I ran a failed crowdfunding campaign back in July. We raised ~$25k of a $100k goal. We spent $7k on the video and another $500 on google, FB, and twitter ads.
The ads didnt seem to do anything. I felt our other marketing efforts were more fruitful. We wrote some guest articles for various tech websites and got written up by a few more that we reached out to.
In the end, we felt the price was too high, so we cut some features and dropped the price by almost half for a recent relaunch [0]. We also launched with no goal to remove all customers' doubts about receiving a product.
[0] https://www.crowdsupply.com/aeroscope-labs/aeroscope-wireles...
Retric|9 years ago
turtlebits|9 years ago
I don't carry my phone around with me at home. And the second I leave my house it's useless to everyone else.
programminggeek|9 years ago
I watch your video and don't identify with any of it. I don't have smart lights, a sonos, or any of the things you would use your remote for.
Here is the other thing. I would lose your remote about 100x a day if I had one. I live with 3 agents of chaos known as children and they would put it places I'd never find.
Last, it's $50, which as silly as this sounds... IS TOO MUCH. I balked at buying a $30 replacement remote for my Roku. It feels like as a user I'd just use a phone app for all of this or at some point tell my phone or some smart connectected Google/Apple/Amazon device like Alexa to do these things.
Worst of all, my tech friends look a lot like me and my less tech friends are even less likely than I am to want a 4 button wood remote for $50.
You built a beautiful product that is really neat, but it's really niche. Too niche for me to imagine it making more than $100k on Kickstarter.
In 5 or 10 years smart house tech might be more common, but I've been saying that for a while and it isn't there yet. I was thinking smart house startups a decade ago, so smart houses might be "the year of the linux desktop" problem...
Do yourself a favor, buy a copy of Gary Halbert's The Boron Letters on Amazon. Read it cover to cover, pay attention to his advice on selling hamburgers and your next product will sell 10x as much.
Good luck! -Brian
richforrester|9 years ago
If I wanted the product.
I have light switches everywhere I want light, and they have light switches close to them, or in sensible places. Putting them all on a remote seems useless to me, since then I'd lose it all the time, or it'd be in the other room, or whatever.
So nope; just not excited about the product itself.
What's interesting though, is that your data point wasn't in the data, and it might've changed the conclusion a fair bit. I wonder how many more outliers there were, and if 100 videos is even close to being enough data.
anexprogrammer|9 years ago
I don't care to have my phone always around at home, couldn't care less about most apps. I even turn the phone off! Have always wanted not an Internet of Things but a local net, with a miniscule subset allowed near the net or usage slurping phone apps.
Was interested seeing MacOS app, hoping for a Pi or similar app further down. I liked that you can have say 3 remotes doing entirely different things or switching functions etc. Oh, bluetooth, iMac is usually in the other room to us in the evening (when I'm more likely to want a remote for something), so we're mainly out of Bluetooth range, and the Thinkpad is either on standby or being used.
Would have been more interested if a) the remote tethered to wifi to talk to the iMac, or better a low power Pi or similar hub so I don't need to care about iMac, phone and their apps just to remote music or lighting and b) there was a cheap n cheerful plastic option for the kitchen etc too. I'd probably look at a couple of plastic cheapies (to get dirty or lost etc) and one nice premium wooden one for the coffee table in main room.
wingerlang|9 years ago
Theodores|9 years ago
So how do you reach a more picky audience and get the 'cool' that they do take on board? Not so simple. Maybe partner with another brand to get that cachet of cool, piggy back an 'ok' brand to get to market and defeat snobbishness. Or be Amazon and willing to take a big punt. Even then, with lots of advertising, it is not easy.
lloydde|9 years ago
I couldn't get my head around how it would work. How does selection work? Is it proximity to the thing you want to control? For me the video was a little too abstract. Maybe it would have just made sense if I was in the IoT space.
its4tom|9 years ago
Can you tell us more about your campaign tactics, other than video? eg. How big of a mailing list did you have prior to launch? did you advertise? any PR?
trendia|9 years ago
What kind of marketing did you do? e.g. what kind of coverage did you seek / get?
What kind of market research did you do? e.g. did you do user studies and get feedback?
How did you determine the selling price? e.g. did you determine whether it was too low (if customers are price insensitive, then you can increase profit by increasing price) or too high (if customers are extremely price sensitive, then you have to accept lower unit margins to increase total profit)
sadok|9 years ago
tgb|9 years ago
ajiang|9 years ago
frgtpsswrdlame|9 years ago
kingling|9 years ago
It looks like a 10% non-refundable deposit is the entry ticket, plus a bunch of non-refundable marketing work on top. And you can't tell the truth about how much money you actually need for fear of not hitting your target.
I'm not saying there's a problem here, but this isn't how I envisioned crowdfunding in the beginning. I thought it was a promising way for makers without money to get started. But it seems it's become a place for people with money to advertise and execute market analytics.
tomcam|9 years ago
Scirra_Tom|9 years ago
I feel it's a shame people are spending $20,000+ to try and convince you to donate them money, I don't feel it was in the original spirit of Kickstarter earlier on.
egypturnash|9 years ago
its4tom|9 years ago
sadface|9 years ago
A: Pre-campaign support (solid email list, social media presence, etc), B: Video Quality, C: Rest of Page quality (ie: copy, visuals, etc), D: Paid advertising, E: Media Coverage, F: (Most important) Compelling product & pricepoint
Money Raised should be a function of a-f (and several other factors I'm sure I'm missing) so isolating any one of those variables on its own is not that useful. Presumably a campaign with a $100k budget for its video has also made significant investments elsewhere.
Something I'm still trying to figure out: assuming there is a limited budget, would one rather spend 20k on a video or 5k on the video + 15k more on Facebook ads? My thinking is that the 3M extra views (assuming $5 cpm) would be worth more than the marginal increase in video quality from $5k-$20k.
Granted, if there's a good ROI on online ads, the budget there should theoretically be "unlimited", but that's not always the case. Curious about other peoples thoughts here.
its4tom|9 years ago
Video is interesting in that it accelerates your efforts in other areas. The time you spend making a better video should also help you reach a bigger audience (A), increase conversion thus making advertising (D) more effective, it probably helps with PR too (E) since media outlets prefer to show interesting videos, and with page quality (C) to a degree since you can reuse frames from the video for the page.
So back to your question! how much to spend on video is you have $20k budget overall. From an execution standpoint, we certainly see a sweetspot ~$3-6k for video, in that it allows you to get a clean professional video that looks legit. That's enough to hire a director with a small crew for a day and simple editing. If you spend less then you'll have to take on some of the director's responsibilities to make sure you hit on the requirements we found in the benchmark (location scouting, quality images, tight narration...) We wrote more about this here https://www.videopixie.com/how-much-does-a-kickstarter-video...
arafa|9 years ago
maneesh|9 years ago
[1] https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/pavlok-breaks-bad-habits [2] http://indiegogo.com/projects/shock-clock-wakeup-trainer-nev...
its4tom|9 years ago
wingerlang|9 years ago
E.g. the video in another commenters post (the wooden remote) obviously hired models to appear in them.
vpontis|9 years ago
It says you asked 100 campaigns. Does that mean you got 100 answers or you only 100 campaigns? I'm curious as to how the bias of who responded to you would affect your data.
vdnkh|9 years ago
vpontis|9 years ago
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calchris42|9 years ago
unknown|9 years ago
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