Kickstarter. One Week To Go. 150% funded. Partnerships with Roald Dahl and UCL. Phew!
It's been quite a rollercoaster ride since we launched Yoto on Kickstarter on the 1st November. We had a great start hitting 60% funded in the first day and then 100% in the first five days.
After the exhausting but exhilarating start we bunkered down for the inevitable mid-campaign doldrums that everyone that has had experience with Kickstarter told us would happen (it's true).
Two weeks in we were lucky enough to sign a deal with the Roald Dahl Literary Trust to bring the classic stories and characters to Yoto in new and exciting ways. This was a huge boost to us and proved to our prospective backers that we could secure some of the best names in Children's content to our platform.
Fast-forward to now, as I write, we are 150% funded and we announced this morning that we would be joining the EDUCATE programme - a joint initiative from UCL, Nesta, F6S and The Education Foundation initiative funded with ￡4.5m from the European Regional Development Fund.
This partnership gives Yoto access to world-leading experts and academics in the area of Early Years learning and should help us develop great educational content for the Yoto platform.
Kickstarter is a lot of hard work for raising modest sums of money but for us the funding is only one aspect of it. Kickstarter has helped us validate the concept, got us an initial customer base and forced us to make difficult decisions on product, pricing and positioning.
The boy scouts motto is "Be Prepared" and although it's probably applicable to almost anything in life, with campaign failure rates of 60%+, it's of critical importance on Kickstarter!
Yoto's Kickstarter campaign ends at 8pm UK time on December 5th