A Tale of 2 Kickstarters - Part 2

If you didn’t read Post 1 - do it here. Gives the context of the 2 campaigns I am comparing from my experience on Kickstarter.

REFLECTION 2: Don’t Underestimate the Power of the Dream

SmartThings was selling the future. A fully connected smart home. A new way to interact physically with your world. A Jetson’s home today. And people get really excited about the future. Perhaps to the point of irrational exuberance.

I remember a time after the SmartThings Kickstarter campaign had ended where our CTO was on the stage at a tech event in Paris. And before that live audience he had a video feed going all the way across the world back to a living room in Minneapolis, MN. He raised his phone, pressed a button, and the lights on a Christmas Tree in that living room turned on. Magic. Turning on lights from across the world.

The crowd went nuts. Tremendous applause. More applause, in fact, than the speaker who had just finished before him. That speaker had been a lead on a tiny little project that landed Pathfinder on Mars.

I sh*t you not. Turning on some LEDs from a few thousand miles away got more applause than someone who successfully landed a spaceship on Mars 150 million miles away.

I have often reflected on the massive and seemingly inappropriate difference in response between these two incomparable achievements. My thought is that folks in the audience already knew and had fully processed that humans could land a robot on Mars and tootle around taking selfies. It was a present reality. But most people still hadn’t experienced a smart home in their day to day life. Even though technologies existed to make it possible, it wasn’t easily or practically accessible to them. It was still a dream except for folks like Tony Stark.

People want to believe in the dream. They crave it. And SmartThings was promising to make some of that future a reality today. Something that would change your world for good. And that sales pitch worked. The audience craved the future and wanted to talk about the future. We had over 2,600 comments on our project page. Engaged and aspirational folks, for sure.

Rated Cards, on the other hand, is selling a present reality. A funny and quirky reality for sure, but the product itself is well understood and exists around you. It captures a chuckle, but it doesn’t capture the aspirational imagination of the human spirit. The ‘what if’ and ‘what could be’.

While there are likely hundreds of examples that could be thrown in my face to prove this wrong, I believe there is an underlying desire of participants in crowdfunding projects to be sponsoring human aspiration. Reference this project to go back to the moon. That gathered what was likely over $1M USD in 2014. Chances of sending a probe to the moon? Probably nil. But backers want to believe in the dream. Backers are voting the future into existence with their dollars in a way that feels less commercial and less likely to just pad a corporate CEO’s bank account.

So my conclusion is that, broadly, the most successful crowdfunding campaigns you will find are selling a vision of how the future will be different. You’ll control your Christmas lights from Paris. You’ll make phone calls from your watch. You’ll be immersed in VR gaming. You’ll be able to blend a god damn margarita right there on the beach. Even your wallet will suddenly be thinner by the application of space warping Einsteinian relativity. Not a coffee table book about coffee tables.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dE5ROl2YPbs

The power of running a campaign on a crowdfunding site is you activate the passion of the community that already exists. And nothing achieves that like the sizzle of giving them the future before anyone else.

But the lesson here is actually one of caution, not exuberance. Selling the dream is a risky proposition on a crowdfunding site. While backers know there are risks, they back because they believe and they have real expectations and will hunt you down like a stalking lion if you pitch and ditch. An arduino-based proof of concept isn’t a miniaturized, production ready product. Technically possible doesn’t mean practically possible.

Our friends at Instacube, a campaign that was running simultaneously with SmartThings, struggled (I imagine financially) to finally produce the promised product though they did eventually deliver. And there are multiple projects live right now with hundreds of thousands of dollars that appear, to my now somewhat experienced albeit cynical eye, unlikely to deliver on what they claim.

So one conclusion might be, for a project and product like Rated Cards, it could have been just as effective launching the project on an established commerce site like Etsy, Amazon or even throwing up a Shopify site. The community of Kickstarter provided far less of a push in backers or eyeballs, though I retain the right to modify this statement through the end of the actual campaign. Kickstarter projects have a tendency to bounce in the final days as the community does get more excited. Plenty of interesting stats on that here.

The one argument against that conclusion is my cousin’s desire to have guaranteed coverage for the production expense of creating the product vs. creating inventory risk. By using a crowdfunding site and setting a tipping target, he could have assurance that there was ‘money in the bank’ before he had to produce anything. An alternative approach might have been to use a ‘roll your own’ crowdfunding platform like https://www.trycelery.com.

Net net - If you’ve got a product vision for the future, crowdfunding can be a tremendous platform to gain access to like-minded, spirited and deeply committed supporters who will pile in to make it a reality.

Next post, some more practical reflections on execution.