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KHARISMA MAGAZINE { PREMIER ISSUE 2018 }
WE REALIZED THAT MARKET CAMPAIGN ISN’ T THE SAME AS
Kharisma: I know you have a really unique story and journey into the crowdfunding space. What were you doing before you got into the crowdfunding market?
Khierstyn: Before I was crowdfunding, I was a start-up advisor. The problem with that business model was I was a little broad with my scope of services. I was basically a jack of all trades. If you needed someone for Infusionsoft( email marketing and sales), I would learn it. If you needed a sales funnel built, I would do it. This is just because I loved coaching and advising businesses. But, I also wanted to learn the online space, so I would just do whatever I can get my hands on at that point. Crowdfunding happened when I moved back to Canada from the UK and I started working with a client who, at the time, had this really cool business idea for a wearable weight loss technology and he said, I really want to do a Kickstarter project and I had no idea what Kickstarter was at this point.
I didn’ t really understand crowdfunding, but as we started looking more and more into it... as I had a lot more experience online than he did, but he had a really good visionary mindset with the product, so we decided to partner up and launch this thing on Kickstarter, but, we ended up not going with Kickstarter at that time, instead going with Indiegogo.
That first campaign was a disaster. We only raised $ 16,000 out of a $ 50,000 goal. We realized that marketing for a crowdfunding campaign isn’ t the same as marketing for just the general business, because there is a build-up period and a bunch of other factors. With that failure, we’ re like okay, well screw this, I’ m not doing crowdfunding again, but then we realized that for funding models, we didn’ t have enough to get the product funded and we had no choice, but to raise money again.
Our best option was going back to Indiegogo to see if we could relaunch the campaign. So, knowing we had to do it, we really studied to see what we did wrong and what we could do to improve to make sure that we at least hit our $ 20,000 goal the second time. So, we relaunched two months later with a $ 15,000 goal, and ended up raising close to $ 60,000 in a 40- day period.
Kharisma: Wow, that’ s amazing! Breakdown what crowdfunding is for our audience.
Khierstyn: Crowdfunding is such an attractive model, because 5-10 years ago, if you had a business idea for a product that you wanted to launch, the way that you would do it, is you would need to find money to manufacture the product, then manufacture it and then sell the product. But the manufacturing process and the prototyping is really expensive. You’ d have to go for angel investment, you’ d have to go to your parents, remortgage your house, get a bank loan... like, the process is just crazy. It’ s really dangerous, because after you spend thousands of dollars and years developing this thing: What if people don’ t want to buy it? Crowdfunding is actually the reverse of that model, where it allows you to put up a marketing campaign for a set period of time, and the goal is to raise money to bring your product to life.
For example, Pavlok was another project which we needed to raise $ 40,000 to manufacture the first run of the product, because we knew we needed it for tooling and manufacturing and stuff. The whole point is that you put up a marketing campaign on Indiegogo or Kickstarter. Customers can preorder the product, but they don’ t get the product for six months or nine months, but the product creator or the entrepreneur will be able to take that money from pre-orders and develop the product and then bring it to market. And I get the question
a lot: Why would someone want to support a campaign for a product they can’ t get for six months? It’ s because generally, people want to be a part of the novelty and new cool ideas that are out there and available to the retail market yet, and they