Still has 12 days left, however, the Boona team, a new, buzzing tandem showerhead, reached its $10,000 purpose on Kickstarter last month, raising $619,733 in investment so far. While this kind of reaction is the dream of each and every founder who takes the crowdinvestment route, the crusade is not the disjointed effort of an amateur usually related to fundraising tactics. It took the team more than a year to plan and execute.
Boona, the product, was an original concept by Brett Skaloud, 38, and Jeffrey Feiereisen, 33, who worked together on mechanical and curtain engineering for Cashierless Amazon Go retail outlets. generate enthusiasm and traction, adjusting a tandem marketing and sales tool that is helping a company gain a foothold on multiple fronts. — and that a crusade that without delay exceeds its purpose of investment is no guarantee of lasting good fortune.
Boona’s origin story is the simplest component of the product’s adventure so far. After leaving Amazon, Skaloud and Feiereisen kept in touch, and their conversations were extensive enough to relate to their love life and private hygiene and, most memorablely, the intersection of the two. “Jeff talked about the frustrations of showering with his component. It turned out that my wife had just asked us to have two showerheads in the bathroom we were renovating,” says Skaloud.
As engineers, the pair might have been able to start assembling in a garage and hacking together a prototype of a two-head shower. of family members. They said the unconventional concept needed to be validated through a marketplace of committed buyers before spending a lot of time and money on it.
In March 2021, they embarked on a year-long effort that included surveys and tests through friends and family, followed by national surveys driven through social media campaigns, product testing with 50 people, Facebook advertising to create pre-orders, and then, of course, the Kickstarter campaign. “We did a lot of due diligence. At each stage, we spend a little more cash and increase the amount of feedback we receive, to this trust,” Feiereisen said. (Unsurprisingly, he met, learned fluid dynamics, and designed dozens of versions of the tandem showerhead that would eventually become Boona, which can be pre-ordered starting at $249. )
The Kickstarter crusade wasn’t part of the initial plan, but it became a logical step for Boona’s founders, who had already raised 7,000 pre-order fees on their own website. Even with that number, they sought greater validation. “Kickstarter gives you the feeling of an area where creators and consumers can come together,” says Feiereisen. “We felt it was worth paying for that trust. “
Accepting this as true with the broader audience provided through Kickstarter doesn’t come cheap. The platform charges successful project owners only around 10% of their income, through a payment of 5% of the total budget raised, plus 3-5% for processing the payment of each of the commitments. According to Kickstarter, to date, less than 40% of the almost 560,000 projects introduced on the platform in the last 12 years have been successful; 640 of them have raised more than a million dollars.
For the creators of Boona, the charge is even greater, in terms of work. When they weren’t designing the product, they devoted almost all of their runtime to their marketing efforts. Much of that time was spent creating documents that would be used in their Kickstarter Campaign, whose homepage only consists of 2,006 words, 12 photographs, 11 illustrations, 10 GIFs, and nine videos.
They also took significant advantage of their own pockets, hired lawyers to start the business, and hired photographers, designers, and San Diego crowdfunding consulting firm LaunchBoom. They examined 20 film studios before hiring LaunchLight Films, a small Atlanta video center that specializes in crowdfunding videos, to make a flashy promotional short of a couple laughing in the shower with Boona showerheads.
For the engineering couple, perhaps the biggest expense was the time they spent learning marketing before posting the Kickstarter campaign. Neither had been active on social media, and Skaloud says creating and maintaining a presence while juggling all other facets of the startup has been his goal. The biggest tension of last year. For Feiereisen, it was about making the launch video. “It was really uncomfortable for us as introverts. It was very tense. , however, I actually don’t need to do it again. “
Feiereisen and Skaloud are very happy that their mission has only about 3000 contributors, but they hope to have more for the rest of the campaign. “We have a long way to go,” says Skaloud. $10,000 investment purpose and its internal purpose. While they are still in the process of establishing their production chain and source for Boona, Feiereisen says they can meet existing orders, without needing any employees, until January 2023.
What they are still concerned about is whether their concept has been validated in the market. What is the correlation between Kickstarter orders and orders they can assign on their own site through 2023 and 2024?
“If it can be identified as a pre-order opportunity, that’s a pretty false basis for saying, ‘Maybe there’s a company here,'” Feiereisen says. “But honestly, every step of the way, we’re informed and try to understand what that means in terms of having a real business. How do sales now turn into sales when you’re a genuine company with a product available right away?
It’s nothing they’re going to be informed about in the next 12 days.