The Hardware Startup by Renee DiResta

Author:Renee DiResta
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: O'Reilly Media
Published: 2015-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

If press is clustered, it will perpetuate. Five articles across two days is much more likely to engender 20 more blog posts, and that attention will trickle down to Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks, where it will spread further. The Misfit team felt that they couldn’t afford a good PR firm, so they reached out to the press through warm introductions from friends and investors, and began to develop relationships. Most reporters and bloggers they reached out to were willing to embargo a story until the day of the launch. The team expanded beyond the traditional tech and gadget blogs, and reached out to mainstream publications that appealed to their target market segment: customers who purchased premium brands.

Once the press and the champions were established, Misfit got to work on timing. They wanted both of these sets of supporters to feel special, so they opened the crowdfunding campaign at a time when the champions could get in first. Then they lifted the embargo, and the stories went out. Only after these things were done did Misfit send out a broader global press release. Sonny adds, “It cost us $3,000, or some outrageous amount, but the agency we used did translation into 10 languages. We found that 32 percent of our coverage came from overseas. Don’t neglect the international market!”

The same degree of precise orchestration went into the design of the Indiegogo campaign itself. Although they decided not to spend money on PR, they chose to hire a team to produce a highly polished video, which generated 650,000 views. Misfit carefully studied completed campaign pages (both successful and not) and observed that looking at Indiegogo’s site on a regular-sized monitor showed approximately two perks. They wanted to get the most important reward, the Shine, above the fold.

Because Indiegogo offers project owners flexibility with rewards (it’s possible to increase or decrease prices, quantities, and offerings throughout a campaign), Misfit was able to test new offerings as the campaign continued. They experimented with prices, charging higher prices for special colors. They read user comments about the perks they were offering and added new perks (including a popular necklace add-on) in response.

Misfit’s successful crowdfunding raise was the culmination of several months of organizing and strategizing (see Figure 8-1 for its Indiegogo campaign timeline and Figure 8-2 for an expanded view of the launch-day schedule). However, although a great deal of time and effort was devoted to producing a top-notch campaign, the team never lost site of the ultimate goal: to introduce, and sell, the Shine.

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