We are a company
called the SatoriWest LifeClub…and we have an Indiegogo campaign. I am the
operations director and I wanted to share with you a few things we have learned,
so that you might avoid the same pitfalls.
Our company vision and mission statement are transformative.
We want to start a global movement because we have a formula that helps people
change the wiring of their brains to be more content, peaceful and calm.
Like many small businesses, we have the idea…we just don’t
have the capital. We explored many ways to acquire funds and landed on
crowdfunding. Our vision was that crowdfunding would offer us 3 things: Money,
exposure and new customers. We have 25
days left of our 40 day campaign and we have only raised 5% of our goal. Ouch.
We haven’t given up, at all – instead we are taking a step back to assess (and
share) what we have learned so far.
1)
Launch
when you are ready, even if that means pushing your original deadline. Planning
is not a joke. We were focused on getting our campaign out by the beginning of
January. We stuck to the deadline rather than waiting until we were really
ready. There is a ton of information on how to plan for your campaign and get
ready…we kinda jumped the gun.
2)
The
campaign will not market itself. This lesson goes hand in hand with making
sure you have planned. People won’t just happen upon your campaign. You need to
reach out and you need to be putting up new and fresh content. The campaign
needs to be your top effort everyday of the campaign and other work projects
need to be postponed.
3)
Your
network of friends and family may not donate like you thought they would. Our
team is small (4 people). We started counting up our combined personal contacts
and we were confident at least 20 or 30% of our personal contacts would donate
something. That has not been the case. It is not that they are unsupportive,
but we made a mistake in estimating such a high conversion rate of close
contacts.
4)
Put on
your sales person and marketing hat. We are a team of visionaries,
creators, makers, implementers etc…
Marketing and sales are not something that comes naturally to any member
of our team. We feel like we are being
pushy, or rude, or spamming. This has
led us to not reach out enough. We need to check our egos at the door and
become sales people. Asking for money can be hard. Remember that you are
offering people the opportunity to be part of something – not just pan
handling.
5)
Big ideas
should be boiled down to an actionable list. Our concept is big (we have a
monthly membership club that is designed to help people manage their complex
lives and rewire their brains). We focused on getting people to understand the
high level goals of our business model. What we offer is transformational and
we hope to start a global movement. But, our campaign message isn’t tangible
enough for potential contributors to understand what exactly they are funding.
6)
You
lose 10% of contributions made through PayPal. Yep…we should have read the
fine print, but we didn’t think much of it. We wanted to offer campaign viewers
as many options as possible to contribute. We wouldn’t change our decision to
offer PayPal as a payment option, but we should have budgeted that into our
contribution projections.
All of that said…Check out our Indiegogo campaign.
Contribute to our campaign and be part of this global movement. (Of course we
had to put in a shameless plug – see, we are practicing being sales people.)
We would love to hear your ideas for how we could have, or
still could improve the chances of our campaign being successful.
I also want to say a sincere thank you to our backers so
far. Thank you for getting our campaign started and believing in our mission.
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