Six years ago, crowdfunding barely even existed. Now, it seems like every start-up and invention idea is launching a crowdfunding campaign. But what sets the successful campaigns apart from the ones that don’t hit their funding goals?
I’m super excited to be talking with Roy Morejon, digital marketing powerhouse, crowdfunding expert, and President and Founder of Command Partners digital marketing on this week’s podcast. With you in mind, we’re talking about the incredibly important topic of raising funding in a constantly changing world.
Roy launched Command Partners in 2010, when crowdfunding was just beginning to show up on the scene. His company was focusing on digital media until a client approached them with a crowdfunding project. Command Partners doubled the client’s funding goal in a matter of weeks!
After this experience, Roy saw the niche need for crowdfunding expertise and started replacing retained clients with crowdfunding projects for start-ups. To date, they’ve worked on over 175 campaigns and have raised over $75 million dollars. This year, 95% of their projects have raised their full funding goals. Wow!
As Roy says, crowdfunding can be a challenge because you’re selling clients on a product they don’t know exists yet, something they might not have known they needed until they hear about it or visit your site. You only get one opportunity to get them to that page, so you want to convert them right away!
This is why crowdfunding can also be a great way to build your market—it allows you to directly interact with potential consumers and industry experts. Social media enables you to be in conversation with people interested in your product all throughout this funding and producing process.
These people supporting your campaign are the people that will become your brand evangelists. When your product launches, they’ll be the ones telling their friends that they knew about it before it was cool, maybe they can even say they tested out a prototype!
Along with all this, you’re about to hear Roy’s list of the five most important things to know about crowdfunding. It’s all super interesting and helpful, you won’t want to miss a minute of his advice!
Bravery in Business Quote
(click to tweet)
Cliff Notes
- Command Partners has 15 -20 crowdfunding client a month, on average raise 100s of thousands, have run over 175 campaigns and raised $75 million
- This is an exciting time because so many people have not heard of crowdfunding or haven’t backed their first project yet, There are 11 million backers total on Kickstarter, 15 million Indiegogo unique visitors
- Crowdfunding allows companies to fail faster, getting direct feedback from customers and industry professionals, before they’ve sunk years of time into to project
- An exciting new market for Roy’s business is enterprise clients—big corporations looking to use crowdfunding to test out ideas. Sony has an internal crowdfunding site for employees, GE used Indiegogo for several campaigns
- In the past these companies would have paid for focus groups and feedback from customers but social media & crowdfunding allow them to get this crowd response for free.
- Clients don’t have the chance to touch the product so you have to really sell them on it and make them believe that you will deliver.
- Press is a key component in any successful campaign, connections and interviews/ PR should be arranged before the campaign launch, not just to drive it mid-campaign
- Do your homework before the campaign launches: talk to industry, experts, make sure you are selling a product with a market and that hasn’t been made before. Build a pathway back to consumer, reach out to journalists & try to get feedback on prototype
- To crowdfund successfully, you “gotta have that hustle”, even before you turn the key and launch the campaign
- 90 % of crowdfunding projects don’t deliver on time, but this is often because they’re doing their due diligence, testing out the product with all of the community feedback and responses available through social media. Crowdfunding allows for easy communication channels with backers / clients so that they can understand your timeline/ process in production.
5 Things To Understand About Crowdfunding
- Make sure your idea is a good fit for crowdfunding
- Set a realistic funding goal
- Do your homework and pre-campaign before you launch
- Have good design and quality video for your site
- Communicate with your backers and potential customers, industry professionals, throughout this process.
(click to tweet)
Resources
CommandPartners.com
TheArtOfKickstart.com - Roy’s podcast