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Ok, there's a chance I'll gain some valuable insight from posting this, which beats the cost of putting myself out there, so here goes... I just completed a 30

by conesus 10y ago

Ok, there's a chance I'll gain some valuable insight from posting this, which beats the cost of putting myself out there, so here goes... I just completed a 30 day hardware Kickstarter last week and spent $22k on the video ($18k for main video, $4k for founder interview) and raised $57k, which is an outlier to this data. I can tell my campaign is not in the Video Budget / Amount Raised graph because it would stick out near the bottom right. So it seems to me that something's not right. The product is compelling and I think it shows in the video. Much of the feedback I got for the video was positive. And there are a couple near competitors that have raised $1M+. My internal goal was to break $100k and that did not happen. Did I make a mistake with this video or campaign? I hit all of the points: early product intro, upbeat mood, 2:23, image quality, founder presence, location scouting and voice talent, and outside help. You can watch the video here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/samuelclay/turn-touch-beautiful-control https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/samuelclay/turn-touch-b...

its4tom 10y ago
I agree the video is well made. The quality is on par with what you'd expect for that budget. And it hits on all the recommendations we derived from the video benchmark data. Can you tell us more about your campaign tactics, other than video? eg. How big of a mailing list did you have prior to launch? did you advertise? any PR?
- conesus 10y ago
  The only ads I bought were about $2k of Facebook ads, which converted into about $1.6k of pledges. Not a winning strategy. I hired a couple people with experience in FB ads to help me with the audience, but the CTR of 3-4% at $0.25 CPC did not convert well. As for mailing list, I had 1,000 people signed up and I sent an email newsletter to 55k people who use my other service (which is compatible with this hardware), so it was relevant for them as well. Of the lessons learned, building up the mailing list is quite possibly the biggest. Just having ads running that you optimize for months beforehand is a good setup for running ads during the campaign itself.
trendia 10y ago
The video is very well done imo. However, it's only a small part of the overall marketing strategy. What kind of marketing did you do? e.g. what kind of coverage did you seek / get? What kind of market research did you do? e.g. did you do user studies and get feedback? How did you determine the selling price? e.g. did you determine whether it was too low (if customers are price insensitive, then you can increase profit by increasing price) or too high (if customers are extremely price sensitive, then you have to accept lower unit margins to increase total profit)
- conesus 10y ago
  I got a healthy amount of press coverage, as you can see in this graphic: https://ksr-ugc.imgix.net/assets/015/617/477/4373b04fd29a9776444cb689dad103cb_original.png?w=680&fit=max&v=1487878236&auto=format&lossless=true&s=44903557aa74362009ef6900e4903ba3 https://ksr-ugc.imgix.net/assets/015/617/477/4373b04fd29a977... I'm with you on pricing. It's hard to tell what would have worked better. I could possibly have raised the price to $99 from $59, but I didn't do the proper pre-campaign testing that would have confirmed if that was the right strategy.
frgtpsswrdlame 10y ago
Can you link to your successful near competitors?
- conesus 10y ago
  I only bring these campaigns up to make a point about market size. A four button wood remote won't compete as well against a handheld screen or a single button. But again this is only about establishing that there is a market for this type of device. https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/flic-the-wireless-smart-button-app#/ https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/flic-the-wireless-smart-b... https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/knocki/knocki-make-any-surface-smart https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/knocki/knocki-make-any-... https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/901859853/sevenhugs-smart-remote-the-first-remote-for-everyt https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/901859853/sevenhugs-sma...
Retric 10y ago
No offence, but that seems like an ultra niche product which may be part of the problem. Clearly some people like the idea but home automation + wood seems iffy to me. Worse only 4 buttons seems like a poor fit for home automation. One button suggest getting as many as you need, 4 is kind of an odd compromise.
- conesus 10y ago
  Ah-ha, we hit my area of expertise which is talking about how four buttons is all you need. It's a 16 button remote. Hold a button down to switch to that button's app, and each app has its own four buttons. Buttons can also perform multiple actions at once. So you step into your home and press a button and everything welcomes you home: the lights fade up (hue, lifx), the music fades in (sonos, iTunes, spotify), the heater/fan kicks on (wemo), temp gets set (nest), etc. So you have lots of control but only have to change the battery once a year, so you can leave the remote out on the coffee table and feel like its part of your home. But we're talking more than an order of magnitude difference raised here between campaigns, which is what I'm trying to get to the bottom of.
  - Retric 10y ago
    You could do unlimited selections with 1 button using Morse code, but that's terrible UI. Anyway, it's not that I think 4 buttons can't work it simply seems like a poor compromise like setting a clock on your VCR. Can X work? Sure, but this is not the conversation you want to have with someone buying your product.
    - conesus 10y ago
      That morse code product is called Knocki and it raised $1.1M on Kickstarter a few months ago. I don't think it's only the UX of four buttons. You can use them as only four buttons as well without having to remember that each button has its own app. I'm going to try again with a less expensive product (minus the wood most likely) and a better marketing strategy of signing up interest for months beforehand. But I still worry that the conversion rate will still remain low, even with the additional traffic.
sadok 10y ago
I agree with the "super-niche" product perspective and why it didn't have the success you wanted, although it did succeed after all.
turtlebits 10y ago
I saw your product, and the price is good. I would have considered buying it but the requirement that it's tethered to your phone is not a good idea. I don't carry my phone around with me at home. And the second I leave my house it's useless to everyone else.
blackguardx 10y ago
I saw your prototype at a HDDG meetup in SF. I think your campaign was very well done. If you fell short of your internal goal, it might be price related. You are in impulse buy territory, but the product might be too niche for that price. I ran a failed crowdfunding campaign back in July. We raised ~$25k of a $100k goal. We spent $7k on the video and another $500 on google, FB, and twitter ads. The ads didnt seem to do anything. I felt our other marketing efforts were more fruitful. We wrote some guest articles for various tech websites and got written up by a few more that we reached out to. In the end, we felt the price was too high, so we cut some features and dropped the price by almost half for a recent relaunch [0]. We also launched with no goal to remove all customers' doubts about receiving a product. [0] https://www.crowdsupply.com/aeroscope-labs/aeroscope-wireless-oscilloscope https://www.crowdsupply.com/aeroscope-labs/aeroscope-wireles...
- conesus 10y ago
  Oh nice, I just bought it because it looks useful. I would have liked to see more photos of the oscilloscope hooked up to boards, esp. with clips on both the probe and ground pins. I plan to hook up probes to it and not have to hold it in my hand as it runs. I have a small office and I bought it to replace my much bigger oscilloscope, since all I use it for it to hook up a voltage graph to my boards. And I already use the µCurrent Gold to measure current.
  - blackguardx 10y ago
    Thanks! You make a good point about our photos. This illustrates why marketing is so hard. We wanted a more "human" element to our media, but maybe our potential customers don't care about that and just want to see features.
- miahi 10y ago
  A one-channel scope is useful, but it still feels as cutting your left arm when you are used to (and need) more than one channel. And these days most of the things are digital, so that means SPI/I2C/whatever with more than one line, and even then, A-B is quite important. I guess you can't combine two of them with a hardware trigger in/out so you can synchronize them and simulate a two-channel. As it is, it's more like a toy scope, fortunately pretty close to impulse buy prices as these things go, so I guess it will be alright. I would buy one but it's iOS only, so I'm stuck with my Rigol :).
anexprogrammer 10y ago
To start I'm probably outside the usual IoT demographic - it mostly doesn't deliver what I'd like. I looked at your campaign and thought it interesting, but didn't back it. Here's some entirely personal thoughts, make of them what you will - I don't expect to be very representative though! :) I don't care to have my phone always around at home, couldn't care less about most apps. I even turn the phone off! Have always wanted not an Internet of Things but a local net, with a miniscule subset allowed near the net or usage slurping phone apps. Was interested seeing MacOS app, hoping for a Pi or similar app further down. I liked that you can have say 3 remotes doing entirely different things or switching functions etc. Oh, bluetooth, iMac is usually in the other room to us in the evening (when I'm more likely to want a remote for something), so we're mainly out of Bluetooth range, and the Thinkpad is either on standby or being used. Would have been more interested if a) the remote tethered to wifi to talk to the iMac, or better a low power Pi or similar hub so I don't need to care about iMac, phone and their apps just to remote music or lighting and b) there was a cheap n cheerful plastic option for the kitchen etc too. I'd probably look at a couple of plastic cheapies (to get dirty or lost etc) and one nice premium wooden one for the coffee table in main room.
richforrester 10y ago
Have to concur with most; while there's some stuff I didn't like about the video (overall still a great video) - those wouldn't have held me back from buying the product. If I wanted the product. I have light switches everywhere I want light, and they have light switches close to them, or in sensible places. Putting them all on a remote seems useless to me, since then I'd lose it all the time, or it'd be in the other room, or whatever. So nope; just not excited about the product itself. What's interesting though, is that your data point wasn't in the data, and it might've changed the conclusion a fair bit. I wonder how many more outliers there were, and if 100 videos is even close to being enough data.
ajiang 10y ago
What was your mailing list size before the campaign?
- conesus 10y ago
  Mentioned in this comment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13878836 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13878836 - and I will reiterate how important that one number is to optimize, because in order to do so it means optimizing other processes first, like ad messaging, compelling product, and sizing the market.
programminggeek 10y ago
I live in Lincoln, Nebraska. I'm a techie, but my house isn't. I watch your video and don't identify with any of it. I don't have smart lights, a sonos, or any of the things you would use your remote for. Here is the other thing. I would lose your remote about 100x a day if I had one. I live with 3 agents of chaos known as children and they would put it places I'd never find. Last, it's $50, which as silly as this sounds... IS TOO MUCH. I balked at buying a $30 replacement remote for my Roku. It feels like as a user I'd just use a phone app for all of this or at some point tell my phone or some smart connectected Google/Apple/Amazon device like Alexa to do these things. Worst of all, my tech friends look a lot like me and my less tech friends are even less likely than I am to want a 4 button wood remote for $50. You built a beautiful product that is really neat, but it's really niche. Too niche for me to imagine it making more than $100k on Kickstarter. In 5 or 10 years smart house tech might be more common, but I've been saying that for a while and it isn't there yet. I was thinking smart house startups a decade ago, so smart houses might be "the year of the linux desktop" problem... Do yourself a favor, buy a copy of Gary Halbert's The Boron Letters on Amazon. Read it cover to cover, pay attention to his advice on selling hamburgers and your next product will sell 10x as much. Good luck! -Brian
lloydde 10y ago
First time hearing about this product and watching the video. Beautiful video and well articulated, though was that guy doing yoga in jeans? ;) I couldn't get my head around how it would work. How does selection work? Is it proximity to the thing you want to control? For me the video was a little too abstract. Maybe it would have just made sense if I was in the IoT space.
tgb 10y ago
Keep in mind that that plot is log log scaled. Your numbers really wouldn't look out of place on it. I'm thinking it would be close to the trendline, vertically above that bottom right point.
Theodores 10y ago
People just do not care for home automation as much as one might think. I have bought various smart gadgets for various family members over the years, thinking that due to health/age/whatever that this smart light/whatever would be well received as a gift. You would think that having some remote to turn all the lights on/off with dimming would be very useful but someone that has their house lit up by lots of very individual lights actually enjoys interacting with the 'design classic' lights, dodgy switches and all. So you think 'better' is 'better' but it is to totally misunderstand the way it works for my relatives and friends... So how do you reach a more picky audience and get the 'cool' that they do take on board? Not so simple. Maybe partner with another brand to get that cachet of cool, piggy back an 'ok' brand to get to market and defeat snobbishness. Or be Amazon and willing to take a big punt. Even then, with lots of advertising, it is not easy.
wingerlang 10y ago
If your goal was 25k, why didn't you just work a few months on whatever for the remaining 3k, then spend those 22+3 on the project instead?

by conesus 10y ago

its4tom 10y ago

I agree the video is well made. The quality is on par with what you'd expect for that budget. And it hits on all the recommendations we derived from the video benchmark data. Can you tell us more about your campaign tactics, other than video? eg. How big of a mailing list did you have prior to launch? did you advertise? any PR?

conesus 10y ago
The only ads I bought were about $2k of Facebook ads, which converted into about $1.6k of pledges. Not a winning strategy. I hired a couple people with experience in FB ads to help me with the audience, but the CTR of 3-4% at $0.25 CPC did not convert well. As for mailing list, I had 1,000 people signed up and I sent an email newsletter to 55k people who use my other service (which is compatible with this hardware), so it was relevant for them as well. Of the lessons learned, building up the mailing list is quite possibly the biggest. Just having ads running that you optimize for months beforehand is a good setup for running ads during the campaign itself.

trendia 10y ago

The video is very well done imo. However, it's only a small part of the overall marketing strategy. What kind of marketing did you do? e.g. what kind of coverage did you seek / get? What kind of market research did you do? e.g. did you do user studies and get feedback? How did you determine the selling price? e.g. did you determine whether it was too low (if customers are price insensitive, then you can increase profit by increasing price) or too high (if customers are extremely price sensitive, then you have to accept lower unit margins to increase total profit)

conesus 10y ago
I got a healthy amount of press coverage, as you can see in this graphic: https://ksr-ugc.imgix.net/assets/015/617/477/4373b04fd29a9776444cb689dad103cb_original.png?w=680&fit=max&v=1487878236&auto=format&lossless=true&s=44903557aa74362009ef6900e4903ba3 https://ksr-ugc.imgix.net/assets/015/617/477/4373b04fd29a977... I'm with you on pricing. It's hard to tell what would have worked better. I could possibly have raised the price to $99 from $59, but I didn't do the proper pre-campaign testing that would have confirmed if that was the right strategy.

frgtpsswrdlame 10y ago

Can you link to your successful near competitors?

conesus 10y ago
I only bring these campaigns up to make a point about market size. A four button wood remote won't compete as well against a handheld screen or a single button. But again this is only about establishing that there is a market for this type of device. https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/flic-the-wireless-smart-button-app#/ https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/flic-the-wireless-smart-b... https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/knocki/knocki-make-any-surface-smart https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/knocki/knocki-make-any-... https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/901859853/sevenhugs-smart-remote-the-first-remote-for-everyt https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/901859853/sevenhugs-sma...

Retric 10y ago

No offence, but that seems like an ultra niche product which may be part of the problem. Clearly some people like the idea but home automation + wood seems iffy to me. Worse only 4 buttons seems like a poor fit for home automation. One button suggest getting as many as you need, 4 is kind of an odd compromise.

conesus 10y ago
Ah-ha, we hit my area of expertise which is talking about how four buttons is all you need. It's a 16 button remote. Hold a button down to switch to that button's app, and each app has its own four buttons. Buttons can also perform multiple actions at once. So you step into your home and press a button and everything welcomes you home: the lights fade up (hue, lifx), the music fades in (sonos, iTunes, spotify), the heater/fan kicks on (wemo), temp gets set (nest), etc. So you have lots of control but only have to change the battery once a year, so you can leave the remote out on the coffee table and feel like its part of your home. But we're talking more than an order of magnitude difference raised here between campaigns, which is what I'm trying to get to the bottom of.
- Retric 10y ago
  You could do unlimited selections with 1 button using Morse code, but that's terrible UI. Anyway, it's not that I think 4 buttons can't work it simply seems like a poor compromise like setting a clock on your VCR. Can X work? Sure, but this is not the conversation you want to have with someone buying your product.
  - conesus 10y ago
    That morse code product is called Knocki and it raised $1.1M on Kickstarter a few months ago. I don't think it's only the UX of four buttons. You can use them as only four buttons as well without having to remember that each button has its own app. I'm going to try again with a less expensive product (minus the wood most likely) and a better marketing strategy of signing up interest for months beforehand. But I still worry that the conversion rate will still remain low, even with the additional traffic.

sadok 10y ago

I agree with the "super-niche" product perspective and why it didn't have the success you wanted, although it did succeed after all.

turtlebits 10y ago

I saw your product, and the price is good. I would have considered buying it but the requirement that it's tethered to your phone is not a good idea. I don't carry my phone around with me at home. And the second I leave my house it's useless to everyone else.

blackguardx 10y ago

I saw your prototype at a HDDG meetup in SF. I think your campaign was very well done. If you fell short of your internal goal, it might be price related. You are in impulse buy territory, but the product might be too niche for that price. I ran a failed crowdfunding campaign back in July. We raised ~$25k of a $100k goal. We spent $7k on the video and another $500 on google, FB, and twitter ads. The ads didnt seem to do anything. I felt our other marketing efforts were more fruitful. We wrote some guest articles for various tech websites and got written up by a few more that we reached out to. In the end, we felt the price was too high, so we cut some features and dropped the price by almost half for a recent relaunch [0]. We also launched with no goal to remove all customers' doubts about receiving a product. [0] https://www.crowdsupply.com/aeroscope-labs/aeroscope-wireless-oscilloscope https://www.crowdsupply.com/aeroscope-labs/aeroscope-wireles...

conesus 10y ago
Oh nice, I just bought it because it looks useful. I would have liked to see more photos of the oscilloscope hooked up to boards, esp. with clips on both the probe and ground pins. I plan to hook up probes to it and not have to hold it in my hand as it runs. I have a small office and I bought it to replace my much bigger oscilloscope, since all I use it for it to hook up a voltage graph to my boards. And I already use the µCurrent Gold to measure current.
- blackguardx 10y ago
  Thanks! You make a good point about our photos. This illustrates why marketing is so hard. We wanted a more "human" element to our media, but maybe our potential customers don't care about that and just want to see features.
miahi 10y ago
A one-channel scope is useful, but it still feels as cutting your left arm when you are used to (and need) more than one channel. And these days most of the things are digital, so that means SPI/I2C/whatever with more than one line, and even then, A-B is quite important. I guess you can't combine two of them with a hardware trigger in/out so you can synchronize them and simulate a two-channel. As it is, it's more like a toy scope, fortunately pretty close to impulse buy prices as these things go, so I guess it will be alright. I would buy one but it's iOS only, so I'm stuck with my Rigol :).

anexprogrammer 10y ago

To start I'm probably outside the usual IoT demographic - it mostly doesn't deliver what I'd like. I looked at your campaign and thought it interesting, but didn't back it. Here's some entirely personal thoughts, make of them what you will - I don't expect to be very representative though! :) I don't care to have my phone always around at home, couldn't care less about most apps. I even turn the phone off! Have always wanted not an Internet of Things but a local net, with a miniscule subset allowed near the net or usage slurping phone apps. Was interested seeing MacOS app, hoping for a Pi or similar app further down. I liked that you can have say 3 remotes doing entirely different things or switching functions etc. Oh, bluetooth, iMac is usually in the other room to us in the evening (when I'm more likely to want a remote for something), so we're mainly out of Bluetooth range, and the Thinkpad is either on standby or being used. Would have been more interested if a) the remote tethered to wifi to talk to the iMac, or better a low power Pi or similar hub so I don't need to care about iMac, phone and their apps just to remote music or lighting and b) there was a cheap n cheerful plastic option for the kitchen etc too. I'd probably look at a couple of plastic cheapies (to get dirty or lost etc) and one nice premium wooden one for the coffee table in main room.

richforrester 10y ago

Have to concur with most; while there's some stuff I didn't like about the video (overall still a great video) - those wouldn't have held me back from buying the product. If I wanted the product. I have light switches everywhere I want light, and they have light switches close to them, or in sensible places. Putting them all on a remote seems useless to me, since then I'd lose it all the time, or it'd be in the other room, or whatever. So nope; just not excited about the product itself. What's interesting though, is that your data point wasn't in the data, and it might've changed the conclusion a fair bit. I wonder how many more outliers there were, and if 100 videos is even close to being enough data.

ajiang 10y ago

What was your mailing list size before the campaign?

conesus 10y ago
Mentioned in this comment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13878836 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13878836 - and I will reiterate how important that one number is to optimize, because in order to do so it means optimizing other processes first, like ad messaging, compelling product, and sizing the market.

programminggeek 10y ago

I live in Lincoln, Nebraska. I'm a techie, but my house isn't. I watch your video and don't identify with any of it. I don't have smart lights, a sonos, or any of the things you would use your remote for. Here is the other thing. I would lose your remote about 100x a day if I had one. I live with 3 agents of chaos known as children and they would put it places I'd never find. Last, it's $50, which as silly as this sounds... IS TOO MUCH. I balked at buying a $30 replacement remote for my Roku. It feels like as a user I'd just use a phone app for all of this or at some point tell my phone or some smart connectected Google/Apple/Amazon device like Alexa to do these things. Worst of all, my tech friends look a lot like me and my less tech friends are even less likely than I am to want a 4 button wood remote for $50. You built a beautiful product that is really neat, but it's really niche. Too niche for me to imagine it making more than $100k on Kickstarter. In 5 or 10 years smart house tech might be more common, but I've been saying that for a while and it isn't there yet. I was thinking smart house startups a decade ago, so smart houses might be "the year of the linux desktop" problem... Do yourself a favor, buy a copy of Gary Halbert's The Boron Letters on Amazon. Read it cover to cover, pay attention to his advice on selling hamburgers and your next product will sell 10x as much. Good luck! -Brian

lloydde 10y ago

First time hearing about this product and watching the video. Beautiful video and well articulated, though was that guy doing yoga in jeans? ;) I couldn't get my head around how it would work. How does selection work? Is it proximity to the thing you want to control? For me the video was a little too abstract. Maybe it would have just made sense if I was in the IoT space.

tgb 10y ago

Keep in mind that that plot is log log scaled. Your numbers really wouldn't look out of place on it. I'm thinking it would be close to the trendline, vertically above that bottom right point.

Theodores 10y ago

People just do not care for home automation as much as one might think. I have bought various smart gadgets for various family members over the years, thinking that due to health/age/whatever that this smart light/whatever would be well received as a gift. You would think that having some remote to turn all the lights on/off with dimming would be very useful but someone that has their house lit up by lots of very individual lights actually enjoys interacting with the 'design classic' lights, dodgy switches and all. So you think 'better' is 'better' but it is to totally misunderstand the way it works for my relatives and friends... So how do you reach a more picky audience and get the 'cool' that they do take on board? Not so simple. Maybe partner with another brand to get that cachet of cool, piggy back an 'ok' brand to get to market and defeat snobbishness. Or be Amazon and willing to take a big punt. Even then, with lots of advertising, it is not easy.

wingerlang 10y ago

If your goal was 25k, why didn't you just work a few months on whatever for the remaining 3k, then spend those 22+3 on the project instead?