Crowdfunding - those that flew and those that flopped.

Hello, Indie Hackers! Ever since my college days I have been crowdfunding around the indie scene. What do I have to show for it? Well £430,000 from 409 backers in 17 countries so far, this was for a company called Clouder that was an integrated e-commerce destination for vape and featured a 1hr delivery, marketplace, subscription service, store locator, and a wholesale destination.

These days I’m heading into another crowdfunding round with a different indie project SimpleX Chat. Kickstarter is our platform of choice on this passthrough and not Seedrs. The team is better, the product is better, we have a better marketing budget, better crowdfunding platform, and better energy. I feel comfortable looking to raise somewhere between $500,000 - $1,000,000.

How did we get here? A bumpy road through both success and failure. In this spirit I’d like to tell you about “What worked?” and “What didn’t?"... Please let me know in the comments if you think anything needs adding to either list.

Good:

• Large email lists.
• Pub meets.
• Merchandise packs.
• Fundraising events.
• Display ads done by a professional.
• Clear and simple message.
• Having the right influencers.
• Good design and presentation for your campaign.
• Well done script, filmography & choreography.
• LinkedIn Sales Navigator & other CRM’s.
• Getting lots of uni friends to pitch in a $20.
• Having a solid approach to distributing our press release.
• Landing page to collect interest.

Bad:

• Leaflets.
• Physical letters.
• Wasting money on ads that don’t convert.
• Untargeted social media.
• Getting caught up in an investment that will never happen.
• Not having enough money in your bank account prior to launching.

Would you like to hear what happened to the crowdfunding campaign that failed? Everything went from hero to zero with one word, namely: coronavirus.

We were heading into a crowdfunding campaign without sufficient money in our bank to survive the year and a half of chaos that ensued. We weren’t expecting a sudden market shift. We certainly didn’t expect to be having to deal with supply issues. Half our partner suppliers, distributors and wholesalers were forced to suddenly close and scale down expansion.

This misaligned the message we were trying to send from “We are expanding into 35 cities and doubling the number of individual brick and mortar stores on our platform!” to “We are struggling to secure supply for existing customers and have halved in the number of individual locations and those that are still open are working on restricted hours… yuck...”, which is a big shift in attitude.

So what’s next? The crowdfunding journey continues for me and I’ll give it another go! This time around with:
https://github.com/simplex-chat/simplex-chat
https://simplex.chat/

Hope to see you soon,
VM