Unexpectedly raised ~1M USD with a physical product on Kickstarter

Since a decade I’ve been bootstrapping businesses. Actually more tried to bootstrap than succeeded. Here an overview:

• an in-app ad platform for local business (12 months of development -> never went live)
• a platform to rent event places (9 months of development -> a few hundred bucks in revenue)
• Airbnb for pet owners & house sitters (3 months of development -> a few thousand users but no revenue)
• a course for junior react developers (MVP created in a few weeks -> made 50k or so over 4 years)

Mid last year I decided to discontinue the course business. Searching for a new idea I realized there’s a gap in the market for durable walking pads. I had burned through 3 electric models in 3 years and pulled the trigger on manual treadmill. The manual one was great but super expensive and huge.

So for some reason I decided to give it a try and build one myself. It took more than a year but in June this year I had a working prototype and launched a Kickstarter end of September.

The demand was overwhelming and I raised 60k in just 2 minutes. Now it’s less than two days before the campaign ends and we’re at close to 1M USD 🤯

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/981825764/office-walker-the-manual-walking-pad-for-your-office

How did this happen?

Contrary to all the software products I built I outsourced a lot of the development to s as mechanical engineer (because of lack of skills on my side). This gave me time to work on marketing from the beginning. I launched a website and wrote some SEO focused blog posts. I learned this skill in my previous business and over a year it helped grow my waitlist to 2.5k subscribers.

I basically built in public as well and created a Discord community. Both helped tremendously with building trust which is essential for a pricey product on Kickstarter.

Finally I hired a marketer to run Meta ads. That way we grew the waitlist to 10k in the 5 weeks before the launch.

Anyway, all the skills acquired in the failed projects over the past decade finally resulted in this success. It’s kind of funny that in the age of AI what worked for me was a fully analog physical product 😅

Let me know if you have any questions.