Rory, Jay, John, and I were very enthusiastic about our new weeding robot.  We envisioned Tertills rolling into gardens around the world, leaving in their wake weed-free soil and bountiful harvests.  But before that could happen, we would need a little more than enthusiasm.

It takes scads of cash—at least several million dollars—to develop just about any consumer product.   We weren’t that flush.  To get the cash we’d need to convince investors that a huge, eager market was poised to adopt our product.  Our early presentations of Tertill at maker faires and other venues had persuaded us that this was the case.  Potential customers were enthusiastic, many saying that they wanted and would buy a Tertill.  

Thus, when we began reaching out to possible funders—angel investors, manufacturers who might want Tertill in their product lineup, and organizations that supported startups—we could provide lots of positive anecdotes suggesting that our market would be substantial.  But they all said no.  What we had wasn’t nearly enough.  They told us we needed “market validation,” proof that potential customers weren’t just intrigued by the product but would actually buy it.  

As we pondered how we should proceed this sequence of thoughts kept running through my mind:

1. To get funding we needed market validation.
2. To get validation we needed paying customers.
3. To get customers we needed a working robot and someone to market it.
4. To get a robot and a marketer we needed funding (see Item 1).

We thought that a Kickstarter campaign might offer a way out of that insidious iteration.  For a startup company like ours, Kickstarter promised a great benefit—we could sell our robots before we built them.  If a big angel investor wouldn’t fund us, then maybe a crowd of little ones would.  

We didn’t dare hope that we’d score all the money necessary for commercial development, but we believed that a successful campaign would constitute market validation.  With the market proven, it should be easy to get any needed remaining funds from traditional investors.  Such are the hopes of the naïve.  

We didn’t have a lot of money to launch a campaign—we were operating on our savings—but we hoped to muddle through.

Homework

To facilitate the muddling we resolved to learn as much as we could.  We read many articles about how to run a Kickstarter campaign.  We built spread sheets and carefully analyzed campaigns others had run.  We spoke with veteran campaigners.

It quickly became apparent that the days when one could simply put up an attractive campaign page and wait for pledges to roll in were long gone.   Extensive pre-campaign publicity was critical, as was compiling a large mailing list of potential backers.  

To attract publicity, I started contacting reporters and influencers—favoring thought leaders in technology and gardening.   I got the most traction among those who had previously interviewed me or knew of me because of Harvest Automation or Roomba.  It required a lot of emails because less than 10% of the messages I sent out got any response.  Years later I learned that many reporters seem to use PR agencies as a sort of crackpot filter.  Reporters usually respond when your frightfully expensive PR agency contacts them.  But individual cold callers—even ones who claim to have invented Roomba—are suspected crackpots and therefore ignored.

To expand our mailing list we set up a website and solicited those who visited to leave their email.  At maker faires we asked people who stopped by our booth to sign up.  We collected more emails at conferences and other events we frequented.

High-performing Kickstarter campaigns invariably included a slick video of their project.  We needed one as well, so we arranged with a firm in Providence to drive up to the Boston area with all their gear and make an engaging video.  A garden blogger we’d been working with agree to provide her attractive garden as our video venue.

But, in a panic-inducing moment the day before the shoot, our blogger contacted us to tell us not to come. Happily, a dear friend of mine—who just happened to have a show garden—agreed with zero notice to let us film at her place.  It ended up being a fun day, with the videographer’s drone zipping about, Tertill chopping weeds, and kids posing with robots.  We were fully satisfied with the results, much better than what we could have managed on our own.  The evidence is here.

In the run up to the campaign we suffered a loss and a gain.  Jay Francis found himself uncomfortable with the track we were on.  The idea that we would probably have to tap VCs for some of our funding left him ambivalent.  So, when an opportunity for him to work on electronics for a rocket company came along, he amiably shifted to a different orbit.  

Then we gained an enthusiastic teammate.  Jeff Vandegrift, a veteran embedded systems programmer with experience in robotics, found us.  I was thrilled to welcome Jeff on board and not just because of his impressive credentials and convivial spirit.   Jeff, having been born ten days before me, meant that I was no longer the old man in the company!  

Campaign Prep

We needed to make some critical decisions as our campaign date approached.  One choice, our campaign pledge goal, was fraught.  Kickstarter campaigns are all or nothing affairs.  You select the number of days your campaign will run and the cash goal you must reach for success.  If the total pledges from backers within that time reaches your goal, then Kickstarter deposits the money in your account (less their cut, of course).  But if you don’t make the goal, you get nothing and any backers you’ve attracted are not charged for their pledges.  

How much money did we need?  Market validation was the motive for our campaign but to claim the market validated we’d have to sell more than a handful of robots.  Looking at earlier successful campaigns with similarly priced products, we figured that market validation started somewhere around 1000 Tertills.   We used that number to compute our cash needs.

Building hardware is expensive.  But one thousand robots would give us at least minimal economies of scale.  For example, the unit price of a component is generally much lower if you order say, a thousand of them rather than ten.  We expected to pay a contract manufacturer to assemble the robots for us.  And there would be expenses like required FCC testing and many other incidentals.  Foregoing extravagant extras, like paying salaries to ourselves, was part of our cost saving strategy.

When we added it all up, mixing in a heaping helping of optimism, the total came to around $200 thousand.  If we received that much support or more, we should be able to deliver the robots we promised to our backers and prove the market for our product.  So, should we set our campaign goal at $200 thousand?

The perplexing answer was no.  As we soon discovered, picking a Kickstarter goal was a most disquieting game.  Successful campaigning has everything to do with perception.  If we set our goal artificially low, and then achieved it quickly we might boast, “We met our goal in only 10 hours!”   Our campaign would then seem wildly popular and nearly certain to succeed.  The bandwagon effect would convince fence sitting backers to pile on—enhancing our chances of reaching our true goal.

But, if we stated our actual needs, we would approach our goal more slowly.  That would make our project seem sluggish and un-buzzworthy.  Fence sitters might decide to play it safe, to wait and see.  The peculiarities of Kickstarter campaigns and human nature combined to punish candor.

We wrestled with that dilemma—should we possibly doom our campaign with a too-high goal, or doom our ability to deliver robots with a too-low one?  Then, the creators of a previous, very successful campaign told us their strategy. Set the  goal low, they suggested.  If we achieved the artificial goal but not our real one, we would call off the campaign and return our backers’ pledges.  Acknowledging the non-idealness of our world, we set our campaign goal at $120 thousand.  

There were many other things to do in addition to wrestling with dilemmas.  We designed infographics—making and remaking a timeline of Tertill’s past and future development.  We composed a graphic of the many publications and shows that had reported on Tertill. We described Tertill’s many virtues.   We had business cards made up showing the campaign launch date and then distributed them widely.  We chose a set of “rewards,” the perks we would provide backers in exchange for their pledges, e.g. the first 100 backers would pay only $199 for their robot; subsequent backers would pay more.

To boost our mailing list, the team pooled all of our personal contacts.  By launch day our list totaled about 3500 names.  I wrote a message describing our work and our hopes for Tertill and we emailed that missive to everyone, alerting them to the start of the campaign.  

Campaign

On June 12, 2017, our 30-day campaign launched.  It began, as many campaigns do, with a surge of pledges, questions, and media interest.  We obsessively watched Kicktraq, a site that displays statistics on Kickstarter campaigns, willing the numbers higher.  We issued updates as we passed key milestone: “Halfway to our goal in 48 hours!”   Kickstarter featured us as a “Projects we Love,” boosting our visibility   We passed our (pretend) goal in just five days.  Our real goal was met around day 12.

As we expected, having analyzed many other campaigns, activity slacked off after the initial rush.  But there were bursts of interest whenever we were mentioned in well-read publications.  All the while we were contacting influencers in an effort to get more mentions.  It was a most exciting time!

And then we made a mistake.  When we began the campaign, we had restricted sales of Tertills to only the US and Canada.  Shipping products to those addresses was simple compared to international destinations.  But more important than that, many countries require that product sold within their borders be certified in some way.  Members of the European Union, for instance, demand that products possess the CE mark.  To obtain that mark requires passing certain tests and jumping through bureaucratic hoops.  Securing certifications from multiple countries would mushroom our costs.  

We underestimated those costs.  With the campaign in full swing, and eager support from the US, we thought we might attract many more backers if we opened Tertill to the rest of the world.  It was also the case that an advertising partner whose help we wanted would agree to join us only if we sold internationally.   

The decision to do so would prove problematic.  We did sell more robots, but not in huge numbers, and our ad partner proved largely ineffective.  Ultimately, the costs of international Tertills proved insurmountable.  Unable to deliver, we offered our foreign backers refunds.

But those were tomorrow’s problems.  When the dust cleared at the end of the campaign, we had 1267 backers who pledged $312,000, 260% of our stated goal.  That seemed pretty good.  I compared our numbers with other technology-based campaigns and found that Tertill did better than 98% of our peers.  Clearly, it seemed, people wanted our robot and were willing to pay a price that would make it profitable for us.

Next, we just needed to build robots, present our market validation bona fides to investors, and collect our funds.