Benchmark of 100 crowdfunding videos reveals what works and how much to spend (opens in new tab)

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-wireles...

I don't carry my phone around with me at home. And the second I leave my house it's useless to everyone else.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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)

Video is interesting in that it accelerates your efforts in other areas. The time you spend making a better video should also help you reach a bigger audience (A), increase conversion thus making advertising (D) more effective, it probably helps with PR too (E) since media outlets prefer to show interesting videos, and with page quality (C) to a degree since you can reuse frames from the video for the page.

So back to your question! how much to spend on video is you have $20k budget overall. From an execution standpoint, we certainly see a sweetspot ~$3-6k for video, in that it allows you to get a clean professional video that looks legit. That's enough to hire a director with a small crew for a day and simple editing. If you spend less then you'll have to take on some of the director's responsibilities to make sure you hit on the requirements we found in the benchmark (location scouting, quality images, tight narration...) We wrote more about this here https://www.videopixie.com/how-much-does-a-kickstarter-video...

E.g. the video in another commenters post (the wooden remote) obviously hired models to appear in them.

It says you asked 100 campaigns. Does that mean you got 100 answers or you only 100 campaigns? I'm curious as to how the bias of who responded to you would affect your data.