This is an excerpt from a Tech In Chicago podcast episode. To listen to the whole episode and catch up with all Tech In Chicago episodes, click here.
This transcript has been lightly condensed and edited.
Colin Keeley: You recently had a very successful Kickstarter campaign raising over $250,000 with $100,000 of that coming in the first day. I have run a Kickstarter in the past and I know how much work goes into preparing for that first day. To what do you attribute your success and how did you and your team prepare for that campaign?
David Rabie: It was pretty insane. My philosophy is to talk to as many people that have done it before and try to learn as much as possible. So we talked to a bunch of friends of mine that have done hugely successful campaigns to learn what are the best practices and what do you do. It was a multi-faceted launch. A big piece of it was the PR. We tapped our networks as much as possible and we met with probably 15 different journalists before the day of the launch and did demos for all of them.We then tied up all the news in embargo so that the day we launched all of sudden there was this onslaught of press and that momentum kind of built on itself. That was probably the biggest piece to the launch.
We also built up our own email list. Everyone on the team emailed and texted every single person they knew that day. At the time we were in Sunnyvale in the Bay Area and so flew the whole team out. Everyone holed up with us in this house that we rented for four months. There were 8 or 9 of us crammed into a 3 bedroom house for the whole week of launch sitting around the table.
I told everyone literally text every single person you know telling them that we launched today to visit the Kickstarter because it’s all about building that momentum on the first day. Fortunately we were able to actually hit our goal within the first 24 hours and then ended up more than doubling it by the end of the campaign.
About Tech In Chicago:
Tech In Chicago takes you inside the Chicago tech world. Each week Colin Keeley is joined by Chicago’s top founders and investors to talk about the amazing companies being built right here. If you want to learn more about Tech In Chicago, head to TechInChicago.co
I would love to hear your thoughts on the show and any guests I should have on. Please reach out @TechInChicago. You can also find me @ColinKeeley
