A Look At Play-i’s Successful Crowdfunding Campaign

Editor’s note: Vikas Gupta is the co-founder and CEO of Play-i, a company that builds robots for children to program...


In just six months, Play-i went from just an idea to a working prototype to $1.44 million in pre-orders through our crowdfunding campaign. We’re making robots, Bo and Yana, that help children ages 5+ learn programming concepts and creative problem solving. We launched our crowdfunding campaign on October 28, 2013, and hit our goal of $250K in just four days. After two weeks, we were at $500K and hit $1.44 million at month’s end.
We received visitors from 180 countries and orders from customers in 80 countries even though we were shipping to about 20 countries. Before our campaign, the largest consumer robotics crowdfunding project raised $188K. Entrepreneurs often ask us what we did to run an effective campaign. So I’m sharing our strategy and what we learned along the way.

Play-i’s Bo and Yana..

Self Starter vs. Kickstarter or Indiegogo...

 

In deciding whether to go with our own website or a crowdfunding platform like Kickstarter or Indiegogo, we looked at a lot of data from past projects. Our target customer, parents of 5-10 year old children, didn’t really overlap with the demographic that tends to back projects on Kickstarter. Seventy-five percent of backers on Kickstarter projects were also first-time backers. Network benefits from Kickstarter were low, and we would have do most of the work to drive people to our own project page.
There were four major reasons why we decided to host our own campaign:

1. Analytics. We wanted access to data about customer visits to our project, looking deep into drop-off points, site heatmaps, traffic sources, and a lot more. Third-party platforms didn’t give us those capabilities.
2. Fees. All third-party platforms took a significant transaction fee. Middlemen are a big reason why products get marked up for consumers, and we wanted to keep prices affordable.
3. User experience. We wanted to control the user experience and build our brand. Third party platforms tend to have confusing layouts for customers, especially if they are not familiar with the platform. There are endless sections of rewards and links that can distract customers from our project to somewhere else on the site. We wanted to keep things simple.
4. Focus. When you launch on a crowdfunding platform, part of the media story will inevitably be about the platform itself. We wanted every article that journalists wrote to be focused on our robots.

We felt that we had to launch on our website, on our terms. We used selfstarter, and it was certainly not a trivial process. You need to have design and engineering resources to get it done right.