How to launch? When to launch? Where to Launch? Drink To Forget?
Everyone has their opinions and when you’re busy building a brand new product you have to make some business decisions along the way too. Believe it or not there isn’t really a template for success with a lot of Custom Products in the eCommerce world. You essentially have to look at similar products and see what they did but you really don’t know how they became successful a lot of the time. Was it Dad’s money? Were they the first one to ever do it? Did they have a massive Youtube following? All things that help but we didn’t really have those luxuries to leverage.
So Drink To Forget is done. We have 3,500 drinking card game boxes being shipped in 20 days. Where do we start selling? Well, we decided on Kickstarter for a lot of reasons actually.
Expect the unexpected – We really didn’t know what challenges or unpredictable things would happen so we liked the luxury of being able to set expectations on fulfillment time.
Building an Audience – We had 190 followers on Instagram when we launched our product. We learned how difficult it was to build an audience organically and that we we would need to be patient.
Gauge Demand – Are people even interested in a drinking card game? Turns out the answer is yes.
What did we do to set ourselves up for success with Drink To Forget Kickstarter?
Made a kick ass video – we hired a really cheap video guy, bought $400 worth of seltzers and invited our friends over to help make a funny video of us playing the game. It was really fun.
Paid for Graphics – We spent a lot of money on Fiver to produce renderings and video clips to ensure our page looked professional.
We sold hard – Day 1 & 2 we got over $5,000 in backers for Drink To Forget by texting/emailing/calling all of our friends and family. We weren’t too pushy but were wildly appreciative of anyone who helped chip in.
So what did we learn?
SET EXPECTATIONS – My goodness was this one of the biggest lessons we learned. We were using other successful Kickstarter Games as a template of what we should be doing and we did a pretty good job at emulating their strategies without totally ripping them off. However these card games received over $1M in pledges so we kind of felt that if our page was as good as theirs, we should see relatively the same amount of success, right? Day 3 hits and we have completely exhausted our personal networks and we see all the momentum come to a screeching hault. Everyone’s frustrated. We’ve been working 16 hour days for weeks only to to run out of steam 50% to our goal of $10K that we thought wouldn’t be a problem. Apparently everyone’s expectations ranged from $10k-$10M for what this Kickstarter would do. I assumed something was wrong so I went and looked up the top 50 Kickstarter Games to get an idea of what they were doing differently. 50/50 of these campaigns had the same 3 things in common. They were established companies with years of experience making games, they all had massive social networks that were huge advocates, and this wasn’t their first rodeo — most of them had already completed 10+ Kickstarters.
Fortunately, I’m relentlessly optimistic and was able to bring the focus back to the fact that this launch was all about learning. We learned so much in such a short amount of time and I’m happy we had Kickstarter to help us with that. We plan to leverage our Kickstarter to jump start our Amazon Listing and hopefully I’ll have some good news to share with you in a couple of weeks 