4 Lessons from a $650,000 Kickstarter Campaign

On the day he closed a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign, Petteri Lahtela, co-founder of health-tracking ring Oura, shared with Hybe his key lesson from the campaign.

This article was originally posted on HYBE.

Story

It’s really important to get the story right. We were using a lot of time and several people, to really streamline the story so that all the main factors and all the main selling points are clearly explained and they then support the story.

Basically for us Kickstarter was the testing platform for how well people understand the story and buy the story. Is this form factor something they can accept if they understand the benefits. I think that was something we succeeded with quite well, but I would do quite a few things differently if we ran the campaign again now.

Promote early

Many successful campaigns start promoting their campaign several months before they launch, they have competitions and things like that. They learn from people’s feedback early on, and they start to create the community around the product – the offering they are coming up with – so it gives them a much easier way to ramp up the campaign and keep it going.

We also did a lot of footwork but, for example, Facebook is a platform that converts quite nicely into pledges on Kickstarter. We only had some 450 people on our Facebook page, which we opened a couple of weeks before the campaign; now we have something like 7,500 people. We have reached hundreds of thousands of people through that. Still, we should have started telling the story much, much earlier on and started sharing too.

Sign up early power-users

We should have given products to some influential people for testing. We did that, but a little bit too late. We have influential people who are tweeting about their first night with Oura, like Eric Topol. That would give people something to share early on, these kind of things would help a lot.

Seek traffic from outside

Also, what we learned during the first couple of weeks or so, is we should concentrate more on generating traffic from outside the Kickstarter community to our campaign page. We were concentrating too long on serving the backers, then we understood that this was not bringing in new customers. Then, we started to concentrate again on the external world and on getting the word out; in the end it helped again to raise the curve a little bit.

Hybe.com is a news service and content discovery platform focusing on the latest in startups, innovation, and entrepreneurship from around the world with a thick lens of lifestyle.