Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Collaboration: Dan Roberts, founder, Scout Alarm”.
Um, so i’m dan roberts, i’m the co-founder of scout and i’m going to talk a little bit today about independent crowdfunding, so a little different take from indiegogo or kickstarter, where you’re actually hosting all the pre-ordering activity and order processing on your own company website. So this is a approach that we took with scout and scout just a little bit of back on our campaign. It’S a do-it-yourself wireless home security system and the idea is that we want to create a more open, affordable, modern, take on home security. So we launched our campaign in february of this year and, like most crowdfunding campaigns, we gave ourselves a 30-day window to raise a hundred and eighty thousand dollars in that 30 day window we did over 190 000 and one of the perks of having independent campaign is That we were able to keep pre-orders open so to date, we’ve sold over a thousand systems for about 267 thousand dollars. So i just want to take you back a little bit and walk you through our decision process to go independent. Some of the pros and cons of doing that, and then whether it might be something you should consider so flashback to the fall of 2012, when we were thinking about how we should approach scout, these were the things that were happening that were influencing whether we were Going to go independent or not so kickstarter had just changed their rules. They had the famous kickstarters, not a store blog post, which for many reasons we would have been disqualified and not made it on their platform.
The same time, lockatron was just coming off the heels of their very successful independent campaign, so we knew that we could do it ourselves, um. The other piece of it is that the goal of scout was really by doing. Crowdfunding was really to test demand, so we didn’t want to get into fulfilling t-shirt orders and sticker orders. We really wanted to know whether our core product had legs in the market.
So that’s what we were focused on. Another great thing is that you know we were going from nothing, so our site was not recognized. I think we showed up on probably page four of google results before our campaign. What was great about doing an independent thing is all the press, all the attention that we got linked to our actual company website.
So we were building that brand recognition from the start, as opposed to building that brand recognition on a third third-party site. And since the established sites like indiegogo and kickstarter have to you know, appeal to a variety of projects, they have to be pretty flexible, so you don’t have a ton of control so going independent gives you this this ability to control the entire experience and really make It catered to your company and finally, this was not a deciding factor, but we did. We did save about ten thousand dollars in fees which, for a young startup is a big deal so um. This is just a quick sort of pros and pros and cons of going with an established site versus uh an independent site, and i’m not going to go through each of these, but just to summarize it that you know you’re getting an established brand when you go With a dedicated site like indiegogo, but when you go independent, you’re getting more control, so these are sort of you know the the push and pull here and something to consider when, when you’re deciding to crowdfund so uh some of the concerns. So that’s one thing as we were deciding how to approach this. Our main concerns were these four things so of all those pros and cons. This is what it boiled down to. Can we replace the user base so when you forego indiegogo or kickstarter you’re, foregoing a huge established user base of people that have used those systems, they trust it. They know it. They know how to find you.
That’S a big thing to to choose not to leverage. Will visitors trust our site enough to purchase also a big deal since you need pre-orders? Are we relying too much on pr and when should we charge the customer, so these last two questions ended up being kind of a wash whether you go with an independent site or a dedicated site, you’re going to need an awesome pr campaign, so we knew uh Regardless we were going to need that, so that was sort of out of the out of consideration and then when should we charge a customer? This is sort of a personal uh, a question you have to answer. If you need the working capital to get to production and you have to charge them up front, that’s what you have to do. We were able to not charge the customer which essentially de-risked it, but that was unclear at the time whether we were going to be able to do that and we we had to to work through that um and i want to talk a little bit more in Depth about the first two questions, so when we were thinking about it, we laid out all the tactics before we made a decision. Can we actually, you know, solve these two problems, so our approach was that, in terms of replacing the user base, the great thing about independent site is from day one. We cookied every user that came to our site and we were able to do a retarding campaign throughout the month so that our sales didn’t rely on you buying the first time.
Hopefully, we’d see you six or seven times throughout the month we sent backers regular shareable updates again, that’s things that go across independent campaigns and the established sites, but very very important in terms of getting the word out through social media and other channels. We for people who are interested, we created competition, so they could sign up, get a unique url and the people that drove the most of visitors to our site would win either a gift card or free product. And then the final thing – and this was a big thing – that swayed us towards an independent site is that running an independent campaign in and of itself was press worthy.
So after our our first two weeks of press for the actual product uh weeks, three and four, we got a nice pickup because we actually um were you know the independent campaigns were relatively new um at the time, so that helped us replace our user base. In terms of building trust, it should go without saying that, if you’re going to do this, you need to have a seamless, professional website. You need to be able to make it.
You know table stakes with other websites in terms of the experience or you will lose that trust immediately. We did leverage familiar crowd, funding features. So while it was hosted on our site, it was still the mechanisms that you’re used to seeing on the various crowdfunding sites.
So that felt familiar we did the payments or amazon which most people trust. We got one or two people that were not happy about that, but that was great and then again, as i mentioned, we didn’t charge we’re not going to charge until the system ships, even though we have the ability to charge our card which de-risks it for the User to to purchase so i just wanted to wrap up here and for those of you who may be considering or wrestling with the the decision. Should you go independent um? Certainly we see it as an exciting thing. We we use it successfully and we see more people doing it, but it’s definitely not the plug-and-play scenario that you have with with some of the established sites. Uh locktron helped us start to get there with their open sourcing of their template, but it’s not for everyone. There’S coding required um, you know you’re going to have you know a couple weeks worth of work to get it really uh to where it needs to be, and if you want to be on a particular site and you’re disqualified, you may not have a choice.
So if you’re going to do it, here’s what you need. You need a strong development team with a couple, maybe a week or two worth of time to work on the site. I would recommend some on the team have pr experience or that you have a little bit of budget or bartering set aside for pr help, because that was extremely helpful.
In our third week of our campaign, our pr person had been selling mashable on the story for like literally three weeks, they would not bite and finally, they broke, and that ended up being like 22 000 in order, so it really uh made the campaign happen. So i you definitely need that help full-time team. I wouldn’t try to go independent on the nights and weekends and then, if you can do it, flexibility on payment timing will help your orders but of course not everyone’s going to be able to to do that.
So that’s scout. If anyone has any questions, grab me in the break and i’d love to chat. Thank you. .