DESIGN West: How to fund your tech startup with Kickstarter

Second shot

"I was depending on the media coverage from the Demo Day, which was very disappointing," said Baddeley. "My company was just one person--me--and I had just spent three months in China at HAXLR8R, so I didn't have any media materials prepared and my video presentation was not very good."

[Click here to register for DesignCon 2013, April 22-25 at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center. Options range from an All-Access Pass -- which includes Black Hat (security) Conference Session to Free Expo Admission].

Subsequently, both Portable Scores and Nomiku decided to try crowd-funding at Kickstarter. Both companies launched their Kickstarter campaigns on the same day, but the resemblance stopped there, because within 30 days Nomiku had raised over a half million dollars--almost three times the amount for which they were asking--while Portable Scores failed to meet its goal of $200,000.

"My analysis is that our Kickstarter failure was not a result of weakness in Portable Score's product, but a direct result of not enough media attention--you need to generate buzz to persuade people to make pledges on Kickstarter. We have fixed that now by continuing to refine the product, get working prototypes out to beta-testers and put together a professional marketing campaign for our second attempt at crowd-funding," said Baddeley.

Portable Score's DigiTally scoreboard has different remote control screens. Shown here is one for interval training, where people work out for a short interval, then rest before another burst.

Besides Kickstarter, there are now about a half dozen alternatives including Fundable, Microventures, and Indiegogo, from which Portable Ventures can choose for its second stab at crowd-funding. Plus there are a number of case studies revealing the psychology of why people make pledges, which Baddeley hopes to emulate to multiply Portable Score's chances this time around.

"When I started, only a few projects had ever raised more than a few hundred thousand dollars, and they were the outliers--not many people knew much about what it really takes to make a Kickstarter project successful," said Baddeley.

One successful project Portable Score is emulating this time around is the Pebble E-Paper Watch, which only had a goal of $100,000, but instead raised over $10 million. "After talking to Pebble, I found out it was a good thing they raised $10 million, because they say in retrospect there was no way they could have successfully completed the project if they had only raised $100,000," said Baddeley.

By following the examples of Pebble and other successful Kickstart projects, Portable Scores is prepared this time to succeed at crowdfunding too. It has hired a marketing expert to work full time alerting online new outlets during the entire crowd-funding period. Portable Scores also now has multi-faceted press kits with high-quality images and is planning a high-quality video that makes it easy for new outlets to write about Portable Score's crowd-funding campaign.

Information Redux

Conference Registration

Session info: Why I Failed Kickstarter and My Friends Didn't on Wednesday, April 24 in San Jose, Calif.

Conference Home Page: Design West 2013 (April 22-25, San Jose, Calif.)