Has anyone successfully crowdfunded an app idea?
Kim Stowe
10 replies
Has anyone got experience of successfully crowdfunding an app idea or something similar without a large marketing budget? Actually, any tips and feedback would be most appreciated.
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Ryan Hoover@rrhoover
Product Hunt
@gistsy_app Aloe Bud did a Kickstarter with some success, but I agree with @abadesi that I would try to build something people want before launching a crowdfunding campaign, even if it's just a small thing. Once you do that, those fans will be evangelists and hopefully backers for your crowdfunding effort.
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@gistsy_app often you can make up for what you're lacking financially with... sweat (gym pun intended). Go where your target audience hangs out (aka watering hole) and get some feedback.
Not necessarily demo the whole app, just figure out:
- if they have the problem
- how they're currently dealing with it
- is it worth solving
- would they pay for it (if so how much)
@gistsy_app I would suggest creating a simple MVP to validate the idea before embarking on building an app.
@gistsy_app @abadesi by MVP you mean a working protoype or just Invision/similar prototype? Just asking because I am working on a fully functional MVP which should be soon released, but in future I would like to try more of testing before developing a feature.
@gistsy_app most successful startups begin with zero marketing budget. We used guerrilla marketing to build a user community that helped power the Focusmate crowdfunding campaign, https://republic.co/focusmate.
@gistsy_app My MVP is out but I'm having hard time getting traction on it, knowing that it's niche based mobile app & my niche are actually gym goers in which I need some significant amount of marketing budget to reach out to them.
Paradym 2.0
@gistsy_app I've closed an overfunded crowdfunding raise on Crowdcube with a beta and no marketing spend. Happy to chat about the experience, or holla at me with your specific qu's. This is the app:
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/.... This was the campaign: https://www.crowdcube.com/compan...
Paradym 2.0
@gistsy_app @artem_smirnov its definitely a fair amount of work. End to end it was a 5 month process including pitch prep and pre/post raise admin, legal etc. And for ~ 2 months it was a full time job just focusing on the raise. But I think it's the same for any fundraise from what I gather. The added benefit for us from our crowdfunding was the pr/marketing support that we received.
@gistsy_app @courtney_carlsson Wow, I always thought that crowdfunding requires a dedicated person and a few months of content marketing. How much effort have you put into it?
@gistsy_app @courtney_carlsson That's expectable, but did you have to, well, spread the word? How did you manage to attract supporters? A group in FB, blogging, forums etc etc? Or was it just a pitch on the crowdfunding site?