We launched The Flic Hub on Indiegogo and received $200,000 in pre-orders in less than 24 hours.
Here is how that came to be.
The Flic fans, our brand ambassadors, are the people that made this happen. Many of who have been with us, supporting us from the original launch of the Flic button. You know who you are, and even if you’re humble and think you only shared it once on Facebook – you, too, made this happen. THANK YOU.
This was our second launch on Indiegogo. Although there is an exciting month ahead of us, and we still have a lot to go until we reach the $640k of our last campaign, this was a much quicker start than last time.
In fact, we got four timed as much preorder value the first day than what we got last time. The team was excited, to say the least.
So what did we do to reach this rocket start?
We talked about the Flic Hub, months in advance.
It’s not like 2338 backers saw the Hub for the first time and decided to buy instantly – that would never happen unless you’re a big and famous consumer brand.
Quite the opposite, most of them knew what they were buying before even heading to Indiegogo. In fact, they had even scheduled exactly when to click which link, to get in as early as possible.
Many crowdfunding campaigns, startups, and early product launches make the mistake of not talking about their product in advance. Perhaps they look at Apple and the likes that keep everything disclosed until launch date. Perhaps they’re afraid someone would steal their idea and release ahead. That’s not how we have run things.
A Pre-launch referral campaign
In a successful crowdfunding campaign, it’s important to get as many interested people in as early as possible after launch. So we sell the product promise in advance and gather as many qualified email addresses ( = interested people) as possible.
We talked about the promise of the Flic Hub officially on a new site – hub.flic.io. We did not mention any details or exactly how the product would work, nor did we reveal the price of the Flic Hub. If people were interested in the promise, they were encouraged to sign up.
Once signed up, they landed on a referral campaign site with a unique and personal URL to share. The more they shared it, the greater the reward.
As long as the incentive to share is good, people will share – and surely, they did!
We asked our most loyal customers for help.
As mentioned above, we contacted our brand ambassadors. These are the people that love Flic. We gave them an even better incentive to share than what was official. They got better rewards for sharing (after all, we want to award our fans!) but also more detailed requests to post information about the Flic Hub in forums and talk about us in their channels.
Ads to the Pre-launch campaign
We ran Facebook ads to hub.flic.io with two intentions:
- Get more eyes, interest and email signups, spurring the referral campaign.
- Optimize the messaging.
The latter is arguably most important. Running several different ads is an effective way to see which text and image that are most likely to spur interest. We then used these learnings to build up the content on the Indiegogo page.
Online thunderstorm
At the time of launch, we sent out heaps of emails to our different email lists, social media posts, and much more. The message was clear – there is a limited amount of bundles at super early bird price, and the sooner you invest, the lower your price.
We shared all we could at the same time, and again, we asked our ambassadors to the same.
In advance, we had talked to a lot of news sites and had given them a set time to post. CNN, Digital Trends, Apple Insider, Slash Gear and many others released news about the launch at the same time. (This was one of the reasons that we didn’t reveal any details of the product in advance – the news site must have something new to write about!)
We found a well-reputed hunter to post the Flic Hub at Product Hunt on the same day as well (Thanks, Jack!). Product hunt is a great place to post if you know the community, and we had a lot of success with it when we launched Flic for Mac a few months ago.
All these efforts at the same time spurred a huge peak in traffic to the Flic Hub Indiegogo site and resulted in this unexpected first-day success.
Check out the Flic Hub campaign here – if you just want a Flic, you can still buy one here.
With excitement,
Joacim