IndieGoGo just celebrated their first hardware demo night with a packed house at Parisoma cowork space in San Francisco. We got to see startups like Breathometer, Misfit Wearables and Skully and find out what happens after the crowd-funding campaign is over. Did you know that Breathometer founder Charles Yim was the first person ever to persuade all 5 sharks on “Shark Tank” to invest?
But the biggest take home message for me was catching up with IndieGogo’s startup support infrastructure. IGG have have been working to produce a “Hardware Handbook” with Adam Ellsworth as their first hardware entrepreneur in residence. It’s short but seriously useful.
The handbook has 5 worksheets, 3 checklists, 3 pages of crowd-funding tips and an additional resource list. The worksheets cover everything from prototyping to pricing, certification to fulfillment, with advice on timelines, gantt charts, order sizes and error margins. The checklists keep you on your timeline. And give you a reality check.
The handbook is a free download and joins IndieGoGo’s other resource, the ongoing IndieGogo Playbook which breaks gives you the latest best practice for running your campaign, from basic information to every step of setting up, running and wrapping up a campaign.
And at the Demo Night, the message that every successful startup shared? “Make sure you have secured 1/3 of your campaign ahead of time from backers you already know. “ You have to prime the pump before the crowd funding platform works for you.
