While in the early stages of developing band.it, the RDM team realized that they would need to raise capital in order to establish a manufacturing process to fulfill orders. They thought of a variety of different methods in which they could raise money, such as asking family and friends, or seeking an angel investor. After much debate, they decided to crowdfund. At the time, it was a new way to raise capital without giving out equity, and it could provide valuable customer data from pre-orders. The RDM team, like usual, researched endlessly until they reached a decision to use the Kickstarter platform, as opposed to other platforms like GoFundMe or IndieGoGo.

Kickstarter is a crowdfunding platform where people can create campaigns for a set amount of days to raise money for business or product idea that meet the platform’s requirements. The main components of a campaign include a touching, unique, innovative, or special video showcasing the product or service, as well as a clear description of why they have created the campaign. For Kickstarter, the company running the campaign offers tiers of support to site visitors. If the visitors are convinced by the campaign’s message, they “pledge” their support and become a backer. If the campaign reaches the funding goal by the deadline, the company receives the money and uses it to fill pledges and grow their business.

RDM chose to use Kickstarter for band.it for several reasons. For one, it had the largest brand recognition when compared to other crowdfunding sites at the time and offered the team great organic exposure and a thorough user interface. A drawback the team saw in the Kickstarter approach is the “winner-take all” campaign style. Essentially, if the campaign didn’t raise enough money, even by one dollar, all of the money from the pledges would be refunded back to the donors and the team would receive zero for their efforts. After researching further and calling the businesses behind several successful campaigns, the team realized that the biggest reason why past campaigns failed to reach their funding goal was due to a lack of planning and pre-work before launch. This prework includes critical activities such as setting email campaigns, developing contacts within digital blogs, and gaining initial pre-orders.

To make the Kickstarter campaign happen, the RDM team hired graphic designers and a videographer to help out. They knew that this campaign needed quality content in order to succeed, since their target market for band.it was professional photographers. In addition to investing resources to make a professional campaign, they reached out to a variety of blogs within the photography space, who could help spread the word and reach their goal of $10,000. They also used their history and past transactions to reach out to their small list of email subscribers.

Band.it had a very successful launch and was funded within the first week. The team used this momentum to gain exposure in blogs like the Huffington Post and Petapixel. With the success of the campaign, RDM knew that they had to set up www.camerabandit.com in order to get pre-orders from people who missed out on their campaign.

All in all, the campaign was very successful and raised all of the needed capital to begin manufacturing band.it. Further, the team was able to take their efforts out of their dorm room and into an office space in Gainesville, Florida.

Tips for anyone starting a Kickstarter:

• Make sure that you have done pre-work, have everything planned out, and have your marketing strategies ready; 80% of the work of a campaign is done before the actual campaign starts

• Figure out which platforms will best help promote your project

• Come up with digital marketing strategies on when to promote the project and the frequency; having blogs spread the news about your campaign is best in the beginning

• Set up a landing page to redirect traffic to their website after the campaign has ended.