$100,000 Raised for a Watch on Kickstarter: Astronic Watches

Launching a successful crowdfunding campaign for a high-end watch is not an easy game, trust me. But Kris and his team raised $100.000, what's behind this success?

We've already talked about the campaign I'm most proud of: Astronic Watches, I also did an unboxing of their exclusive watches that you can watch here.

Astronic Watches, is a new high-end watch brand from Hong Kong, Kris, the creator, that is not so new to the watch industry, has been in the Swiss Watchmaking world for over 20 years now, and he have learned a lot of industry secrets, enough to start its own timepiece collection.

These timepieces are created for those who truly appreciate engineering feats, it features a really high-end mechanism, including an in-house designed tourbillon.

After helping Kris from the pre-launch phase to the actual launch, I couldn't wait to interview him to share his experience with all of you creators!

Before watching the video or reading the article...

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1. TELL US ABOUT YOUR PROJECT AND YOUR CROWDFUNDING JOURNEY

I've been in the watches business for 20 years in Switzerland and learned a lot about watches, I wanted to experiment with something different and start my company in the watch business. I wanted to create a tourbillon watch for a few years but I didn't have time and an idea of how to do it. I had to wait a few years until the time was right to start my new brand Astronic Watches but creating a company requires a lot of money to start, so I started looking at the crowdfunding world but didn't have the experience. I wanted to create a challenging product in the watches industry, that's why I thought about the tourbillon, I researched the design and saw there were a lot of tourbillon watches around. Then I started thinking about the name and the concept, since I'm a fan of aircraft and movies like Star Trek or Star Wars I decided to get inspired by that. It took me one year to be satisfied with the design and another year to find someone to create it.

2. WHAT STAGE IS YOUR CROWDFUNDING RIGHT NOW?

We just delivered everything to the backers and some of them are waiting for it, I'm proud because we promised to ship in a month and we did it, now I'm receiving a lot of comments, suggestions, and unboxing reviews, it's good and I hope backers appreciate it, finally, they're touching the real product and see people engage with my product is a great feeling, even after some delay in the delivery my community was still there and ready to wait a little longer, and this makes everything worth it . It's important to keep the promises that you give to the backers and that's the only way to build a solid brand in the future.

3. WHY DID YOU CHOOSE KICKSTARTER TO LAUNCH YOUR PRODUCT?

Kickstarter was the first platform that came in my mind, because I knew and heard it from my collegues, I choose it because it felt like the original one for me, and Indiegogo was more for electonic and robotics I had more trust in Kickstarter because it is made for design kind of project, after Kickstarter I went on Indiegogo indemand, some project tend to work better in one or another.

4. WHAT YOU STRUGGLED MOST WITH?

I struggled most with time management, sometimes you expect to do everything really fast, but in reality it takes time to grow the community it took me almost a year, this is the problem I faced in my first campaign. We did everything in two months, I had to pause my campaign multiple times during the pre-launch and I think it influenced my credibility for my community, it's hard to keep the community warm for several months. You have to have a plan on when to communicate your news, in order to invest your time on other aspects. I thought 2 months were enough to prepare the pre-launch but they were not, in order to launch a new product in the market it takes almost a year.

5. WHAT WAS YOUR KNOWLEDGE ABOUT CROWDFUNDING BEFORE YOUR LAUNCH?

It was below nothing, I thought it was really easy just posting the product online and selling it, but it was not that easy, especially for the pre-launch phase I had no idea on how to create a community, I thought crowdfunding platforms worked just like any e-commerce.

6. HOW MUCH IS IMPORTANT RUNNING A PRE-LAUNCH PHASE?

It's really important because managing a pre-launch phase correctly will get your campaign to success, my watches cost from $500 to $2000 so that's a bold move to back a new product with this price and I wanted people to feel safe and confident in backing it. I had to spend time following the pre-launch community for 6 months, in order to get to know me, some guys were very convinced by me and my job, they started following me at any part of the process. It's fundamental to create a community for a high-end product because the backing process will not be automatic because of the price, people should be confident and believe in the creator and it's something not skippable.

7. HOW MUCH WAS IMPORTANT TO HAVE AN EXPERT FOLLOWING YOU THROUGH THE CAMPAIGN?

Fundamental, otherwise I wouldn't been able to launch, because I didn't know anything, I and my team spent a lot of time studying the crowdfunding platforms, but we were not very practical about what to say and what to do, I felt that something was wrong in the 6 months we worked and we started looking for some professional crowdfunding coach. We needed someone to explain to us what to do and how to approach the crowdfunding world. Thank you Mattia for your help!

8. WHAT WOULD YOU HAVE DONE DIFFERENTLY?

I would have started contacting you a lot earlier, before starting the campaign, I was focusing too much on my product and not on the crowdfunding platform, it's better to do the research on crowdfunding really early and writing a plan to understand how to manage the budget and when doing what, I spent a lot of money on advertising and that gave me a hard time. My advice for creators is to find someone to talk to in order to not waste money and plan well before the start.

9. WHAT ARE YOUR FUTURE PLANS?

I'm in Indiegogo In-demand now, I was a little bit behind on the promotion with that, I trasfered the product from Kicsktarter to Indiegogo. We're now focusing on the delivery and logistics for 45 days we focused only on that, so now we've completed this phase and the next stage is to further promote the campaign on Indiegogo, I'll do some adverstising and probably we'll go on a Japanese crowdfunding platform since I received a lot of contacts from Japan to launch crowdfunding there.

WRAPPING IT UP

It was a pleasure to work with Kris and Astronic Watches and achieve this amazing result $100,000, what makes me most proud of it is that he and his team are really happy with the results they've reached.

Kris will keep us updated with his new path in the crowdfunding world, can't wait to see where it brings.

So creators, always remember to create a community of interested people around your new product, gather them and keep these people warm with special and detailed content about your new product, in order to make them want to support you and be part of your journey.

If you want to analyze and prepare your pre-launch phase to launch your first product I’ve got you covered with my crowdfunding pre-launch free e-book called ''3 steps to success on Kickstarter and Indiegogo''. 

As always make sure to check today's interview video right on top and comment to ask me questions and subscribe to my channel to stay updated on fresh new content that I’m gonna drop there.

Ciao ciao! 

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