Mattia Di Stasi Interview Maker Faire 2015 before raising $675k on indiegogo

It's been a while since I've been doing this job and lately, a lot of people started to follow me and appreciate my advice and contents, I'm so glad for this because I love helping my students and clients launching their dream project!

Today I wanted to share a little piece of my career with all of you and introduce myself to the new entries. Click on the video above to watch the entire interview for "Tom's Hardware" or continue reading to learn what tips you can learn about my experience.

MY INTERVIEW AT THE INTERNATIONAL INNOVATION FAIR: MAKER FAIRE

This interview was made during the Maker Faire the biggest European event promoting innovative products, where we introduced Lucy (now called Caia for copyright reason), a Solenica product. Back in 2015, I was working at the launch of my first project with the start-up I co-founded: Solenica, in which I don't work actively since 2017. This was one of the first times presenting our project, before launching our Indiegogo campaign that generated more than $675.000 of sales.

CREATING A COMMUNITY WAS FUNDAMENTAL FOR OUR PRODUCT LAUNCH

Back in these amazing times, we were always participating and joining international innovation fairs in which we established our start-up brand presence and introduce our product to innovation-enthusiast.

Unfortunately, these are tough times for fairs and events and it might seem difficult to manage public relations, but thanks to technology you won't be slowed down, there are a lot of possibilities to attend virtual events, webinars, and create business relationships.

By the way, at that time it was fundamental to attend these events because that's where we got the chance to gather a strong community fond about our project which later on would have backed our Indiegogo campaign!

I would never get tired of saying this: creating a strong community is vital to launch a new product on the market.

THE FIRST STEPS THAT MADE US REACH THE $675K GOAL

The secret recipe is a community and market testing!
But of course, these were not the only things that lead our crowdfunding campaign to success and I will talk about the full strategy in the future articles I'll make.

As I said before, we had the chance to gather a lot of interested people presenting our product at innovation events and fairs, and that's what led us to create a big community of people fond about our product.

As for market testing, when we were launching our first product we didn't know if there was a potential market for it, because it was a very peculiar object and we needed confirmation about our market placement.

Later on, two big societies (Qualcomm Robotics and Techstars) invested in our product an amount of $120.000 that made us so proud of what we achieved and permitted us to join an accelerator program in San Diego (CA) and fund our first pre-sale campaign in 2015.

With that first pre-sale campaign we sold over 300 product pieces and we gladly noticed that there was effectively a market demand and that a lot of people appreciated and purchased our innovative product for their houses.

This market confirmation gave us the confidence to launch our first campaign on Indiegogo in 2016, thanks to this campaign we reached $150.000 in the first 24 hours overcoming our initial goal of $50.000 and we got funded with more than $675.000!

2 LESSONS TO LEARN

That really was an incredible experience and an amazing journey. Nowadays I want to put this experience at your service and help entrepreneurs and creators to reach their successful crowdfunding campaign goals!

Taking a step back on this story, there are 2 important tips you should not forget:
1. Community: be sure to create a community of interested people around your new product, gather them and keep these people warm and spoiled with special content about your upcoming product, in order to make them want to support you and be part of your journey.

2. Market testing: knowing your market value and potential is a fundamental stage to launch a new product. Especially because you cannot know if people would be interested in spending money on a brand new kind of product. Running a market test before a bigger launch will give you the necessary confidence and data, in order to predict the possible outcome and understand how to leverage on price and features, meeting the market needs.

If you want to analyze these stages more deeply but don't know where to start, I’ve got you covered with my crowdfunding pre-launch free e-book called ''3 steps to success on Kickstarter and Indiegogo''. 

It’s gonna guide you through the right strategy to follow in order to build a warm community of potential backers for your project.

As always make sure to check out my new 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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