191: How to Grow Your Crowdfunding Sales

With Mark Pecota, Co-Founder + CEO of LaunchBoom

Hosted by Kevin Mako, President of MAKO Design + Invent

Mark Pecota is the Co-Founder of LaunchBoom, the original and largest crowdfunding agency globally. He’s also the author of the top-selling Amazon book “Crowdfunded,” a guide covering the end-to-end crowdfunding process, which has held its top spot for over 3 years. Additionally, Mark co-hosts the Crowdfunded Summit, an event I’ve had the honour of keynoting several times and will be speaking at again from September 12th to 14th.

Mark shares some invaluable insights tailored for inventors, startups, and small manufacturers. He delves into the mechanics of sales growth before and during a crowdfunding campaign for new hardware products. Mark also sheds light on the online advertising tools instrumental in driving sales while highlighting the best practices to optimize your return on advertising investment when selling your novel invention through platforms like Kickstarter or Indiegogo.

Here are some key points from the discussion:

• Crowdfunding serves as a potent avenue to bring hardware products to fruition.
• The beauty of crowdfunding lies in generating pre-orders, with the funds earmarked for manufacturing.
• A crucial misconception is assuming that products on crowdfunding platforms will naturally gain immense traction.
• Establishing a robust pre-launch strategy is pivotal to leveraging crowdfunding algorithms.
• Harness advertising to cultivate email subscriber lists.
• Facebook stands out as the primary platform for launching new products, both in pre-launch and during crowdfunding.
• The cornerstone is consistent, scalable, and high-quality traffic.
• In the pre-launch phase, the focus is on constructing a meticulously curated email list.
• During the live campaign, the goal shifts to driving actual sales.
• Accurate targeting is vital, with Facebook audiences revolving around user interests.
• Utilize Facebook’s suggestions to build a comprehensive list of user interests.
• The visual content of ads holds paramount importance, with the creative element (photo or video) being particularly critical.
• Crafting scroll-stopping ads is a key strategy.
• When choosing Facebook objectives, prioritize those yielding tangible ad results over awareness campaigns.

Episode Highlights

• 3:06 – Reducing risk: Crowdfunding allows creators to utilize a pre-order method whereby they only have to make prototypes before generating revenue to move forward into manufacturing
• 3:50 – The biggest myth in crowdfunding is that you can just put your product on a site and starting making sales
• 4:40 – You need to do the work in the pre-launch in order to build up an audience before your launch your campaign
• 5:50 – To be able to drive consistent, high quality, scalable traffic to your campaign, there is no better platform than Facebook
• 6:10 – The main objective in the pre-launch stage is to build a highly-qualified email ist
• 6:57 – How to breakdown a Facebook advertisement into 2 stages: 1) the audience and 2) the ad, itself
• 7:25 – How your product aligns with the interest of your demographic is so key to your campaign’s successful on Facebook, or any platform
• 8:00 – Build your audience using your intuition and knowledge of the space
• 8:49 – The ad is typically made up of two parts: 1) the creative – which is about asking yourself how to make your ad “stop-scrolling”, and 2) the copy.
• 9:45 – Targeting your ads can mean creating ads is cheaper and the exposure is better
• 10:20 – Facebook is incredibly smart in terms of how they optimize ads
• 12:35 – The Concept of AB Testing
• 12:56 – You want to make sure that you are limiting the amount of variables and things you change between your ads
• 14:28: About Mark Pecota’s Book “Crowdfunded” and the importance of learning the art of crowdfunding
• 16:27: The Annual Crowdfunding Summit on September 12th, 2023

Mark Pecota Links:

LinkedIn | LaunchBoom | Book

The Product Startup Podcast Links:

Instagram | LinkedIn | Facebook Page | Facebook Group | Pinterest | Twitter | YouTube

Mako Design Links:

YouTube | Instagram | LinkedIn | Facebook | Pinterest | Twitter

Kevin Mako Links:

Instagram | LinkedIn | Quora | Facebook | Twitter

Partner: PTC’s best-in-class software solutions Onshape: The only cloud-native product development platform that delivers full-featured computer-aided design (CAD), integrated product data management (PDM) and enterprise analytics in a single system, and Creo: 3D CAD solution that provides designers with the most innovative tools to build better products faster, such as generative design, additive manufacturing, real-time simulation, IIoT, and augmented reality.

Producer: MAKO Design + Invent is the original firm providing world-class consumer product development services tailored to startups, small manufacturers, and inventors. Simply put, we are the leading one-stop shop for developing your physical product from idea to store shelves, all in a high-quality, cost-effective, and timely manner. We operate as one powerhouse 30-person product design team spread across 4 offices to serve you (Austin, Miami, San Francisco, & Toronto). We have full-stack in-house industrial design, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, patent referral, prototyping, and manufacturing services. To assist our startup and inventor clients, in addition to the above, we help with business strategy, product strategy, marketing, and sales/distribution for all consumer product categories.