
Benchmark of 100 crowdfunding videos reveals what works and how much to spend - tomsaffell
https://www.videopixie.com/blog/crowdfunding-video-cost-benchmark-what-works-how-much-to-spend
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conesus
Ok, there's a chance I'll gain some valuable insight from posting this, which
beats the cost of putting myself out there, so here goes...

I just completed a 30 day hardware Kickstarter last week and spent $22k on the
video ($18k for main video, $4k for founder interview) and raised $57k, which
is an outlier to this data. I can tell my campaign is not in the Video Budget
/ Amount Raised graph because it would stick out near the bottom right. So it
seems to me that something's not right.

The product is compelling and I think it shows in the video. Much of the
feedback I got for the video was positive. And there are a couple near
competitors that have raised $1M+. My internal goal was to break $100k and
that did not happen.

Did I make a mistake with this video or campaign? I hit all of the points:
early product intro, upbeat mood, 2:23, image quality, founder presence,
location scouting and voice talent, and outside help.

You can watch the video here:
[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/samuelclay/turn-
touch-b...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/samuelclay/turn-touch-
beautiful-control)

~~~
blackguardx
I saw your prototype at a HDDG meetup in SF. I think your campaign was very
well done. If you fell short of your internal goal, it might be price related.
You are in impulse buy territory, but the product might be too niche for that
price.

I ran a failed crowdfunding campaign back in July. We raised ~$25k of a $100k
goal. We spent $7k on the video and another $500 on google, FB, and twitter
ads.

The ads didnt seem to do anything. I felt our other marketing efforts were
more fruitful. We wrote some guest articles for various tech websites and got
written up by a few more that we reached out to.

In the end, we felt the price was too high, so we cut some features and
dropped the price by almost half for a recent relaunch [0]. We also launched
with no goal to remove all customers' doubts about receiving a product.

[0] [https://www.crowdsupply.com/aeroscope-labs/aeroscope-
wireles...](https://www.crowdsupply.com/aeroscope-labs/aeroscope-wireless-
oscilloscope)

~~~
miahi
A one-channel scope is useful, but it still feels as cutting your left arm
when you are used to (and need) more than one channel. And these days most of
the things are digital, so that means SPI/I2C/whatever with more than one
line, and even then, A-B is quite important. I guess you can't combine two of
them with a hardware trigger in/out so you can synchronize them and simulate a
two-channel.

As it is, it's more like a toy scope, fortunately pretty close to impulse buy
prices as these things go, so I guess it will be alright. I would buy one but
it's iOS only, so I'm stuck with my Rigol :).

~~~
blackguardx
You are very perceptive. We had a prototype of two scopes synced with a cable
we called "nunchuck mode," but we shelved it because we weren't sure how
useful that would be.

I think the main selling point is the portability and remote measurement
aspects. It fits in your jeans so you can literally have a scope with you at
all times. You can also capture waveforms from over 100 ft away.

I was worried about the one channel limitations when we first decided to go
with this form factor. After thinking about my own scope usage, though, I
realized that I use only one channel on my four channel scope 90% of the time.
More channels is obviously better, but not always necessary in every instance.

Thanks for the feedback.

~~~
ChuckMcM
First, I think you've made a really creative project. You did a good job of
laying out its features and what you saw as the market need. The price is
certainly inline with a number of other scopes in its range.

EE Times did an excellent survey article on USB oscilloscopes the under $200
ones are here:
[http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1326699&page_numb...](http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1326699&page_number=6)

There are two serious challenges with "remote display" oscilloscopes, and that
is connectivity to, and compatability with, the display. Over the the years I
have owned a couple but the challenge is always that when you buy into a
remote display'd test tool you bet that _both_ the manufacturer _and_ the
environment will continue to exist. For me I've got a nice 2 channel 100Mhz
USB scope that has a "display and control" application that runs on Windows
98. It kind of worked on WinXP, and barely worked at all on Win7 and works not
at ll on Win10. It also uses USB 2.1 which, from a connection standpoint has
been exceptionally long lived. The previous "universal" connection was
parallel ports and those went away and a lot of gear became useless.

The choice of IOS is ok for now, but Apple will rev IOS in an incompatible way
and if you're gone by then the scope is dead meat. Compare that to my first
oscilloscope that was a used Tektronix 465b that was built in 1980,
recalibrated in 1990, traded to a friend in 2000 and is still running today
and doing the job. Test equipment lives a long time because the job is the
job, it doesn't change, and if the tool is self contained it will never not be
able to do the job until the parts it uses are no longer made.

So as a tool buyer (and I'm an outlier, having bought the 465b, a Rigol 1152D,
a Tek 2216, and then a Tek MDO3024, and 3 different 'headless' oscilloscopes)
none of the headless ones are completely functional any more and all of the
'headed' ones are. But there is a saving throw here.

Like you, I appreciate how cost effective it is to build these things these
days. Why not build the display as well? Lets say you contract with a tablet
maker in Shenzen or build your own LCD display + SoC of your choice. Then
_you_ are in control of both the display and the instrument and it opens up
some other possibilities. You could for example have several test instrument
"bodied" that could pair with the display, so a DMM body, a scope "body" a
Freq Counter body, etc. Easy to unbundle, easy to get either "higher end" or
"lower" end remotes. Second it solves your multi-channel problem if you tie
all the probes to the same 'sync' line. Now you can have 8 channels if you
want and the display body software just sucks them all in. You can also dump
Bluetooth LE and go with the inexpensive Nordic 2.4ghz spread spectrum radio
chips. Now you can share a nanosecond disciplined time base with all your
tools and bring the signals back together in the display "panel." You can sell
a larger 'indoor/bench' display panel or a ruggedized 'on the road' panel.
That iPad Pro in the video cost the person $700 - $800, a panel with an ARM53
SoC talking to it can be had in Shenzen for $35, $150 is you put an IPS panel
on it. Now you sell it for half the price of an iPad, it works with all your
tool heads forever and I, as the engineer buying your stuff, know that even if
you go out of business my test equipment will still work.

If you build something like this I'll buy one for sure. Market size is
somewhere between 1 and several million engineers :-). If you want more
thoughts on this feel free to contact me in email in my profile.

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kingling
I never saw the economics of crowdfunding before, but this confirms what I
suspected: crowdfunding isn't really about getting your project funded by the
crowd, but about buying a structured platform to launch from.

It looks like a 10% non-refundable deposit is the entry ticket, plus a bunch
of non-refundable marketing work on top. And you can't tell the truth about
how much money you actually need for fear of not hitting your target.

I'm not saying there's a problem here, but this isn't how I envisioned
crowdfunding in the beginning. I thought it was a promising way for makers
without money to get started. But it seems it's become a place for people with
money to advertise and execute market analytics.

~~~
tomcam
No argument here, but I can tell you that this kind of market research was
absolutely impossible for such small sums in the pre-internet age.

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Scirra_Tom
Does anyone else feel that Kickstarter has turned from helping cash strapped
startups and individuals raise funds for interesting projects into a low-risk
small business pre-order system?

I feel it's a shame people are spending $20,000+ to try and convince you to
donate them money, I don't feel it was in the original spirit of Kickstarter
earlier on.

~~~
egypturnash
It still functions perfectly for smaller things too. For instance I spent
today starting to get all my ducks in a row to fulfill a comics KS I raised
$15k for.
([https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/egypturnash/decrypting-...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/egypturnash/decrypting-
rita-volume-3-and-omnibus))

------
sadface
Interesting information! I really like the analysis of video content,
particularly the "founder presence" info. However, I think that the headline
results that isolate video cost when looking at raise results is a bit of an
odd way to do this analysis because it leaves out the rest of the marketing
mix. I'm actually preparing a crowdfunding campaign myself (first time), and
I'd think that the main levers for success would be, in no order of
importance:

A: Pre-campaign support (solid email list, social media presence, etc), B:
Video Quality, C: Rest of Page quality (ie: copy, visuals, etc), D: Paid
advertising, E: Media Coverage, F: (Most important) Compelling product &
pricepoint

Money Raised should be a function of a-f (and several other factors I'm sure
I'm missing) so isolating any one of those variables on its own is not that
useful. Presumably a campaign with a $100k budget for its video has also made
significant investments elsewhere.

Something I'm still trying to figure out: assuming there is a limited budget,
would one rather spend 20k on a video or 5k on the video + 15k more on
Facebook ads? My thinking is that the 3M extra views (assuming $5 cpm) would
be worth more than the marginal increase in video quality from $5k-$20k.

Granted, if there's a good ROI on online ads, the budget there should
theoretically be "unlimited", but that's not always the case. Curious about
other peoples thoughts here.

~~~
its4tom
Totally agree. I think that's what we are seeing from the other comments as
well. Video is only part of the battle, and a more complete study would look
at all the variables together.

Video is interesting in that it accelerates your efforts in other areas. The
time you spend making a better video should also help you reach a bigger
audience (A), increase conversion thus making advertising (D) more effective,
it probably helps with PR too (E) since media outlets prefer to show
interesting videos, and with page quality (C) to a degree since you can reuse
frames from the video for the page.

So back to your question! how much to spend on video is you have $20k budget
overall. From an execution standpoint, we certainly see a sweetspot ~$3-6k for
video, in that it allows you to get a clean professional video that looks
legit. That's enough to hire a director with a small crew for a day and simple
editing. If you spend less then you'll have to take on some of the director's
responsibilities to make sure you hit on the requirements we found in the
benchmark (location scouting, quality images, tight narration...) We wrote
more about this here [https://www.videopixie.com/how-much-does-a-kickstarter-
video...](https://www.videopixie.com/how-much-does-a-kickstarter-video-cost)

------
arafa
Many of the graphics here violate visual best practices, which can make them
very misleading (the scatter plot in particular). The most egregious is the
use of a log-scale on three of the graphics, which isn't highlighted at all.
Humans don't compare and interpret log scales well (see The Elements of
Graphing Data by Cleveland, etc.). I would've much rather seen percentages
(say on return on investment) or break out the analysis into tiers that were
more comparable.

------
maneesh
Interesting. I've run two campaigns. The first we spent 5k on the video, and
did 280k. The second campaign, we spent 2k on, and did 343k. I would say the
video was negligible --- but the email list, marketing, product dev, and
promos were far more important. As we prep for our third campaign, I'm
thinking more about the video quality however.

[1] [https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/pavlok-breaks-bad-
habits](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/pavlok-breaks-bad-habits) [2]
[http://indiegogo.com/projects/shock-clock-wakeup-trainer-
nev...](http://indiegogo.com/projects/shock-clock-wakeup-trainer-never-hit-
snooze-again--2/)

------
its4tom
Author here! happy to answer questions, and curious to hear about your own
crowdfunding video stories.

~~~
vpontis
Awesome article!

It says you asked 100 campaigns. Does that mean you got 100 answers or you
only 100 campaigns? I'm curious as to how the bias of who responded to you
would affect your data.

~~~
its4tom
That's great to hear! We contaced many campaigns, and received answers from
100 of them. We are very grateful to the companies who shared their video
info. This kind of transparency is much needed, in particular in video
production. In terms of methodology, one third of the sample is from randomly
selected campaigns on Kickstarter / Indiegogo, one third are campaigns that
made videos with Videopixie creators (I am a co-founder), and the remainig
third we targeted specifically to cover the full range of campaign sizes.
Obviously we'd love to do this with even more campaigns. This was kind of a
proof of concept for us. People seem to benefit from the data, and we have a
methodology in place, so I hope we get to do more of it!

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calchris42
Can any causality be shown? I'd think there is likely a correlation between
money spent on the promo video and the amount of resources, name recognition,
e-mail lists, etc that a company already has prior to running the campaign.

