What is crowdfunding anyway?
Crowdfunding gives young companies and inventors the opportunity to raise funding for their ideas and developments. In our case, it was reward-based crowdfunding. The supporters receive a reward for their support in return. In our case the IRISgo® cups and/or our specialty coffee.
We launched our initial crowdfunding campaign on the Kickstarter platform. The aim of the campaign was to gain initial market insights and raise money for production. A functional prototype has already been developed. In order to move towards mass production, we first had to evaluate how the IRISgo cup would be received in the world.
For our young company, the Kickstarter campaign would decide how the future of IRISgo® can look like. That's why we decided to do everything we could to make the IRISgo campaign as successful as possible.
The Kickstarter campaign was scheduled to start at the end of March 2020. Due to the Corona crisis, which was severe in both Switzerland and the USA, the Kickstarter market also collapsed and we had to postpone the launch. The crisis continued, but in June we still had to launch our campaign for financial reasons.
We reached our funding goal of 15,000 CHF in just an incredible 2 hours! After 24 hours we had reached around 41,000 CHF. The peak of the rollercoaster ride at IRISgo goes Kickstarter.
But as is often the case with such campaigns, after a brilliant start comes the dreaded plateau. After a few days, progress was sluggish. Many people advised us to stay calm and that such a decline was normal.
But we decided to act. So we designed the entire We redesigned the project page overnight, took more control of the marketing ourselves and gave it our all. Day and night.
Thanks to our full commitment, the IRISgo campaign was a success despite the global crisis. In 38 days we were able to raise CHF 161,000. This makes IRISgo® campaign is one of the 1% most successful Kickstarter campaigns worldwide. A very good feeling, although the ups and downs of this campaign have certainly made us age by 10 years.
Supporters from over 50 countries helped tell the story of IRISgo®. Now we have made it to the next chapter and hope for many more.