“For every $1k we raise, you have to drink a beer!”

Drinking games are everywhere.

But in 2014, Zach Supalla came up with the first (and only?) drinking game for crowdfunding campaigners.

They had just launched Spark Core — a chip that turns anything into an IoT device — on Kickstarter.

And Zach was actually planning on making it a successful one this time around…

But how much would they end up drinking?

You see, 7 months earlier, Zach and his team had launched another campaign: The Spark Socket.

The device promised to give smart functionality to any lightbulb at a time when Philips Hue lightbulbs were just showing up.

Great idea, right?

And while they ended up raising quite a bit… the campaign ultimately failed.

Why?

He set the Price too High

Zach didn’t know the costs for what he wanted to build. And he didn’t know how to bring them down either.

He didn’t have the right connections and partners that would get him a higher quality product — faster, and more affordably.

The Spark Socket ended up overpriced for the wrong reasons.

He Took too Long

Zach spent too long thinking about the idea, and working on the project before launching.

In the time it took him to go to market, LIFX had launched on Kickstarter and raised $1.3M… had he launched 1 month earlier, that might have been him!

He had no Audience

The team had not spent any efforts on lead generation before going live.

Whenever funding slowed down, he had no community to turn to, and had to rely solely on organic traffic.

He Didn’t Validate his Product

Although the idea seemed sound, Zach didn’t really know what the community needed. It was only AFTER failing the campaign that he started listening and learned to build something useful for others.

He Didn’t have a Good Video

I’m not going to lie… the Spark Socket video isn’t the worst out there.

It’s polished, has cool 2D animations, is well-produced… but it’s missing something that most successful crowdfunding videos have.

He Didn’t set a Realistic Goal

So how much did he raise?

I know that after all this negativity, you’re probably thinking he didn’t hit $5k…

But Zach actually ended up raising over $125,000!!

So why am I calling it a failed campaign?

Because he set his goal at an unrealistically high $250k, and never achieved the inertia of the Green Bar effect:

7 months later, the team was sat around Zach’s computer… they’d just gone live...

Would it be another failure? Or would they be getting drunk?

The first $1k came in… they all drank a beer…

Then the second… another beer…

Then the third… and the fourth… and the fifth…

“By the end of the night, we were at $15,000 and we were all under the table,” Zach recalls.

Spark Core ended up raising over 5,680% of its goal and crossing $500k!

I don’t think they drank past the first day though… don’t worry! 😜

Zach made a lot of mistakes the first time round.

And he learned from them, grew, and fixed the issues before launching his second campaign.

He had a community, he built partnerships, he validated his product, and he set a realistic goal of $10k.

But what if you could avoid making all these mistakes when you launch your product?

It’s smart to learn from your mistakes… but as Eleanor Roosevelt said, “Learn from the mistakes of others. You can't live long enough to make them all yourself.”

My campaigner friends, my business partners, and my team of 100+ crowdfunding experts, have all made hundreds of mistakes… no, THOUSANDS!!

That’s how we developed a formula for running million-dollar campaigns…

‍