TAAN THAI Journey Part II: Our Kickstarter Adventure

After coming up with an idea, naturally the next step is to test whether our Thai cooking kit concepts are viable. To do so, Kickstarter, a crowdfunding platform, is what we chose. We want to learn more about our potential customers and whether our ideas are viable to the market. Kickstarter was a good starting point since we did not need to have our products right away. What’s important is that we communicate with our potential backers clearly on the vision of our project. If they like it, they will fund our project in exchange for a reward of their choice.

Kickstarter: what is it and what's important to the food campaign?

Kickstarter is a popular crowdfunding platform that mostly hosts campaigns for new games and innovative products. To a much smaller extent, there is a food category as well. The main challenge that comes with a food product is that potential backers cannot taste our samples. They have to really trust us on the taste and authenticity. Our campaign, titled TAAN THAI: A Taste of Thailand at Home, tried to convey the authenticity that we intended our products to represent. To do so, we put a lot of our time and effort on our VDO campaign, utilizing various trips to find ingredients, recipes and suppliers around Thailand. Here is the link to our VDO that we posted on Kickstarter if you are curious.

Basic things you need for your kickstarter campaign:

If you are thinking of doing your own Kickstarter campaign, based on our experience, the most important things you need to do are (in no particular orders):

• A concise (no more than 5 minutes) campaigning VDO that conveys your products idea. I have read from different books that a Kickstarter Campaign with a VDO typically performs better than those that do not have one.
• A well-designed graphic explaining your vision and the products: the concept, its unique values, and brief descriptions of the products
• A clear and accurate list of different reward tiers. Depending on how much a Kickstarter backer spent, they usually receive different tiers of rewards. The rewards should also be proportionate to how much they have to spend according to the tier list. A clear and concise graphic can encourage backers to make decision a lot easier.
• In our case, because our products are food and the instruction is very important, we also include a short reel demonstrating how to use our products, using our prototype to show our potential backers as well. Here is the reel we have included.

Optional: we have seen a lot of kickstarter campaigns included a stretch goal, which is an additional reward given to all backers if they double or triple their funding goals. In our case, we also include the Pah Khao Ma, a Thai souvenir, as a special reward in case we reach our stretch goal as well. It is supposed to encourage backers to spread the words to their friends who might be interested. Unfortunately, we didn’t reach our stretch goal. We did give all of our backers a small additional reward from our stretch goal anyway, though.

Here are several pros and cons we can think of when it comes to do a Kickstarter campaign...

Pros:

• You can start “selling” your idea and promote your products way before they are available for sale on the market to an already well-established audience built over the years by Kickstarter. 
• You can test your ideas with potential buyers.
• You can build your own followers on social media while promoting your Kickstarter Campaign before the actual product launch.

Cons:

• Most of the audience is catered to games and innovative products. There are not a lot of food-related campaign compared to those popular categories.
• The potential backers cannot taste your products to see if they like it. They have to wait 4 or more months after the campaign is over.
• You are basically promising to deliver something that you have yet to produce. So, there is a risk that in the end you may not be able to produce things exactly as you have promised, thus risking your reputation.

In our case, we decided that the benefits from doing a Kickstarter campaign far outweighs the cons. The most important factor being that we can test our ideas first and see if they are viable at all and to build our own followers on social media platforms. Moreover, we know that we can deliver what we promise since we have done a complete set of prototype during the campaign and they all turned out great. Although after the Kickstarter Campaign, we had several challenges (to be told in Part 3) which resulted in the delay of our delivery.

After we have launched the campaign, we did work hard to get our friends and family members to support and spread the words. The first 24 hours was great! We managed to get 50% of our goal funded. However, the remaining 50% was a steep learning curve. We had to do a lot of marketing campaigns, both online and offline, to get our words out there until we reached the goal. Luckily, we got picked to be a “Project We Loved” by Kickstarter staff, and that helped push our campaign to the finish line. We are not sure what the criteria for that are, but to quote them, they liked the concept of our products and how clearly we explained different reward tiers on our campaign page.

 Later on, we learned that there are marketing agencies who are specialized in Kickstarter campaigns and can help with your planning and marketing. We didn’t use any though since our main goal is to test whether people are interested in products enough to go ahead with it, not to raise as much as possible. I’d be curious to learn from others who have used marketing agencies in their campaigns. One thing that I would do differently if I could would be to build our social media followers more than what we had before we launched Kickstarter. We had around 100+ followers when we launched our campaign and that made everything very difficult. You can always delay your campaign launch date until you are ready. There is also a pre-launch page on Kickstarter where you can drive your followers and audience on Kickstarter to get notified when the project becomes live. So build that first.

Good luck if you are thinking of doing your own Kickstarter Campaign. And, if you are interested in our products, you can check out our website. Currently, we are offering a free sample until the end of October!