Love Thy Crowd

Why we choose to keep coming back to Kickstarter.

By Peak Design

January 20^th, 2016

Let's start by laying our cards out on the table.

It‘s going to sound a little horn-tooty, but we‘re really not like that, we promise. At the time of writing this, we‘ve raised $7,130,163 over the course of 5 successful Kickstarter campaigns in 5 straight years. Here‘s the breakdown:

2011: Capture Camera Clip | 5,258 backers pledged $364,698
2012: Leash and Cuff Camera Straps | 3,108 backers pledged $215,721
2013: Capture Camera Clip v2 | 8,090 backers pledged $819,108
2014: Slide and Clutch Camera Straps | 9,455 backers pledged $861,164
2015: The Everyday Messenger Bag | 17,029 backers pledged $4,869,472

We‘ve grown 100% year over year, every year since we started—and that growth applies to revenue, unit sales and profit. We‘ve been profitable every year we‘ve existed, which evidently is somewhere between ridiculous and completely absurd. We‘ve grown from 1 to 15 employees and counting. Our products (now over 30 SKUs) are now sold in over 2000 storefronts across 50 countries.

Again, we‘re not here to get all high-n-mighty. Are we proud of what we‘ve done? You bet. The numbers definitely have some razzle-dazzle to them and they remind us of the awesome power of crowdfunding, but they‘re not everything. For instance, at the time of writing this (and at various times over the last few years) we have zero dollars in the bank. That sounds like a terrible number, but financially we‘re actually doing just fine for reasons that are too long and boring to explain beyond just saying “inventory.”

The point we‘re trying to make here is that you shouldn‘t look at our (or anybody‘s) Kickstarter stats and think “holy schnikes, those folks are getting rich!“ We‘re not getting rich. We don‘t have a swimming pool full of gold coins a-la Scrooge McDuck. In fact, if our goal was simply to get rich, we wouldn‘t have gone back to Kickstarter 4 times since our initial project. Instead, we would have taken on traditional investors and/or sold off some or all of our company. So, why haven‘t we done that? Because crowdfunding is the complete and utter shyte, bra.

To put it in slightly less Millenial terms:

Crowdfunding lets us do what we love.

Write your story here. (Optional)

Peak Design founder Peter Dering catching up on emails on Bolinas Beach, north of San Francisco.

We‘re a design company. We love to solve problems through the creative design process. That‘s our jam. Well, we also like to go outdoors, travel and have adventures. That‘s our jelly. Oh, and we‘re big fans of photography, videography, building stuff and other creative endeavors. We suppose you could collectively call that our preserves.

Say we hypothetically decided to take on a big fat wad of venture capital. Could Peak Design stand to grow dramatically? Probably. But it would fundamentally change how we run our business. We could no longer just do what‘s right for us and our customers, we‘d have to also do what‘s right for our investors. And what‘s right for our investors would likely be growing at certain rate over a certain period of time. Growing is good, but we don‘t want to spend our time convincing somebody else of our future growth strategies. We don‘t want our projected growth rate to steer our design process. And under no circumstances do we ever want to have to make a PowerPoint presentation. Even Jen, our one team member sporting an MBA, agrees on that one.

For us, repeat crowdfunding eliminates the need to seek outside investment. Every year we‘re able to generate the funds necessary to pay the fantastic expense of developing and manufacturing products, and those funds are being generated by the very people who are consuming those products. We get to spend our time doing what we love: designing products, taking photos, having adventures and never, ever interacting with PowerPoint.

Write your story here. (Optional)

Crowdfunding gives us the best customers in the world.

The customers who buy our products through Kickstarter are so freaking great that Kickstarter has developed a special nomenclature to explain how awesome they are.

First of all, they‘re not just customers, they‘re backers. They don‘t just pre-order your products, they pledge to your campaign. Backers don‘t just like our products, they like our story and they like us too. They follow us, share their feedback with us, and share us with the world. They help us improve our products and they help each other use our products. They pledge to our Kickstarter campaigns not just because they want to be the first to get our latest product, but also because they want to see us continue designing more products in the future. They celebrate our victories with us and they empathize with us when we screw up.

We simply cannot express enough gratitude for our Kickstarter backers. They don‘t just support us, they help steer the direction of our company and products. In a sense, our backers are our board of directors.

Crowdfunding lets us reach more people.

Kickstarter calls itself a “funding platform,“ and we most certainly use it to fund. But for us and most other crowdfunders, it‘s about way more than just funding. It‘s about marketing too.

Professional photographers testing our gear in the Alps above Chamonix, France. We sponsor a photo workshop at the yearly Arc'teryx Academy.

Over 10 million people have supported Kickstarter projects. Over 3 million of those folks have supported more than one project. Kickstarter is one of the 500 most visited websites in the world. It‘s a huge place, and as a project creator you get your very own piece of real-estate, your project page. And while it‘s not free, it‘s pretty darn cheap (you pay Kickstarter 5% of your earnings and a payment processor another 3%). A little stat to illustrate how powerful the platform can be: in our most recent campaign, over a third of our $4.8M in pledges came from people who discovered our project through the Kickstarter platform itself (i.e. they didn‘t learn about it from an outside source).

Dollar for dollar, when we compare Kickstarter with any other marketing platform, we can‘t think of any more effective way to help people discover and purchase our new products.

Crowdfunding is fun.

We get to tell our story through video and pictures, which are two things that we already love. We spend months passionately designing a new product, and then we get to immediately share it with thousands of likeminded, equally passionate people from all over the world. When we‘re in the midst of a Kickstarter campaign, the feeling in our office is electric. Every milestone in our campaigns—the pre-announcement, the launch, hitting the goal, the countdown, the fulfillment—is a celebration between us and our backers.

Crowdfunding is a blast, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.

PD Finance Director Dave homebrewing in our office.

PD Creative Director Peter holding up the final injection molding cast for Capture Tool.

Welcome to Kickstarter 101.

This article of one of many that we plan to write to share our experiences (and what we have come to believe are success factors) on the Kickstarter platform. We’re doing this because we want to give back to a community that has given our company everything. We want more people to crowdfund because we believe it’s the best way to bring new creative endeavors to life. And we want our customers and backers to know what makes us tick, and how the proverbial sausage is made. What a disgusting analogy, by the way.

Are you thinking of launching a Kickstarter project a looking for a comprehensive place to start? Watch the video of our founder Peter Dering giving a presentation about Kickstarter at the 2015 Outdoor Retailer Winter Market:

Kickstarted - Building an Outdoor Gear Brand from Scratch through Crowdfunding [VIDEO OPENS IN NEW TAB]

Lastly, please note the following caveats to the advice we’re giving, namely that we’re speaking with a bit of subjectivity:

1. We’re speaking through the lens of a product design company who uses crowdfunding to launch new consumer products. There’s a lot of us out there (Design projects are 3rd in all-time funded dollars on Kickstarter) but it’s certainly not all of us. People use crowdfunding in different ways, and we’re here to share how we use it and what we think makes it work well for people like us.

2. You may hear us use the word “Kickstarter“ interchangeably with “crowdfunding.” Kickstarter is a crowdfunding platform. There are many other crowdfunding platforms, including Indiegogo, Pozible and GoFundMe to name a few, and each of them have their own schtick. But Kickstarter is undeniably the most popular crowdfunding site in the world, it‘s the site that Peak Design has and will continue to use, and it‘s the one that we‘ll continually reference throughout this series of posts.