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:
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: