Mako Strategy Team on the Pros and Cons of Crowdfunding

Crowdfunding Invention Help

Preparing for your product launch can be equally exciting and stressful and the inventor has to consider a lot of different aspects in order to create a successful debut in the market. Financing, in particular, is one of the most important parts of building, designing, and starting a new business since it is the foundation in what builds your business, funds its marketing, and more! Crowdfunding through different crowdfunding sites such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo has become a popular strategy and avenue for new small business owners and inventors to bring their ideas and product out into the open and help generate revenue and funds to help support and bring their product to life. To help our readers understand their needs for crowdfunding invention help, we’ve listed the major pros and cons of crowdfunding to help better understand and choose whether crowdfunding is the best strategy to help fund your product.

Kickstarter is an example one of the most popular crowdfunding sites

The Pros

Equity

Ownership and Rights to your product and upcoming small business are important, especially if you’re on the journey of entrepreneurship. When looking for ways to fund your new product or small business, a lot of entrepreneurs explore the options of ownership, investors, and giving up equity. Equity refers to the value of ownership or interest in a business, such as shares of stocks. One of the biggest advantages of having crowdfunding invention help versus other forms of funding for your product or small business is that your funders don’t take a piece of equity from your business the same way investors do. This means you still own all rights and ownership to your idea, product, and business and can still raise funds to bring everything to life.

Testing Your Market

One of the best qualities of crowdfunding invention help is that you get a chance to see how well your product could perform once it enters the market. The market is a tricky place to configure and estimate when and what products are most likely to be successful, especially with the fluctuations of trends coming and going. Crowdfunding allows you to introduce your product to your targeted audience or a group of people who could be interested in your product and see how interested and likely they are to invest in your product – by how much funding and support comes through. The speed, interest, and traffic generated to your product is a good indicator that can help predict how well your product is likely to perform once its actually debuted and can give you a better idea and some data on who your audience is, what their needs are and better ways to market your product.

Builds an Audience

Using crowdfunding invention help sites can be a great way to test out the market and see how well your product can perform before its official debut. However, another great aspect of crowdfunding, especially crowdfunding sites, is that you get the chance to build awareness and an audience through online marketing of the idea of your product. There are many people who browse crowdfunding sites excited to see what new products and innovations can be brought to this world, and crowdfunding allows you to build an audience before the official debut of your product. Having a strong audience is a great way to build a loyal clientele who are genuinely interested in your product and seeing its success, which can guarantee you stability for when you enter the market.

Cons

False Positives

What a lot of people don’t properly prepare for their crowdfunding invention help is the proper measures needed for marketing, advertising, and awareness of their new product or business. It’s important that you figure out a strategic way to reach your audiences, especially amongst a competitive market, in order to at least let others be aware and know of your product and small business. This is important because a common mishap that can occur to new small business owners and crowdfunding campaigns is receiving a ‘false positive’ feedback. This means that although you may have a genius product idea and a great small business to launch, because of improper preparation and lack of marketing of your idea, you will get negative responses, or no response to your idea at all. This can be incredibly discouraging to future owners or innovators of their product since it can create a false sense that your product or idea is not “good enough” or desirable to your audience or market. The truth is, your product needs to be properly shown the eyes of your audience in order for them to be invested or take interest into it, and without the right effort in marketing, advertising and content creation to help promote your product, your crowdfund might fail before it gets a chance to succeed.

A Lot of Effort and Work

Crowdfunding isn’t as simple as just posting your idea, small business, and product and sitting back to watch the funds come in. Crowdfunding involves the proper research, preparation of content, information, social media and website channels, advertising and marketing, and overall keeping up with interactions and traffic to your crowdfund. A lot of successful or passionate innovators take months or years to prepare for their crowdfunding invention help and small business debut by creating images, graphics, even videos of their product or business and coming up with smart and strategic ways to gain their target audiences awareness and more visibility to their product idea. Taking the time to observe and learn from the feedback that your audiences provide to you from reacting to your product takes a lot of effort to not only apply these changes and feedback, but to also interact, respond, inform and let your audiences know of any improvements and updates on your product, and small business debut.

Competition/Visibility

One of the biggest challenges with gaining crowdfunding invention help is that because it is such a popular choice for innovators and new small business owners to reach out to and try to promote and fund their product, there is an over-saturation of new ideas and products already out there. With so much competition from those who could already have a lot of backers, followers, and support, it can seem both intimidating and difficult to try to compete against what is already out there. Another challenge is trying to promote your idea or product amongst others, especially if your idea might be somewhat similar or have direct competition from another product within the same audience target or the market as you. In this case, a lot of marketing, awareness, interaction, and effort to reach out and gain audiences’ attention must be taken in order to get support and funders for your own product and small business.

Check out our blog for more tips on how to use Kickstarter for your crowdfunding campaign!

If you have a great new invention and you’d like to learn more about this process, get in touch with MAKO here and visit our website to find out more. Feel free to give us a call at 1-888-MAKO and we can set you up on a call with our product analyst!

About: MAKO Design + Invent is the original firm providing world-class consumer product development services tailored to startups, small manufacturers, and inventors. Simply put, we are the leading one-stop-shop for developing your physical product from idea to store shelves, all in a high-quality, cost-effective, and timely manner. We operate as one powerhouse 30-person product design team spread across 4 offices to serve you (Austin, Miami, San Francisco, & Toronto). We have full-stack in-house industrial design, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, patent referral, prototyping, and manufacturing services. To assist our startup and inventor clients, in addition to above, we help with business strategy, product strategy, marketing, and sales/distribution for all consumer product categories. Also, our founder Kevin Mako hosts The Product Startup Podcast, the industry's leading hardware podcast. Check it out for tips, interviews, and best practices for hardware startups, inventors, and product developers. Click HERE to learn more about MAKO Design + Invent!