by Sachet Bangia — December 2, 2014
While many entrepreneurs struggle to meet their crowdfunding goals—only 4 in 10 Kickstarter projects succeed—Alex Andon, dubbed the “Jellyfish Entrepreneur”, has blown past his goals twice.
The Duke University graduate successfully raised about $98,000 in his recent campaign for the
Chargerito, arguably the world’s smallest phone charger at 2.1″ x 1.3″, and raised well into six figures in his Kickstarter campaign for a desktop jellyfish tank three years ago.
Andon became an entrepreneur after he was laid off from his job at a biotech company during the 2008-09 recession. Having observed how public aquariums visitors were captivated by the rhythmic pulsating of jellyfish in the exhibits, he decided to explore the possibility of a market for jellyfish as pets. He started with a $100 Google Adwords advertising campaign, which led to his first sale to a Vietnamese restaurant in Seattle.
And that’s how
Jellyfish Art, a company that initially built custom jellyfish aquariums that cost up to $25,000 each, was born. But business was slow and did not scale well. Andon knew he needed a more affordable product, so he retrofitted another company’s tank to make it jellyfish compatible, and sold those for about $500 each. Sales took off.
This is because Tilt/Open allowed him to run the campaign from his own webpage, letting him include features such as a live chat box to interact with customers. He could also tinker with the campaign’s aesthetics.
In a guest entry for the Tilt/Open blog, he describes a compelling argument for hosting a campaign on your own URL:
“Many products launch to a lot of press fanfare that links to their crowdfunding page, but after the crowdfunding is over, that traffic often gets lost trying to find the actual product website. I still regularly get people messaging me on my old jellyfish tank crowdfunding page asking where they can buy the product even though that campaign ended almost three years ago. Running the campaign on my own URL allows me to seamlessly switch to selling the product once the campaign is over without losing traffic.”
Andon goes on to argue against the perception that running a campaign on a better-known platform equates to a significantly higher chance of success.
Kickstarter on its own provides very little traffic to a campaign page; you have to get almost of it yourself from the press and your social networks. So using a popular platform does not confer as much of an advantage as one may think. A campaign could just as likely get lost among the many others.
According to Andon, there is only one strategy to crowdfunding: get the press. Which is what he did. Through his years of running Jellyfish Art, Andon had built up press contacts, and he plugged Chargerito to all of them. Being the simple, practical product that it is, Chargerito does not draw attention the same way a flashy desktop jellyfish tank does, yet the campaign managed to raise just a hair under $100,000.
Clearly, the strategy worked well for him. Andon modestly thinks that they did “OK but not amazing” in crowdfunding owing to the nature of the product. Nevertheless, he’s confident that Chargerito will sell well when it goes to market because it caters to a very real need.
Now that the campaign is over, Andon’s team is building mass manufacturing prototypes, getting safety certification, designing retail packaging, lining up fulfillment and quality control, and moving towards production. The campaign dollars will pay for the large up front costs for mass manufacturing, in addition to the materials for production. Chargerito will be available for sale in early 2015.
