Today we’re going to be talking with Rudy, who is the founder of Esington Glass, a Kickstarter that initially had a pretty respectable goal, but has since gone on to raise over $196,000 on a $5,000 goal. This is really a massive success. The campaign has over 2,000 backers.
Not only is this a really cool project, but I also think that Rudy has a very inspirational story showing that anyone who is driven can make a change in their life.
Listen to the podcast below or on iTunes
Show Notes
– The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg
– Tim Ferriss’ deconstruction of the $100k Kickstarter.
– 70% of pledges came from Kickstarter
– An authentic video that shares the creator’s story is better than a commercial video.
– Ask your backers which stretch goals they want! Interact with them as much as possible with updates and comments.
– Consider using an order fulfillment company.
– Kickstarter promotion companies can help (just be sure to research them).
Transcript
This transcript is sponsored by Fulfillrite. “We work with you to make your Kickstarter reward fulfillment fast, simple, and easy.”
Sal: Thanks for coming on the show Rudy.
Rudy: Thanks for having me! It’s great to be here.
Sal: Definitely. I’d like to jump right in. Can you tell us a little bit about the Esington Glass product and how long you’ve been working on it before launching on Kickstarter.
Can you tell us a little bit about the product? How long have you been working on it before Kickstarter?
Rudy: Sure, I’d love to. So, the story of how it came to be started about two years ago when my son was born. Before that, I was always the guy who was the slacker in school. I didn’t do my homework. I was always late to class or didn’t show up. I barely got through college, so, I kind of drifted from job to job never really making my mark.
However, when my son was born, I wanted him to have someone to look up to, and something clicked in my brain. I started reading all I could get my hands on for self-improvement and testing out a bunch of different waters. I came across a book called The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg
The book really solidified what I was looking for. I realized I had bad habits in my life and when I got up in the morning, I didn’t really know what I was going to do. I didn’t have any kind of routines and in the book he describes why that is bad. He introduced this idea of a “keystone habit”, which is just like a small habit that transforms your life. For example, if you have a bad habit of smoking and you stop smoking, you may end up running marathons and running fortune 500 companies in a year. It cascades.
I was convinced that I could find a keystone habit to turn my life around and become somebody better. I tried a bunch of different things. I tried getting up early and running every morning. I tried writing on my blog every day. I tried doing pushups every day. I tried dozens of different things, but nothing was really sticking. Everyone knows that it’s hard to get habits to stick.
There are a few thins that were going wrong, but nothing was really changing my life. I finally came across this idea of time boxing, which is where you just put aside a certain block of time, turn off all your distractions and get to work. That kind of opened my eyes as to how much work I could get done. But, the problem was that I couldn’t turn it into a habit. I knew that it was awesome, just like the way that you know that running every morning is good for your body, but my brain would just ignore it and I would put it off and I would end up not doing it for days at a time.
I was like why, what’s the problem here. But, in that book, he talks about trying to minimize your activation energy for habits so that it’s really easy to get going. So if you wanted to do pushups every day, you would start with just doing one every day until you got the habit down.
For the time boxing habit, I was doing something like 20-30 minutes at a time, but I would have to like open an app and start a clock timer, which was annoying. I tried different timers like kitchen timers and things, but they all had problems.
The biggest problem that I found was that they interrupted your work with an annoying beep or noise. At that time, you might be super focused and super productive, so it kind of defeats part of your purpose. If you’re in the middle of this wonderful thought and you get interrupted by a bell or other noise, that is counter-productive.
So, I was looking for something that didn’t do that and I was looking for something that was super easy. I decided that it had to be physical or something that I could touch and I couldn’t really find anything that I was really happy with, so I decided to make the product and contacted a manufacturer and got them to make something for them.
That’s how the Esington glass was born. Within a week, the product helped me form new habits and now whenever I reach for it, I can feel my brain switching on and falling into focus.
Sal: The product, for people who haven’t had a chance to check out the campaign, it’s sort of like an hour glass that keeps track of time and it looks really cool.
Rudy: It’s unusual in that it doesn’t have any sort of support structure. It’s thicker and wider than your normal hour glass. The defining feature is that it’s filled with a bunch of steel nano spheres instead of sand.
If you just use sand, it falls lifelessly to the bottom, but with steel nano spheres, they bounce everywhere and make a noise, which is one reason why it’s so effective. When you reach to pick it up, it’s unusually heavy and your brain notices that novelty, and that triggers one of the cues to be in your productive mode. The sound is also another queue.
Sal: That’s really interesting. You touched on a lot of awesome points. The one thing about a keystone habit: I also notice that in my life. When I tend to be just focused on exercising regularly, I tend to be more productive in other areas of my life.
The hardest part about it is getting to the gym or just getting started in whatever it is you are doing. So, I think the idea of having something tangible that will just set you in that mental focused state, at least for a limited duration, is a really cool concept.
Rudy: Yea, and this particular habit has touched almost every other area of my life. Just becoming super productive is one thing, but becoming more caring, more observant, and just loving life more is another benefit.
Sal: From what I’ve read about your story, I think it’s really transformed your life. Learning PHP, launching software startups also, that’s incredible. That’s a hard skill set for a lot of people to learn.
Rudy: Yea, I just became unbelievably productive when I started the habit and now I use it all the time. Whenever I use it, my brain just focuses and gets ready to go. I did all that stuff in 3 months, which kind of blew my mind when I look back on it.
Sal: A lot of Kickstarter creators are working on side projects after work, and sometimes they are not as motivated or not as consistent, but just making a small change can unlock all of this potential energy to really make a difference. It’s incredible.
I’d like to talk a little bit about your launch. Your project is a little atypical in that you had a very small goal, and you really killed it. It seems like it’s grown steadily since you’ve launched. Can you tell us a little bit about how you got traction?
Can you tell us a little bit about how you got traction?
Rudy: Yea, I’d love to. It’s a very unusual story. I read a lot about how to start Kickstarters and what you should do to be successful. At first, I had this months-long plan of putting everything together and building up an audience. I read Tim Ferriss’ deconstruction of the $100k Kickstarter. What you’re supposed to do is go out and create social media accounts and create some buzz. Get an audience going before you even launch. That was kind of my plan.
Then, I was like, I’ve never done this before. I just need to learn something. So I just put everything together myself. I didn’t hire anyone to do anything. I literally got up and turned on the video camera myself and walked back to film it. I did the graphics myself. I just wanted to learn.
My goal, with this Kickstarter was to learn the process and understand it and then I had planned on doing another one later with my learnings. That’s how I work best. The fact that it gained traction at all blew my mind. I would be ecstatic with just $5k. That was the minimum amount I needed to pay for the order size I needed. The fact that it gained that in the second day was unbelievable. I think it was just word of mouth. That’s my only explanation. There was no marketing. I set up the social media accounts on day one, so I didn’t have any kind of following. It just kind of took off on Kickstarter all on its own.
Sal: Looking back over the entire period, when you look at the breakdown of pledges, where most of them from the Kickstarter crowdfunding platform? Were you getting any from social media or PR?
Where did your pledges coming from?
Rudy: I think it’s something like 70% from Kickstarter. It’s only 30 days long so I didn’t have much time to gain traction anywhere else. Like I said, social media is very new for me, so I had little from there. I had one Japanese website cover it three days ago, which is pretty awesome. I got like 30 from there, so a relatively small percentage. It’s almost all from Kickstarter. People looking for it, finding it, and believing in the idea.
Sal: Believing in that idea – do you think that people are like you and want to transform their life in some way. Do they really like the design of the product? What sort of feedback have you been getting from backers?
Why do you think people love the concept?
Rudy: So the feedback has been universally positive and universally positive towards the story I’ve shared. So, when I first started putting together the project, I wondered if I should just focus on time-boxing and the method, or if I should also share my story. It’s kind of a personal story and it kind of reveals part of my life and makes it public, but the fact that I did share the story made all the difference. Most of my feedback is about how great the story is and how they want to transform their own lives in a similar way. That’s the whole idea of the project.
Sal: I feel like there is sort of a trend towards more Kickstarters being commercial and there not being a creator in the video. I think that really subtracts from the connection that you can make with backers.
Rudy: I think so too. Like I said, I had never done it before, and like you said, a lot of the newer Kickstarters remove the creator from the product, and I just said – this is what I believe in, this is my passion, and I’m going to go for it.
Sal: Now, do you have any thoughts on how you ranked in the Kickstarter algorithm? Were you included in any of their newsletters?
How did you rank in the Kickstarter algorithm?
Rudy: I ranked highly in popularity for a while. I was #1 in design and I think 3 or 4 on the homepage. In the standard ranking algorithm, I don’t think I made the first page through, and I wasn’t a selected product.
Sal: You’ve had an unexpected success and that comes with its own whole set of problems. You now have almost 2,000 people and you’re going to have to ship out the product to them!
When you were in the planning phase, did you plan for that kind of success or how are you managing that now?
How are you managing unanticipated success?
Rudy: I did not plan for that success at all, so after a few days when it was really taking off, I wanted to put in stretch goals, which I did after a few days, but I had to come up with them on the fly. I had to ask the community for help with suggestions. In the last week or so, I’ve been quickly searching for fulfillment companies to help me with the volume so that everything can be shipped out in a timely manner. I definitely reached out for help, this being my first Kickstarter and there being plenty of people who have experience with this.
Don’t know what stretch goals are? Check out this post.
Sal: I think that’s a really smart idea of reaching out to your existing community, because they are the people that you are going to creating the rewards for. That’s a great way to come up with ideas. It’s sort of like crowdsourcing your stretch goals.
Rudy: Yea, they’ve been wonderful and I’ve been getting so much wonderful feedback. The best part of my day is interacting with them.
Sal: You have a lot of updates too on your project. You have 15 or 16. Do you find that a higher number of updates engaged backers more?
Do you find that a higher number of updates engaged backers more?
Rudy: Yea, anytime I have any sort of bit of news. I want to share it with anyone. I think that is part of the connection I have with the community. I try to respond to every message as quickly as I can. Everybody wants to be “in the know.”
Sal: Yea, I see updates as mini blog posts. When you have a lot of questions, it’s easier to answer them in the updates or in the FAQ section.
Looking back, you’ve had this incredible success. Would you do anything differently?
Would you do anything differently?
Rudy: This was my first time, so it’s hard to say that I would do anything differently. I really wanted this as a learning experience. I do think that if you build up a following first, then it’s probably better. But, if you just wanted to do something to learn how the process works, then it’s better to just dive in and do something quickly. That way you know if your idea is worth pursuing or not.
Sal: You put together all of these graphics, the video, etc. Do you have any tools that you’d recommend?
Rudy: I just used photoshop. I’ve used it before in the past and once you get used to it, it’s not so bad. As far as the video, I just used the default software on the Mac.
Sal: When you were shooting the video, did you put a storyboard together?
Rudy: No, I just wrote out what my story was and the first time I went through it, I just talked through my ideas and it was like 20 minutes long. I then went through and got a friend to help chop it down and after a dozen or so tries, got it down concise enough.
Sal: You have also backed products on Kickstarter. When did you first hear about the platform?
Rudy: I probably heard about it whenever the pebble watch came out. I’ve known about it for a while and have checked on it every now and then, but it wasn’t until this idea that I came back to it.
Sal: Did you consider any other platforms?
Rudy: I did. I just went to google and asked which platform is best. It seemed like Kickstarter was the right one for me for this use case.
For a comparison, see: Kickstarter vs. Indiegogo.
Sal: Yea, it seems so! Looking forward, do you have any idea when the rewards will be shipped out?
Rudy: The final prototypes have been chosen. Manufacturing is ready. I’m looking to get a loan so that I can get them manufactured before I receive the funds. Within the next few days, production will start and they will ship out in February. They will be available on the site soon for pre-order.
Sal: Whenever I find creators are doing a hardware or design product, there is always that fear of some kind of trademark infringement or infringing on someone else’s patent. Did you think about that at all?
Rudy: I have thought about people stealing the design, but I don’t really care. I care that the product changes people’s lives. The goal isn’t to just make a few bucks. It’s to give a keystone habit to the world. I assume that other people are probably going to copy this. I see this as a positive thing as long as it helps people.
Sal: I think that’s how products should be created. We tend to think of them so functionally, like this is an hourglass or this is X, but really there is a whole story behind them and a way that they are meant to improve people’s lives. I think that’s a good perspective to have when launching something.
So we talked about authenticity, the power and unpredictability of Kickstarter, and the value of doing something yourself and learning. Anything you want to add?
Rudy: Don’t worry about getting things perfect. Don’t worry about getting perfect graphics or having a professional photo out there. Please share your story of why you are doing the project, what your passions are, and give the crowdfunding crowd a reason to care about your project. I think you’ll learn from that, even if there is no traction, and you can always try again.
Sal: Great tips! For those listening, you can check out more at Esington.com
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* This transcript is paraphrased in places.
