On May 20 2015, Shelly Floyd launched a Kickstarter campaign for Silisonic, a unique sonic facial cleanser and massager with interchangeable silicone heads. About halfway through the campaign the creator decided to cancel funding, having only raised $1,883 of her $50,000 goal.
“In hindsight, for Kickstarter, I should have done more marketing,” Shelly shared with CrowdCrux, reflecting on her project, “For example: reaching out to more bloggers, gathering more email addresses, performing live demonstrations, etc.
I should have spent about 3-6 months really getting my product out there before starting the countdown on Kickstarter.”
Instead of choosing to throw in the towel or take some time before re-launching a second Kickstarter campaign, Shelly Floyd decided to pursue a new strategy altogether.
Using the pre-order, crowdfunding and e-commerce platform, Celery, Floyd is hoping to fund this product faster and not have to worry about paying any unnecessary platform fees.
Floyd learned about Celery while searching for crowdfunding assistance and signed up for their newsletter. At the time, she was looking for resources that could help her gain exposure and backers for her Silisonic Kickstarter campaign.
“Fast forward until about three weeks ago. I received an email from Celery stating that they had a new crowdfunding platform that uses your own website. Since I already had my website in place, I figured this would be a fantastic way to get my product funded without having to pay all of the Kickstarter fees and without having a time limit to get it funded,” Floyd said.
“Of course, the business owner is completely responsible for making sure the website has all the information needed for backers to make a decision on the product and whether or not to back it.”
I’d recommend using Wordpress and hosting your site on BlueHost, what this site uses.
Celery was launched in 2012 as an e-commerce platform that helped creators with pre-orders after their Kickstarter or Indiegogo campaigns were over. Since then they have grown to offer a number of services, including the addition of Celery Launch, a combined crowdfunding and pre-order service.
Rather than launch a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo or Kickstarter (who generally charge a 5% platform fee along with 3-5% for payment processing), Celery Launch allows creators to raise money from their own website with two lines of code for a 2% flat fee.
Using Celery has allowed Shelly Floyd to lower her funding goal from $50K on Kickstarter to a much more modest $27K. So far, the campaign on her website has raised over $7K from 173 backers.
“Setting up Celery to the website was extremely easy. They have four different ways you can set it up including HTML code that can be placed on your website for checkout,” Shelly Floyd noted.
“The first day I set it up I received backers immediately. You have the option when setting up your account to receive money at checkout or to just reserve the product without charging the customer’s credit card. You have multiple options for payment processing too.”
You can also use Shopify or SquareSpace to host an ecommerce store.
Celery is making it easy for creators to raise money in whatever way suits them best – with a range of customizable options to choose from.
With Celery, you get to maintain control of your brand and keep your customers in one place. Many start-ups are associated with the crowdfunding platforms they use, so now it’s becoming popular for companies to crowdfund on their own websites (like Star Citizen, which raised over $89 million this way).
“My hope is that with Celery, I can get the funding I require to bring SiliSonic to market,” she comments.
“Since Celery does not charge the fees that Kickstarter does, I was able to lower my funding goal quite a bit. So now, I can bring my product to market faster.”
If you are interested learning more about this project you can check out the Silisonic website or the Celery pre-order page, where backers can enter the coupon code FUND20 to receive 20% off. Once you become a backer, refer friends with coupon code REFER20 to give your friends 20% off!
“This is another reason I like working with Celery,” the creator added, “I can reward customers more!”
Doing research ahead of time to figure out which crowdfunding platform or funding method is best for you can save a lot of time in the long run. Still, with all of the options available it’s hard to always know the best course of action. In this case, Silisonic’s creator did her research and has used it to orchestrate a great comeback with a better chance of long-term success.
If you decide to try out celery, do me a favor and click this link to sign up. We’ll get a commission at no cost to you and it’s a nice way of thanking us if you liked this article!
