The Neurio: Home Intelligence Kickstarter campaign has raised $88,012 in 9 days and still is open to backers for a remaining 21 days.
Described as a “A revolutionary new technology that makes an ordinary home smart,” this campaign is the combined effort of the Energy Aware Technology team, based in Vancouver, Canada.
Having been featured on GigaOM, GreenTechMedia, Gizmag, HomeEnergy, and more, this team is a stellar example of how to laser in on your target market and attract pledges with compelling perks, an interesting video, and a transparent pitch.
The team was nice enough to sit down with me and provide some insight into how they went about preparing for their campaign, marketing it, and attracting media attention. Before reading the interview, be sure to check out their video, which I’ve embedded below.
You’ve had a really strong start with this project. How did you go about preparing for it?
It’s been an exciting few days for sure! In terms of preparation, a lot of work went into planning for our launch and I can’t say that the strong start can be attributed to just one thing.
Our team started planning this at least 3 months ago, and we did a lot of research into crowdfunding first to make sure that it made sense with the project we wanted to bring to life.
On Marketing and Driving Traffic
Ultimately, it all comes down to having a very deep understanding of our potential backers.
We spent a lot of time talking about who would be the most likely to not just use Neurio, but love it and want to tell others about it. From the beginning we knew we wanted to make an open, hackable project and build a bit of a community around the device. We want to involve our backers in the process of bringing Neurio to life.
Once we had a good understanding of who we wanted to speak to, then we were able to go about creating content (such as our video) that really speaks to this group of people.
Of course, of equal importance is the support of our family and friends. As many people know the first 20-30% of a campaign really depends on the support of the founders’ personal networks in order to build momentum in the first place.
Did you hire a PR firm?
No. Although we did bring on some part-time help to help bring everything together, we are a small Vancouver startup so all of our PR has been homegrown in-house.
Basically, we had one person focus primarily on PR and community outreach long before the campaign itself launched. This also involved a large amount of research and connecting with the right people early-on who were most likely to be interested in hearing about the project.
How long has it taken to develop the project and prepare for the crowdfunding campaign?
I’d say at least 3 months of intense planning and preparation. However, Neurio is really birthed out of ideas that started 8 years ago when we first founded Energy Aware. What originally started as a class project for some of our founders at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver evolved to hardware and software solutions for utility companies across the world.
Neurio is just the natural evolution of this, as we realized early on that there are some really amazing things that can be done with the data we are able to capture from an individual’s electricity use.
The Funding Breakdown
I’d say that close to half of our backers have discovered us via Kickstarter, while the other half have come from a combination of friends, family, PR outreach, and viral aspects of the campaign (we’ve seen a huge upswing in this lately, as our backers are excited about the project and are telling their friends about it as well).
Of course, the initial boost came from our personal networks, but after a point more and more people start spreading the word for you.
Definitely! As of right now (the end of Day 6), we have raised over $70,000.
Since we launched last week we’ve heard a lot of desire to see Neurio certified for use in Europe, so this last weekend we added a stretch goal. If we reach $125,000, we will add CE certification, which will apply to many countries in the EU!
We have also added a new reward level to support our backers in 3-phase homes, and we will be announcing some exciting news very soon about some more added capabilities to the system. =)
We’ve come a long way so far, but we still have a way to go before we hit our minimum goal of $95,000… so any help spreading the word would be much appreciated!
Join the Discussion!
Leave a comment below. What are your thoughts on the article? How have you gone about marketing your campaign?
