Has anyone successfully crowdfunded an app idea?

Kim Stowe
10 replies
Has anyone got experience of successfully crowdfunding an app idea or something similar without a large marketing budget? Actually, any tips and feedback would be most appreciated.

Replies

Courtney Carlsson
@gistsy_app I've closed an overfunded crowdfunding raise on Crowdcube with a beta and no marketing spend. Happy to chat about the experience, or holla at me with your specific qu's. This is the app: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/.... This was the campaign: https://www.crowdcube.com/compan...
Artem Smirnov
@gistsy_app @courtney_carlsson Wow, I always thought that crowdfunding requires a dedicated person and a few months of content marketing. How much effort have you put into it?
Courtney Carlsson
@gistsy_app @artem_smirnov its definitely a fair amount of work. End to end it was a 5 month process including pitch prep and pre/post raise admin, legal etc. And for ~ 2 months it was a full time job just focusing on the raise. But I think it's the same for any fundraise from what I gather. The added benefit for us from our crowdfunding was the pr/marketing support that we received.
Artem Smirnov
@gistsy_app @courtney_carlsson That's expectable, but did you have to, well, spread the word? How did you manage to attract supporters? A group in FB, blogging, forums etc etc? Or was it just a pitch on the crowdfunding site?
Abadesi
@gistsy_app I would suggest creating a simple MVP to validate the idea before embarking on building an app.
Goran Ramljak
@gistsy_app @abadesi by MVP you mean a working protoype or just Invision/similar prototype? Just asking because I am working on a fully functional MVP which should be soon released, but in future I would like to try more of testing before developing a feature.
Abdullah Al Mallak
@gistsy_app My MVP is out but I'm having hard time getting traction on it, knowing that it's niche based mobile app & my niche are actually gym goers in which I need some significant amount of marketing budget to reach out to them.
Giacomo Balli
@gistsy_app often you can make up for what you're lacking financially with... sweat (gym pun intended). Go where your​ target audience hangs out (aka watering hole​) and get some feedback. Not necessarily demo the whole app, just figure out: - if they have the problem - how they're currently dealing with it - is it worth solving - would they pay for it (if so how much)
Taylor Jacobson – Team Focusmate
@gistsy_app most successful startups begin with zero marketing budget. We used guerrilla marketing to build a user community that helped power the Focusmate crowdfunding campaign, https://republic.co/focusmate.
Ryan Hoover
@gistsy_app Aloe Bud did a Kickstarter with some success, but I agree with @abadesi that I would try to build something people want before launching a crowdfunding campaign, even if it's just a small thing. Once you do that, those fans will be evangelists and hopefully backers for your crowdfunding effort.