The Product Testing and Development aspects of Crowdfunding

25/10/2015
Crowdfunding has emerged as a highly efficient and effective means of raising capital for new projects, but the micro-finance movement is about much more than just money. The community-driven aspects of crowdfunding give owners the chance to let their backers play a much more crucial role in bringing products to life compared to traditional product development.

Building a community around your offering opens up huge opportunities for testing and developing a product that the market both wants and will be happy with, but simply launching on any number of crowdfunding platforms isn’t enough. While it can be a great source of organic data from interested parties, you can’t solely depend on platform traffic to hit your crowdfunding goal. That being said, there are a few steps you need to take when it comes to product testing and development before launching that campaign.
Product Development
While different platforms hold unique requirements as to what kind and at what stage a project can be launched, successful crowdfunding is based on trust, so having at least a crude rendering or early-stage prototype for your product can be a powerful resource in proving to your potential customers that you’re the real deal. This will require a personal cost that won’t be recovered until after your hopefully successful campaign, but it’s an essential investment that you can’t afford to skip.
Customer Research
When launching a new project, you have to make assumptions about who will be purchasing your product, and those assumptions need to be tested to insure you’re heading in the right direction. Testing those assumptions involves finding those potential customers, engaging them, listening to their feedback, and hopefully converting them into high-potential backers for your launch. If the customers you’re engaging aren’t interested, it’s up to you to find out who you should really be attracting.
Pre-Launch Network
Interest in your project is great, but success hinges on conversions and pledges. All of that customer research is meant to help you engage and convert a strong pre-launch network of potential supporters for your product. This network gives your campaign the boost it needs to hit the ground running when you launch your campaign, validating demand, putting others at ease, and encouraging them to jump on board to support a project that others believe in as well.
Platform Research
Not every crowdfunding platform is the same. Backers on a charity-based platform probably won’t back your tech product, if the ones in charge even allow you to post it. Doing at least basic research on the platform you want to launch through can save yourself a lot of time, money, and potential embarrassment by insuring their mission is aligned with yours.
Campaign Development
A failed campaign doesn’t necessarily reflect solely on your project. As we mentioned earlier, creating a powerful crowdfunding community relies on trust. Even with a strong prototype, action plan, and marketing efforts, something as simple as a missing video or poorly written description can cause breakdowns in that relationship, resulting in lost pledges or worse.
When you’re finally ready to launch, what can you expect from your crowdfunding campaign in terms of product testing and development?
Market Demand
Your pre-launch network probably won’t be enough to get you to your goal, and that’s a good thing. Mid-campaign marketing efforts and exposure on your crowdfunding campaign will be where you can really start to judge market demand for your product, and further discover who is driving orders for your unique offering. Many projects use crowdfunding solely for this purpose.
Customer Discovery
All of these experiences are useless if you aren’t taking the time to examine and learn from them. As we mentioned earlier, you made assumptions about the users that will engage with your product, and should be tracking them every step of the way to guarantee you’re implementing the most efficient methods for promoting and developing around what’s really in demand. Building with this knowledge makes the process much more efficient and drives growth outside of your crowdfunding campaign.
Actionable Feedback
Analyzing demographics is one thing, but hearing first-hand from the people putting their hard-earned money behind your project is an invaluable privilege earned through crowdfunding. Again, assumptions can only get you so far. You need to engage and promote communication between your team and your backers to insure a development process that revolves around the customer.
Popular Improvements
Even if your campaign isn’t successful, the feedback you receive can lead to improvements to your offering that you may have never thought of previously. Needless to say, popular improvements lead to greater sales and maybe even a second campaign where the result could be drastically different. Backers take notice when you make changes based on their feedback as well, helping to build a stronger, more trusting relationship between you and them.
Customer-Driven Innovation
Your backers have skills and have expressed at least a bit of interest in what you’re building with their pledges, so when it comes time to continue the building process for your product, strengthen your community even further by involving them where you can. Apart from just listening to their feedback, offer up rewards or discounts to those who can produce logos, copy, CAD, designs, or any other sort of work to help to accelerate your path to market.
Crowdfunding is driven by community. From reducing risk by testing demand of your unique offering to your supporters pitching in where they can to produce a market-ready, first-edition of your project, you can involve your backers or customers every step of the way. They’re there to tell you what they want, what they like, what they want changed, and will hopefully be the ones to supply the capital to bring everything to fruition when it comes time to launch.

By:https://www.krowdster.co/blog/the-product-testing-and-development-aspects-of-crowdfunding.html

LEGGI GLI ALTRI BLOG

• < Prec
• Succ >