[conesus]

Ok, there's a chance I'll gain some valuable insight from posting this, which beats the cost of putting myself out there, so here goes...

I just completed a 30 day hardware Kickstarter last week and spent $22k on the video ($18k for main video, $4k for founder interview) and raised $57k, which is an outlier to this data. I can tell my campaign is not in the Video Budget / Amount Raised graph because it would stick out near the bottom right. So it seems to me that something's not right.

The product is compelling and I think it shows in the video. Much of the feedback I got for the video was positive. And there are a couple near competitors that have raised $1M+. My internal goal was to break $100k and that did not happen.

Did I make a mistake with this video or campaign? I hit all of the points: early product intro, upbeat mood, 2:23, image quality, founder presence, location scouting and voice talent, and outside help.

You can watch the video here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/samuelclay/turn-touch-b...

[blackguardx]

I saw your prototype at a HDDG meetup in SF. I think your campaign was very well done. If you fell short of your internal goal, it might be price related. You are in impulse buy territory, but the product might be too niche for that price.

I ran a failed crowdfunding campaign back in July. We raised ~$25k of a $100k goal. We spent $7k on the video and another $500 on google, FB, and twitter ads.

The ads didnt seem to do anything. I felt our other marketing efforts were more fruitful. We wrote some guest articles for various tech websites and got written up by a few more that we reached out to.

In the end, we felt the price was too high, so we cut some features and dropped the price by almost half for a recent relaunch [0]. We also launched with no goal to remove all customers' doubts about receiving a product.

[0] https://www.crowdsupply.com/aeroscope-labs/aeroscope-wireles...

[miahi]

A one-channel scope is useful, but it still feels as cutting your left arm when you are used to (and need) more than one channel. And these days most of the things are digital, so that means SPI/I2C/whatever with more than one line, and even then, A-B is quite important. I guess you can't combine two of them with a hardware trigger in/out so you can synchronize them and simulate a two-channel.

As it is, it's more like a toy scope, fortunately pretty close to impulse buy prices as these things go, so I guess it will be alright. I would buy one but it's iOS only, so I'm stuck with my Rigol :).

[blackguardx]

You are very perceptive. We had a prototype of two scopes synced with a cable we called "nunchuck mode," but we shelved it because we weren't sure how useful that would be.

I think the main selling point is the portability and remote measurement aspects. It fits in your jeans so you can literally have a scope with you at all times. You can also capture waveforms from over 100 ft away.

I was worried about the one channel limitations when we first decided to go with this form factor. After thinking about my own scope usage, though, I realized that I use only one channel on my four channel scope 90% of the time. More channels is obviously better, but not always necessary in every instance.

Thanks for the feedback.

[ChuckMcM]

First, I think you've made a really creative project. You did a good job of laying out its features and what you saw as the market need. The price is certainly inline with a number of other scopes in its range.

EE Times did an excellent survey article on USB oscilloscopes the under $200 ones are here: http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1326699&page_numb...

There are two serious challenges with "remote display" oscilloscopes, and that is connectivity to, and compatability with, the display. Over the the years I have owned a couple but the challenge is always that when you buy into a remote display'd test tool you bet that both the manufacturer and the environment will continue to exist. For me I've got a nice 2 channel 100Mhz USB scope that has a "display and control" application that runs on Windows 98. It kind of worked on WinXP, and barely worked at all on Win7 and works not at ll on Win10. It also uses USB 2.1 which, from a connection standpoint has been exceptionally long lived. The previous "universal" connection was parallel ports and those went away and a lot of gear became useless.

The choice of IOS is ok for now, but Apple will rev IOS in an incompatible way and if you're gone by then the scope is dead meat. Compare that to my first oscilloscope that was a used Tektronix 465b that was built in 1980, recalibrated in 1990, traded to a friend in 2000 and is still running today and doing the job. Test equipment lives a long time because the job is the job, it doesn't change, and if the tool is self contained it will never not be able to do the job until the parts it uses are no longer made.

So as a tool buyer (and I'm an outlier, having bought the 465b, a Rigol 1152D, a Tek 2216, and then a Tek MDO3024, and 3 different 'headless' oscilloscopes) none of the headless ones are completely functional any more and all of the 'headed' ones are. But there is a saving throw here.

Like you, I appreciate how cost effective it is to build these things these days. Why not build the display as well? Lets say you contract with a tablet maker in Shenzen or build your own LCD display + SoC of your choice. Then you are in control of both the display and the instrument and it opens up some other possibilities. You could for example have several test instrument "bodied" that could pair with the display, so a DMM body, a scope "body" a Freq Counter body, etc. Easy to unbundle, easy to get either "higher end" or "lower" end remotes. Second it solves your multi-channel problem if you tie all the probes to the same 'sync' line. Now you can have 8 channels if you want and the display body software just sucks them all in. You can also dump Bluetooth LE and go with the inexpensive Nordic 2.4ghz spread spectrum radio chips. Now you can share a nanosecond disciplined time base with all your tools and bring the signals back together in the display "panel." You can sell a larger 'indoor/bench' display panel or a ruggedized 'on the road' panel. That iPad Pro in the video cost the person $700 - $800, a panel with an ARM53 SoC talking to it can be had in Shenzen for $35, $150 is you put an IPS panel on it. Now you sell it for half the price of an iPad, it works with all your tool heads forever and I, as the engineer buying your stuff, know that even if you go out of business my test equipment will still work.

If you build something like this I'll buy one for sure. Market size is somewhere between 1 and several million engineers :-). If you want more thoughts on this feel free to contact me in email in my profile.

[conesus]

Oh nice, I just bought it because it looks useful. I would have liked to see more photos of the oscilloscope hooked up to boards, esp. with clips on both the probe and ground pins. I plan to hook up probes to it and not have to hold it in my hand as it runs. I have a small office and I bought it to replace my much bigger oscilloscope, since all I use it for it to hook up a voltage graph to my boards. And I already use the µCurrent Gold to measure current.

[blackguardx]

Thanks! You make a good point about our photos. This illustrates why marketing is so hard. We wanted a more "human" element to our media, but maybe our potential customers don't care about that and just want to see features.

[Retric]

No offence, but that seems like an ultra niche product which may be part of the problem. Clearly some people like the idea but home automation + wood seems iffy to me. Worse only 4 buttons seems like a poor fit for home automation. One button suggest getting as many as you need, 4 is kind of an odd compromise.

[conesus]

Ah-ha, we hit my area of expertise which is talking about how four buttons is all you need. It's a 16 button remote. Hold a button down to switch to that button's app, and each app has its own four buttons.

Buttons can also perform multiple actions at once. So you step into your home and press a button and everything welcomes you home: the lights fade up (hue, lifx), the music fades in (sonos, iTunes, spotify), the heater/fan kicks on (wemo), temp gets set (nest), etc. So you have lots of control but only have to change the battery once a year, so you can leave the remote out on the coffee table and feel like its part of your home.

But we're talking more than an order of magnitude difference raised here between campaigns, which is what I'm trying to get to the bottom of.

[Retric]

You could do unlimited selections with 1 button using Morse code, but that's terrible UI. Anyway, it's not that I think 4 buttons can't work it simply seems like a poor compromise like setting a clock on your VCR.

Can X work? Sure, but this is not the conversation you want to have with someone buying your product.

[conesus]

That morse code product is called Knocki and it raised $1.1M on Kickstarter a few months ago.

I don't think it's only the UX of four buttons. You can use them as only four buttons as well without having to remember that each button has its own app. I'm going to try again with a less expensive product (minus the wood most likely) and a better marketing strategy of signing up interest for months beforehand. But I still worry that the conversion rate will still remain low, even with the additional traffic.

[Retric]

Whoa, that Morse code idea was meant as a joke. Edit: ahh ok that's not how Knocki works.

Anyway, conversion is all about what percentage of people seeing an advertisement want your product. Having a great pitch only goes so far.

[ralfd]

> Whoa, that Morse code idea was meant as a joke. Edit: ahh ok that's not how Knocki works.

It sort of does. Look at this advertisement:

https://knocki.com/images/3dhouse.jpg

I don't know if the idea of using patterns as control is genius or stupid.

That said: Compared to this Knocki thing a wooden house remote with four buttons looks a bit boring. My guess is that people who have home automation (and are surfing kickstarter) are more on the tinkerer-side and they want something complicated. (Ultimately I think speech recognition will win)

[daveguy]

You never really explain how you can set that up easily and use it efficiently.

It looks like it would be tedious to set up and annoying to use if you have to keep different mappings in your head without any visual feedback. Was the feedback auditory?

So the primary issue is not showing how this thing is pleasant to use.

The second issue is you claim to be able to use it without any smart devices. Anyone with any home automation knows that's a bunch of bull. You control all kinds of things with like special outlets, hue, etc. Why would I buy something like this if I don't have any multi hundred dollar home automation equipment? That is a severe audience limiter.

Saying you don't need any special devices while explaining how it controls special devices just comes off as insincere.

[conesus]

That's fascinating. I had heard feedback around the setup before, but I didn't realize it would be beneficial to show how quick it is to pair smart devices to the remote. I easily could have done that in an animated GIF.

Secondly, the remote actually controls much more software than it does hardware. I use it while watching videos, playing music, reading my news reader, as my alarm clock, and to handle my iMac (turn off screen when I go to bed). But I could have done a much more narrative way of explaining that instead of heaping it in a list. I just thought the software side wasn't as interesting as the hardware side. When the devices ship and people learn how it works, that may work out well after all.

Good fodder for the next campaign!

[feral]

>You never really explain how you can set that up easily and use it efficiently.

Conesus, apologies if I'm wrong, but I suspect you might not have understood the core issue Daveguy is raising here. I don't think its about pairing devices.

When I watched the video, there was this huge awkward tension I felt: "How can all this functionality work with just 4 buttons?" which made me think "This product is probably a waste of time, I should close the video."

This is just one guy's gut reaction - although I see a couple of posters here saying something similar - but I really suspect this is a big part of why your campaign didn't work.

The value proposition is unclear:

You are selling a beautiful remote to control my home. But while it is clearly beautiful, it is not clear how it works as a remote. It looks complicated and like it probably won't work, because its not clear and never explained in the video how four buttons will suffice.

I did eventually scroll down far enough to read "Are four buttons really enough?" where I finally realized it was designed to be programmable but even this wasn't convincing (do I have to re-program it between doing all those things showed in the first video? reprogram it each day?), and I'd have bounced long before then if I hadn't come across this in a HN comment. It wasn't until I read that section multiple times I realized the bit about 4 different app profiles, where you hold the corresponding button to activate, and I was long gone by then. The fact that there seems to be a dedicated go-to-bed and wake-up button only confuses things more.

Strongly would advise you to go deeper on this, e.g. show people the video and afterwards ask them to describe how it actually works etc, ask them whether they think it has enough buttons, probe for confusion on that point that would have made them bounce etc.

You even seem to acknowledge in your comment that this is a stumbling block for folks:

>Ah-ha, we hit my area of expertise which is talking about how four buttons is all you need.

(I.e. you know this is something that is unusual/surprising and hence requires explanation)

But the video doesn't explain this at all, and I think that might be causing you to lose a lot of folks early on.

[conesus]

I'm glad I put myself out there for feedback because it was your comment that caused me to see my campaign in a new perspective.

I actually shot two videos. The founder interview at the end cost $4k because it was originally a longer video where I explained how the remote worked. But it didn't have any of the action shots, so I re-shot it, eschewing an explanation in favor of demonstrating its use, relying on people to be intrigued and then read on to see how it actually worked. It seems that didn't work, as I repeated this technique later on in the campaign itself.

Here is the original video (1:20) if you're interested to see what I rejected in favor of committing $18k to another video: https://dl.dropbox.com/s/nsvfn7n3l8phbi3/TurnTouch_CC.mp4?dl...

[comboy]

The video you posted below[1] is so much better. Your target is pretty technical, they buy some home automation stuff, so it seems fair to explain exactly the flow (button talks to my phone, my phone talks with all the stuff you can control from your phone), how far can it be from the phone for it to work, and so on.

Also, I know it's great to hear it all from the founder perspective, but I think you are not doing great job as an actor and narrator. It's probably more of a video guys failure not to give you more hints. At the end of the kickstarter video it's visible how you smile and look with kind of a proud at the button just as the video cuts off. But during the video there's not much smile, more something like "I came up with this really smart thing". Clearly you put a lot of thought into this product, but when looking at example of using it, I probably would have more positive emotions looking at some random relaxed dude with smile on his face that may look like he's completely clueless about the whole thing. You know, typical ad stuff, it's cheesy but it works.

And nice one with the fast response and gathering so much feedback here. I wrote mine because it seems that you make use of this constructive criticism. So I'm pretty sure your next campaign will be a blast.

1. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/nsvfn7n3l8phbi3/TurnTouc...

[turtlebits]

I saw your product, and the price is good. I would have considered buying it but the requirement that it's tethered to your phone is not a good idea.

I don't carry my phone around with me at home. And the second I leave my house it's useless to everyone else.

[programminggeek]

I live in Lincoln, Nebraska. I'm a techie, but my house isn't.

I watch your video and don't identify with any of it. I don't have smart lights, a sonos, or any of the things you would use your remote for.

Here is the other thing. I would lose your remote about 100x a day if I had one. I live with 3 agents of chaos known as children and they would put it places I'd never find.

Last, it's $50, which as silly as this sounds... IS TOO MUCH. I balked at buying a $30 replacement remote for my Roku. It feels like as a user I'd just use a phone app for all of this or at some point tell my phone or some smart connectected Google/Apple/Amazon device like Alexa to do these things.

Worst of all, my tech friends look a lot like me and my less tech friends are even less likely than I am to want a 4 button wood remote for $50.

You built a beautiful product that is really neat, but it's really niche. Too niche for me to imagine it making more than $100k on Kickstarter.

In 5 or 10 years smart house tech might be more common, but I've been saying that for a while and it isn't there yet. I was thinking smart house startups a decade ago, so smart houses might be "the year of the linux desktop" problem...

Do yourself a favor, buy a copy of Gary Halbert's The Boron Letters on Amazon. Read it cover to cover, pay attention to his advice on selling hamburgers and your next product will sell 10x as much.

Good luck! -Brian

[richforrester]

Have to concur with most; while there's some stuff I didn't like about the video (overall still a great video) - those wouldn't have held me back from buying the product.

If I wanted the product.

I have light switches everywhere I want light, and they have light switches close to them, or in sensible places. Putting them all on a remote seems useless to me, since then I'd lose it all the time, or it'd be in the other room, or whatever.

So nope; just not excited about the product itself.

What's interesting though, is that your data point wasn't in the data, and it might've changed the conclusion a fair bit. I wonder how many more outliers there were, and if 100 videos is even close to being enough data.

[anexprogrammer]

To start I'm probably outside the usual IoT demographic - it mostly doesn't deliver what I'd like. I looked at your campaign and thought it interesting, but didn't back it. Here's some entirely personal thoughts, make of them what you will - I don't expect to be very representative though! :)

I don't care to have my phone always around at home, couldn't care less about most apps. I even turn the phone off! Have always wanted not an Internet of Things but a local net, with a miniscule subset allowed near the net or usage slurping phone apps.

Was interested seeing MacOS app, hoping for a Pi or similar app further down. I liked that you can have say 3 remotes doing entirely different things or switching functions etc. Oh, bluetooth, iMac is usually in the other room to us in the evening (when I'm more likely to want a remote for something), so we're mainly out of Bluetooth range, and the Thinkpad is either on standby or being used.

Would have been more interested if a) the remote tethered to wifi to talk to the iMac, or better a low power Pi or similar hub so I don't need to care about iMac, phone and their apps just to remote music or lighting and b) there was a cheap n cheerful plastic option for the kitchen etc too. I'd probably look at a couple of plastic cheapies (to get dirty or lost etc) and one nice premium wooden one for the coffee table in main room.

[wingerlang]

If your goal was 25k, why didn't you just work a few months on whatever for the remaining 3k, then spend those 22+3 on the project instead?

[Theodores]

People just do not care for home automation as much as one might think. I have bought various smart gadgets for various family members over the years, thinking that due to health/age/whatever that this smart light/whatever would be well received as a gift. You would think that having some remote to turn all the lights on/off with dimming would be very useful but someone that has their house lit up by lots of very individual lights actually enjoys interacting with the 'design classic' lights, dodgy switches and all. So you think 'better' is 'better' but it is to totally misunderstand the way it works for my relatives and friends...

So how do you reach a more picky audience and get the 'cool' that they do take on board? Not so simple. Maybe partner with another brand to get that cachet of cool, piggy back an 'ok' brand to get to market and defeat snobbishness. Or be Amazon and willing to take a big punt. Even then, with lots of advertising, it is not easy.

[lloydde]

First time hearing about this product and watching the video. Beautiful video and well articulated, though was that guy doing yoga in jeans? ;)

I couldn't get my head around how it would work. How does selection work? Is it proximity to the thing you want to control? For me the video was a little too abstract. Maybe it would have just made sense if I was in the IoT space.

[its4tom]

I agree the video is well made. The quality is on par with what you'd expect for that budget. And it hits on all the recommendations we derived from the video benchmark data.

Can you tell us more about your campaign tactics, other than video? eg. How big of a mailing list did you have prior to launch? did you advertise? any PR?

[conesus]

The only ads I bought were about $2k of Facebook ads, which converted into about $1.6k of pledges. Not a winning strategy. I hired a couple people with experience in FB ads to help me with the audience, but the CTR of 3-4% at $0.25 CPC did not convert well.

As for mailing list, I had 1,000 people signed up and I sent an email newsletter to 55k people who use my other service (which is compatible with this hardware), so it was relevant for them as well.

Of the lessons learned, building up the mailing list is quite possibly the biggest. Just having ads running that you optimize for months beforehand is a good setup for running ads during the campaign itself.

[trendia]

The video is very well done imo. However, it's only a small part of the overall marketing strategy.

What kind of marketing did you do? e.g. what kind of coverage did you seek / get?

What kind of market research did you do? e.g. did you do user studies and get feedback?

How did you determine the selling price? e.g. did you determine whether it was too low (if customers are price insensitive, then you can increase profit by increasing price) or too high (if customers are extremely price sensitive, then you have to accept lower unit margins to increase total profit)

[conesus]

I got a healthy amount of press coverage, as you can see in this graphic: https://ksr-ugc.imgix.net/assets/015/617/477/4373b04fd29a977...

I'm with you on pricing. It's hard to tell what would have worked better. I could possibly have raised the price to $99 from $59, but I didn't do the proper pre-campaign testing that would have confirmed if that was the right strategy.

[sadok]

I agree with the "super-niche" product perspective and why it didn't have the success you wanted, although it did succeed after all.

[tgb]

Keep in mind that that plot is log log scaled. Your numbers really wouldn't look out of place on it. I'm thinking it would be close to the trendline, vertically above that bottom right point.

[ajiang]

What was your mailing list size before the campaign?

[conesus]

Mentioned in this comment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13878836 - and I will reiterate how important that one number is to optimize, because in order to do so it means optimizing other processes first, like ad messaging, compelling product, and sizing the market.

[frgtpsswrdlame]

Can you link to your successful near competitors?

[conesus]

I only bring these campaigns up to make a point about market size. A four button wood remote won't compete as well against a handheld screen or a single button. But again this is only about establishing that there is a market for this type of device.

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/flic-the-wireless-smart-b...

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/knocki/knocki-make-any-...

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/901859853/sevenhugs-sma...