Latest / Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast) / GEMS: Raising a $120,000 Kickstarter with Fly by Jing founder Jing Gao

Transcript

GEMS: Raising a $120,000 Kickstarter with Fly by Jing founder Jing Gao · Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast)

• 0:08
  I'm always interested about Kickstarter campaigns because obviously they can be a great success, but they can also be a terrible flop if you don't, you know, put in the effort and the work to make them succeed. What were the kinds of things, when you look back in hindsight, what were the kinds of things that made your campaign successful aside from being, you know, just a truly unique product on the platform? Yeah, I think...
• 0:34
  The product itself, you know, should be able to tell a story, right? And then that enables you to tell a richer story around it. So for us, the message that was inherent in the product was about, you know, that made in China or Chinese food product can be some of the highest quality in the world. Yeah.
• 0:56
  this is how we make it. And these are the ingredients we source. And so just being really transparent, but also very, you know, what we were presenting was inherently unique because
• 1:10
  It didn't exist before. And that's because a lot of the food products that made their way out of China had traditionally been lower priced and as a result had used like, you know, much more basic ingredients.
• 1:27
  And that was because manufacturers were told that people in the West would not accept anything that was more expensive than two dollars for a Chinese food product. Right. So if that was the case, then there is no incentive for them to put anything of quality into it. And so I actually face a lot of resistance in manufacturing my sauces at scale in the beginning because no co-packer would be willing to.
• 1:50
  go through the effort of sourcing or all of the different techniques that I required for my sauce. So it was a very difficult journey to get that made. And so it was, you know, it became apparent to me why most of the products on the market were quite watered down. So, you know, just telling even that story of the craftsmanship that goes into it, the sourcing, the ingredients,
• 2:15
  That was compelling as a story. And at the end of the day, brands are stories, right? And so Kickstarter is actually a really effective way to tell stories. You can craft a very compelling page with a video, with the visuals that you present on the page. So I think that was a big part of it. The
• 2:39
  would be just, I mean, it's a lot of work to run a Kickstarter campaign. A lot of it is getting people to come on your page. So whether it's like every single person that you've ever met in your life, just emailing them, you know, asking them to come and support, or reaching out to bloggers and media. So I had cold emailed a few writers who I thought, you know, had written about similar things in the past and might be interested.
• 3:04
  And ended up getting placements in New York Magazine and Savoir on the day of launch, which was really great because, I mean, Kickstarter works on these algorithms that, you know, they'll show you to more people the more traffic you're getting. And so you want to actually hit your goal.
• 3:24
  on the first day for it to kind of snowball. And so, I mean, there's so many different techniques for Kickstarter and there's great resources actually on the Kickstarter website. But I think, you know, for anyone who's starting out of business and doesn't have the capital, this is one of the best ways still to launch. Yeah, totally. Did you have to invest a lot of your own money to make that Kickstarter campaign successful?
• 3:51
  So I built that campaign myself. I had spent about $3,000 on a video that I paid my friend to make for me. So I think the video is really amazing. And if it wasn't my friend, you know, creating it, it probably would have cost more. So that's all I spent on it. And, you know, but I definitely, you have to do the legwork to figure out like,
• 4:16
  you know, how you're actually going to produce it if you do get the money. Because, yeah, people want to know that if they're giving you the money as much as they're because it's Kickstarter. So they're very supportive of entrepreneurship. And so there's the understanding that this may not come to fruition, but you still need to kind of, you know, convince them that you know what you're doing enough for them to give you their twenty dollars or something like that. Right. Totally.
• 4:42
  How much was the goal that you set and how much did you raise? And then what did you use that money for? Like, was it all to do with manufacturing or did it go into other ways, you know, marketing the brand from there onwards, for example? I think I set the goal for $25,000 and I think we hit like $250,000.
• 5:03
  So it was a big success. That's so cool. Yeah, we did it on Kickstarter and then we had a follow on on Indiegogo as well. So there's, you know, Kickstarter only allows you to do it for like, you know, 30 days or something. And then Indiegogo, it kind of extends for another few months. And, yeah, I mean, you know, I think $25,000 would have been enough to...
• 5:29
  run the first big batch. But of course, you know, running a business is expensive. I also decided to move to LA to do this. So, you know, that enabled me to move to LA, set up the business and really like, you know, kick it off for the first few months and fulfillment as well. I mean, there's so many different costs that you don't think about. Like we ended up doing really well. So it was like over 3000 people we needed to ship stuff to.
• 5:55
  But I obviously couldn't do it by myself in my living room in my studio apartment in L.A. So we had to hire a 3PL to do that. And yeah, I mean, it really was like startup funds for the first I would say it lasted us for probably about a year. And I was just one person at the time. So, oh, wow. OK. And I didn't I didn't pay myself. So it was like everything went back into the business. That's amazing. Yeah.
• 6:25
  Hey, it's June here. Thanks for listening to this amazing episode of the Female Startup Club podcast. If you're a fan of the show and want even more of the good stuff, I'd recommend checking out femalestartupclub.com where you can subscribe to our free newsletter. We send it out weekly covering female founder business news, insights and learnings in D2C, and interesting business resources.
• 6:50
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• 7:12
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