Successfully funding our exercise card game on Kickstarter… and more!

“Ha! Leah, I hit the order button! We’re going to have 1,000 decks of cards to sell and start our business with!” Whoa… our business, selling products, marketing, visibility, and a whole bunch of other things I don’t know about yet. I knew we were going start with Kickstarter as a launching point, but what does that even mean? And we are going to be trying to drive traffic to a website I set up in a couple hours while preparing to sell everything and move into an RV more than 2 years ago! Yeah, there is was a lot of work to do there. Our story of stepping into the marketing and online sales world, having spent around 75% of our start up budget on the product alone, is one worth telling. So, hear it goes…

I’ll admit it, I’m very much a get to the point, what’s the main idea, I’ll do it myself type of guy. So when Leah suggested our website really needed some work (and it did), maybe even professional help – I looked at some examples, and gave it a try… for about an hour. Yeah, I needed help. Well, there are lots of options for this from outsourcing online, to help through Bluehost (who hosts our website), to someone local – all with a price tag of course. Well, one web designer came up in our Google search for Lake City, SC. Ok, lets try him. I sent an email and made a call, gaining his thoughts and prices, and we agreed to meet to see what could be done.

I am always willing to work, and want to learn and to be taught so I can do the work. I wasn’t going to just hand over a blank slate and ask this web designer, Jason of Fusion Web Designs (he gave me permission to use his name), to just “do this for me”. I thought this a pretty good negotiation tool when it came down to discussing his price for our project. While I was planning my tactics, Leah, half jokingly said, “You know, this a small town. I wonder if you could offer some of your physical therapy services in exchange for his help. I bet people still do that around here.” I laughed her off, “Yeah, we’ll see if that comes up.”

From our one phone conversation, I knew Jason had a young family and was a computer teacher at a local high school who ran his business in his after hours. He agreed to meet us at the RV park, and after guiding him to our site, he parked his car and walked up to our RV…LIMPING!! Yeah, seriously. It was too easy not to just throw Leah’s suggestion out there while introducing ourselves, and our occupations. I even threw in the fact that I was known as “The knee whisperer” while working in Medford, OR. So Jason is not only an active, basketball loving, middle-age guy with young kids who he wanted to play with without hurting, but he was also a church worship leader who had been told by his doctor to see a PT a couple years ago! Even before it was said upon concluding that meeting, we both silently knew God intended for us to meet in this way. 100%. I still had to ask what he would charge us for the type of help we needed. His response? “Man, if you can get me back to the basketball court, I’ll help you with this.”

And that was it. We met five times, and we would spend around an hour of him teaching me through questions I had regarding website development, and I would spend and hour working with and teaching and educating him on how to take care of his knees. Three out of four of those meetings we made it a family affair with the kids playing, the wives socializing, and us doing this. Then we would go work on our homework at night – he stayed up late too – and get the job done. I am super pleased with how the website turned out, and I think he is on the right path now able to run 1/2 a mile without his knees hurting.

With the website taking shape, I also tackled setting up the Kickstarter campaign. After going through Kickstarter’s material as well as many other online resources, I understood that four big components go into making the campaign a success: 1) A quality video explaining the story and the product 2) great pictures of the product and the story 3) a solid written explanation of the product and the journey behind it and 4) digging into all your available resources at the moment to share and contribute. Steps 3 and 4 I felt I could pull together rather quickly. Steps 1 and 2, lets see…what do I have… an iphone, tripod, and a drone…OK, lets do this! I did purchase an iphone microphone for $12 and a small photo lightbox for around the same price.

A few product pictures – almost professional, right?

With the bribe of ice cream on two hot days, we were able to shoot all the footage we needed in about four hours total. I have then used a combination of the free movie editor software “OpenShot” and iMovie on my phone to produce the original Kickstarter video and the rest of our marketing videos. For the photos, the lightbox served its purpose and I have used the iPhone editing as well as Snapseed to edit all the photos – both free apps. I am extremely pleased how this turned out spending only $24 and ice cream and a pizza party with Jason and his family!

Some live action product pictures – ice cream for the win!

Back to the timeline I referred to in my last blog The Flip Fit Journey, I needed to hit certain marks in order to get Kickstarter underway in an effort to launch the campaign. The suggested run time for a campaign is around 30 days. I wanted to capture as many weekends as possible, including the long weekend July 4th offers most people to conclude the campaign in case I really needed to make a push meeting the goal in time. This was also to line up with receiving our first inventory order, all while we were back in Indiana for 6 weeks. That being said, to start the campaign on June 4th and end on July 6th, Kickstarter provides its own deadlines to have all the necessary info submitted – and it came with a warning – “It may take up to one week to approve your submittal!! Plan for this!”. So I pushed, man. I pushed to make sure the video, pictures and story were good to go, yet I really rely on Leah to edit my work, so with her availability, this came down to the very last day to submit. With sweaty palms, I pressed the “submit project button” expecting to see a “Project Under Review” page pop up. Nope, instantly “You’re Project is Approved!” OK, well that is one deadline down.

OK now to get the word out. One of the most difficult things is overcoming the hesitancy to ask friends and family to donate. Weird, but it’s there – and anyone who has started up a business has hit it. And then there is the conflict of trying to say or show the right things on social media to garnish interest. All the while making it as easy as possible to explain what the heck is happening and what exactly the call to action is. In the end, it’s about knowing and believing our product and showing it…and making it easier than easy, which is still not easy enough, for your audience to do something with. And then doing it again, and again. And I’ll be doing it for a while. But it is all good. Lessons are being learned. And I got a chance to receive so much positive support verbally and monetarily from friends and family all over this awesome country. I am humbled by it, really. THANK YOU!!

As easy as my jumbled brain could make it – my dad called me a “magi” when I created a clickable PDF!

We met our Kickstarter goal early, and needed to decide how and what our fulfillment would look like. Again, using a woman’s touch, and listening to many more podcasts, we decided we’re not quite Amazon (yet – ha!) so we needed to make the packaging, inserts, and stickers special, yet within a reasonable cost range. We decided on these things at night after jumping in waterfalls and exploring trails along the Appalachian trail in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. We stayed near Asheville, NC for 5 nights on our way from Lake City, SC (after Leah concluded her contract) back home to central Indiana. We collected our shipping materials while in central Indiana, and were just chomping at the bit to start sending our game out!

I promise you, it doesn’t look too classy here, but we did our best to make the shipping packaging as sleek as possible on a budget!

Oh yeah, the games! I had ordered them through Alibaba from a manufacturer in China on May 18th – giving the go to start mass production on that date. The manufacturer I chose was great, getting the work done in less than the lead time they quoted me at. The product was scheduled to ship, and I received the domestic UPS tracking number on May 31st, however there was a 3 day delay leaving China. After checking and rechecking, I finally got word that the ship had arrived at the Los Angeles Port on June 20th. It took two weeks from that point for the ship to be unloaded and passed through customs. I finally received confirmation and activity through the domestic tracking number, created on May 31st, on Thursday, July 8th! Given it is process that usually takes a couple weeks, and I had all this riding on delivery while we are in Indiana…if I had a dime for every time I checked that tracking number, I would be rich! Anyhow, there is a huge backlog in shipping right now – for all those reasons that are out there – and we were blessed to receive our cards on July 15th!

Whew! We have the cards – 1,012 decks! It was now time to fulfill the orders for all our Kickstarter backers. In order to fulfill the orders, we decided to go with Shippo.com for label purchasing and printing. And hey, if you are considering doing fulfillments for your own online business, check out the LabelRange LP320 thermal printer. I picked up this little guy on Prime day – and it is a beast! It saved us so much hassle trying to fumble with our inkjet – totally worth it. (And btw, I have no affiliation or kickbacks with LabelRange, I am just tickled with its performance). Leah and I spent a “date night” organizing, packaging and sending out all the Kickstarter orders just in time to wrap things up before heading out of Indiana on our next RV adventure!

Unpacking the long awaited delivery, and the chaos of our “date night”!

The Kickstarter campaign helped Flip Fit reach 21 states – yet this journey is just beginning! Please check out the product, and if you are interested beyond a personal order, contact us! If you have anything to add to the story, leave it in the comments below! Or, should you have questions regarding the process we went through, please ask away! I’d love to try and possibly help you along your journey!