Ask HN: Why is my Kickstarter failing ?
Or course most of us think our innovation will be right understood right away.
Here, my crowdfunding has only 400$ after 3 weeks.
I feel disappointed.
A clue ? Please do say anything : it can't be worth than silence anyway...
15 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 39.7 ms ] threadI think the tool has potentials for remodeling and interior design. is the editor really easy to use? why don't you screen record it instead of capturing your computer monitor?
can the tool be built into a phone app, so no post editing will be needed? can it also generate floor plan?
- Q2 I try to avoid showing to much of the editor because no-patent issue.
- Q3 For now, only tablet, PC or Macintosh
- Q4 you provide the software the floor plan
I see this as a business with a franchise model, you need software , you need hardware, but you need a trained person to quickly model the space.
I was taking pictures of a car the other day, met the owner, and sold him 5 pictures for $10. That is fun but not scalable. A real VR photography job has to pay more. Working indoors, for instance, I am always trying to manage my own shadows and reflections. Indoor scenes often have have lighting anomalies that are unacceptable when I see the images and I have to change the room if I want to get the images in my mind.
1.) Your video is too technical. You may have "dumbed it down" for kickstarter from your perspective, but I'm telling you it's still too in the weeds. People want a very clean demo of the end result, and a very quick and clean demo of how easy it is to use. (Note - your ideal end user may not be the one creating the content - see below).
2.) Consider thinking about your key costumer and tailoring the product to them. If I had to guess, the key market is realestate sales (commercial and residential) and building project management software suppliers, getting away from clunky point-to-point "virtual walk-throughs" (which are lame) into something more First Person game.
3.) I've noticed that a lot of gamers don't realize that most people aren't gamers, so they use gamer terms like everyone knows what they're talking about. Some non-gamer folks have an aversion to the word "shooter". Maybe use First Person Walker?
Bottom line - I suggest you get with a local tech incubator to try and get some free or low-cost marketing assistance to identify your core customer (demographic), then tailoring your product and marketing campaign to that customer. Talk directly to a sampling of your target customers and take their feedback to heart and act on it.
Also, in that process, you should determine if you are selling direct to customer, or what may be better for you - direct to business (i.e. sell your service to larger real estate firms to help them differentiate their higher end listings, white-label your product and have them pay you to tailor it for them).
Who knows, maybe you don't even need Kickstarter.
Good luck!
Honestly I do not know yet my target customers... Kickstarter was also a way to find my market, or if there was even one
a. The name didn’t mean anything to me when i first opened the page and still doesn’t after reading more.
b. Your tag line is “Make your place a video game !” But what you are building is a room editor from pictures. Don’t see the game part anywhere.
c. No mention on platforms that the editor or viewer will work in. You mention vr but not sure if it works with vr headsets.
d. No list of features for the editor or viewer. Extra stretch goals would be good incentive for people to pay more.
Overall it seems like you have an interesting and possibly good technology but lack in the product aspect. Who is your audience? Is it gamers? Is it developers? Is it real estate agents? Does your audience have the skills and patience to use your product? Why would they buy this? Does it offer them hours of play? Does it solve a problem they have at home or at work? If it’s a gimic then you need to make look more enticing, more fun.
The editor seems desktop based and relatively tedious to use (at least from the video). Could you release this as a mobile app and use the device’s location and accelerometer data to create the mapping without the user having to do the boring part?
Find your audience and rework the product you are selling and its features.
Good luck :)
pps. If you can’t decide on an audience, find more than one, flesh out the features of each, and build a couple single page apps for each product and ask people to sign up for updates. Spend some money on google/facebook ads and gauge the user engagement of each idea. Search for startup idea validation and you’ll find other similar ideas around this.
Re: who is your audience ? -Well I would guess photographer who want more than photos : virtual visit