The Silver Lining

If you’re following this blog, you already know that Massuni’s Kickstarter campaign got kickstopped back in November. We’ve since completed the requisite penance and restorative meditation in a remote hilltop monastery, and are now ready to start blogging again.

Postmortem analysis of the KS campaign points the finger at two key errors: overestimation of the interest the media would take in our project (tech reporters didn’t think it was “techy” enough”; and the design-focused media didn’t want to cover a Kickstarter campaign), and overestimation of the average pledge. Our thinking was that we would need 100-120 backers at an average amount of $650 – the midpoint of our furniture range. Instead, we got 56 supporters at an average of $294 – half the number of backers but only 20% of the dollars. It seems the inability to get onto the Massuni website, create some custom furniture and see how much it costs, left people with uncertainty as to how much they should pledge. What many did (quite sensibly) was opt for either a token amount of $8/$15/$25, or the least expensive piece of furniture, with the intention of topping up the amount later. This approach meant we failed to achieve that oh-so-important “momentum” that is needed on the first day of a campaign – subsequent visitors to the page looked at the numbers and assumed we weren’t going to make it to our goal, and didn’t bother backing the project. Such is the world of crowdfunding.

What no one has said, during or since the KS campaign, is that Massuni is a bad idea. Our belief, biased as it undoubtedly is, is that this was a failure of the Kickstarter campaign, but not of the Massuni business concept. (If you disagree, please tell us! If we’re missing something, we’d like to know about it.) We are therefore pushing forward with development, albeit at a slower pace than would be possible with kickstarterbucks in our wallet.

There is a silver lining to the whole experience: the attention we got through the KS campaign brought inquiries from potential partners all over the world – retailers, manufacturers, software companies, and investors. If you’re one of these people, or one of the 56 who backed us on Kickstarter – thank you so much for your interest and support! We look forward to more dialogue in the months ahead.