{"id":1180,"date":"2016-05-23T17:57:15","date_gmt":"2016-05-24T00:57:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.backerkit.com\/new_blog\/blog95-inflection-point-kings-of-india-and-drumi\/"},"modified":"2017-10-11T16:54:51","modified_gmt":"2017-10-11T23:54:51","slug":"95-inflection-point-kings-of-india-and-drumi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.backerkit.com\/blog\/95-inflection-point-kings-of-india-and-drumi\/","title":{"rendered":"Inflection Point: Kings of India and Drumi"},"content":{"rendered":"

Inflection Point is the BackerKit blog series that studies crowdfunding campaigns to discover tactics that other creators can use mid-campaign. Subscribe to the BackerKit blog here<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n

Kings of India Playing Cards<\/h2>\n

The Kings of India Playing Cards<\/a> project leaped from $23,111 to $28,230 in funding in just two days in the middle of the campaign. The project update<\/a> posted just prior to the jump revealed the joker card and additional details on the deck upgrades stretch reward.<\/p>\n

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Project co-creator Reena Mistry offered insight into the cause for the rise: \u201cWhen we released that update for the stretch goal, we noticed that we had caught the attention of Mark Frauenfelder, who had posted a message<\/a> about our update on his site Boingboing.net<\/a>. That drew a lot of attention to our campaign, which explains that spike in backers.\u201d<\/p>\n

BackerKit followed up with Mark from BoingBoing to see if he remembered how he found the project, but it can be difficult for a busy founder to recall the events leading up to a post written almost a year ago. Mark explains: \u201cI honestly don\u2019t remember where I first heard about the cards. I just saw them somewhere and thought they were cool. That\u2019s how stuff shows up on bb!\u201d<\/p>\n

Looking at the BoingBoing post<\/a>, you can see how the Kings of India project creators made it easy for editors to feature the project by having beautiful images and an easily embeddable video assets available from the campaign page.<\/p>\n

It also helps to post newsworthy project updates such as stretch goal announcements or releasing new product details or images. According to Reena, \u201chad we not posted that stretch goal update, maybe we wouldn\u2019t have been featured on BoingBoing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Drumi: The Foot Powered Washing Machine<\/h2>\n

The Drumi<\/a> project was already trending towards funding success when it started adding backers at a much faster rate just a few days after passing the mid-campaign point.<\/p>\n

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The only project update we found before the campaign started its new trajectory was a post<\/a> about the Drumi referral program. We asked the Yirego team if the referral program was responsible for the campaign\u2019s increased growth rate.<\/p>\n

Megan Savage, Marketing and Communications Specialist at Yirego told us that the referral campaign \u201cwasn\u2019t as successful with us as it has been with other campaigns on Indiegogo.\u201d<\/p>\n

The actual momentum didn\u2019t come from the referral program project update. \u201cWhat really sparked our campaign was our campaign video and also an older demo video of ours going viral again.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe original demo video gained over 30 million views from an engineering blog from India.\u201d The team worked on contacting influencers and leveraging personal networks to increase awareness. \u201cWe weren\u2019t targeting India directly, but we were doing a lot of in-house outreach to get more coverage.\u201d<\/p>\n

It only took one big blog hit to spark a new round of media mentions for the Drumi. \u201cThe video started in India, but quickly expanded into Europe, Asia, as well as South and North America. We quickly gained a lot of attention from that video, and other media began to hop on it as well, and we ended up going viral for a second time!\u201d<\/p>\n