You need to consider how to design for crowdfunding (such as Kickstart and Indiegogo) throughout your project.
The concept ideation stage
At the concept ideation stage, you need to plan for the amount of investment that will be needed, and how to finance that investment. And you need to plan for the way to reach your intended audience be it paid online marketing, influencer marketing, a B2B sales force, etc.
If a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter and/or Indiegogo makes sense, you need to confirm that your product category, in general, tends to work well on those websites. E-bikes and earbuds tend to do well, but many other categories don’t.
As you work through the designs and the prototypes, as you conduct testing for compliance and testing for reliability, as you conduct market research, always keep in mind ‘is this something we could showcase on our Kickstarter product page?’ More positive and ‘cool’ content will be very helpful.
Prototypes
As you move through the design for crowdfunding process and prepare prototypes, try to use fabrication processes that are as close as possible to mass production. It means your prototype will look like a mass-produced unit, and that’s what you want to show your potential backers.
For example, instead of 3D-printing the plastic enclosure, at one point, you need to use silicone molds, as the resulting product will be very close to what you can expect out of plastic injection molding (with hard steel molds used for production volumes).
Final notes
And finally, a word of caution for would-be crowdfunders. Make sure you have done a full Design for Manufacturing (DFM) review of your product before you set any target dates for a campaign. It seems that 90% of the crowdfunding campaigns of physical products fall behind their deadlines, and that’s usually because of nasty surprises when it comes to manufacturability… AFTER they raised money.
