The Crowdfunding Formula x Bristly: The Most Funded Dog Campaign
We hit the funding goal in under 24 hours and raised $1,000,739 on Kickstarter and Indiegogo.
May 10, 2026
Overview
This is a 5k-word article on how to run a successful Indiegogo campaign and raise funds, and it will take some time to read.But, that’s for a good reason; you’ll learn a lot about what to do to successfully crowdfund your project and bring it to life.Here's how it all started…
Product Development
For a great crowdfunding campaign, you need a great product.
Azat (an inventor) presented us with his invention, a smart wallet with a power bank and a Bluetooth distance detector: the first version of the Volterman Smart Wallet.
After just a bit of research, it was obvious that it had nothing new compared to its competitors.
Nomad Wallet was already a successful and long-time leader, which included its own power bank. Others like Walli, Woolet, and Ekster had successfully introduced the Bluetooth distance alarm feature and had very successful crowdfunding campaigns.
The challenge
Why? Because we wanted to have enough credibility.
TCF's approach
When people start pitching media but there’s $0 in their balance, they are shooting in the air.
Here’s an important thing to remember:
DON’T SPAM
If you’re sending the same message to 400 people, putting them in BCC, or the ultimate newbie mistake, CC – it just doesn’t work.
Journalists get hundreds of pitches a day.
To stand out, you need to really hustle.
Instead, we sorted out the journalists into several categories: tech, fashion, smart wallets, etc., and created different messages for each of them.
We used GMass, which is a great tool to send out mass emails using your Gmail.
I really love Rebump, which allows us to automate our email messages and provide automated follow-up to those subscribers who didn’t open the email or didn’t reply.
Other my favorite Gmail extensions that we used were:
Streak – Shows who open your emails
Boomerang – Re-sends unanswered emails
Discover.ly – Shows the social profiles of whoever sends you an email
Rule #7: Put yourself in the shoes of journalists. Send newsworthy and personalized messages
Indiegogo Campaign Page Design
There are three main elements in your campaign page: Video, Page Design, and Perks/Rewards.
The Video
I’ve written a detailed article on how you should structure your Kickstarter videos, but even we strayed a little from that structure.
When we shot the video with our initial script, the video ran at 7:48.
We had to cut it down several times.
There’s always a problem in editing when you have great things in mind and you don’t want to cut them.
But believe me, what you need and want is to only leave what matters.
We were able to edit our video down to four minutes, and after a couple of minor but difficult changes – 3:56.
Still, when people ask me how long a video should be, my answer is: no longer than 2:30.
As it was almost 1.5 times longer than expected, we came up with one unbroken scene (a humorous sex scene, which grabbed men’s attention and boosted our watch time until the end), which would prompt people to watch it until the end, where we had our hook (Call to Action).
We repeated this phrase: “I am not a Superman, I have Volterman” three or four times, and I am sure there are many people who don’t like it.
But it works.
When you say something three times in a video, people fixate on it.
Rule #8: Make your video emotional. Remember, people buy with emotions
Support
Support is one of the most important aspects of success in any campaign, with no exceptions.
We put in a lot of effort to make sure we had 24/7 support, where any question or comment on our Indiegogo page, email, or Facebook received a reply in 20 minutes or less.
It fully paid off.
Crowdfunding is all about trust. Nobody is 100% sure you are going to deliver what you promised.
So to back your project, they need to trust YOU – somebody they’ve never met or heard of before.
Support is one of the critical factors in earning trust, and if you do it promptly and thoroughly, you’ll earn even more.
There were a number of times when people wrote us, unsure if they’d back the project, but ultimately said they did because of our prompt support and communication.
It made them feel safe talking with us.
Rule #9: Your support can’t just be good enough, it needs to be great!
Pricing Strategy
We didn’t reveal our price before our launch.
We had great hype, and the number one question we heard all the time was “What’s the price?”
Despite that, we didn’t announce the price until the campaign launched
Here’s the logic behind it.
Before people visit your campaign page, they have very little information about your product.
They may have visited your landing page and read a couple of posts, but that’s not enough to create a complete image of how awesome your product is.
So when you give out a price without the full scope of the product, people start judging the price/value ratio based on the information they have. As you can imagine, in most of the cases the price for something they don’t know about will seem higher in that cost-benefit analysis.
In contrast, when they visit your campaign page and see your great images, video, comments, and 100% funded status, the price that they see seems fairly justified.
The best pricing strategy is to provide both low and high-priced rewards in order to open your product up to backers who can’t spend more while providing opportunities to those who can and want to spend more.
We had three types of wallets (in our perk list), as well as a couple of upsell perks.
One of them was $19, to engrave their initials on the wallet. For $29, we provided a wireless charger.
We also had our big VIP package which combined all the previous perks: Package 365.
365 came from 365 days in a year, meaning it would give you what you wanted every day of the year. We even put the price at $365 to make it easy and memorable (although later on, we had to increase the price.)
It’s very important not to have too many perk/reward levels as people can get confused.
Our wallets had two colors, brown and black, and we had two types of leather – natural leather and faux leather. Imagine what would happen if we put 4 variations of each of our product types – 20 Perk levels!
What happens when you offer too many options?
They won’t choose any.
Fortunately, we knew this and wrote in the description that they would be able to select the color and leather type later on, during the survey after the campaign’s completion.
That gave us just 8 perk levels. Easy to understand, and right to the point!
So You Have Your Indiegogo Campaign Ready, What’s Next?
We’d sent our subscribers five or six emails prior to the campaign’s launch, making sure they were prepared for the launch date long before we hit launch.
In order to break the $0 balance in our Indiegogo account and get traction early, we pushed a post to our Facebook VIP group subscribers – our most enthusiastic subscribers – which said:
“Dear VIP Subscribers,
Today, at exactly 10:00 AM PT, we will launch our campaign on Indiegogo. As you are our most enthusiastic subscribers, we post this announcement in here first and will send a newsletter to everybody else exactly at 11:00 AM. We have only 100 units with an exclusive super early bird discount and we want you all to benefit from it.
Make sure you are in front of a computer at 10:00 AM to get the best discount ever!”
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