How we raised $1,158,228 for AIR PIX on Indiegogo [CASE STUDY]

A look inside our system for launching a $1M+ Indiegogo campaign for AIR PIX

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Mark Pecota | CEO at LaunchBoom

Early in 2019, the company AirSelfie reached out to the LaunchBoom team to discuss their new product, the AIR PIX. They had already launched a successful project on Kickstarter in 2016 raising a total of $634,556. We decided to work together and launch their new AIR PIX product on Indiegogo — raising $1,158,228 (and are still funding).

Raising this much money isn’t easy. It takes executing on our proven process and hard work. Let’s dive into it.

Phase 1: TestBoom

Like the majority of our clients, we started them on our TestBoom program to test demand for the product before we committed to a full launch together. In TestBoom, we use a proprietary system and predictive model to determine how successful a launch will be with minimal upfront investment of time and money.

Messaging & Positioning

TestBoom begins with our Messaging & Positioning process. During this phase, we developed the initial ways we wanted to position AIR PIX in the marketplace.

From this process, we came up with 2 to 4 angles to test in the market. There are many ways to communicate the value of a product. An angle can be thought of as one of those points of value that we want to lead with. Here’s what we came up with for AIR PIX.

  1. Pocket sized portability and featherlight — perfect for your all your adventures.Incredibly small flying device allows convenient, spontaneous use. Golf ball weight comparison.
  2. Take your social media game to the next level — Everyone has the same type of images. Take the shot no one else can. A dopamine rush like never before. High quality photos without the expense of a drone. More followers and likes. New angles taken that have never been seen before. Instagrammers upping their game with new perspective.
  3. Feature rich next generation aerial selfie camera — A.I.R. (Aerial Imaging Robotics) — The complete AirSelfie aeronautic & imaging system processes that make AirSelife aerial cameras a truly revolutionary advancement in photography. It’s the hardware and software platforms, rotors, camera, app as an all in one system. Easily Controlled By App — Easy Pilot mode on the app allows the pilot to easily navigate with a simple familiar gesture with one touch. User presses ‘Selfie Mission’ (Parallel Path), selects distance of photograph to be taken (5,10,20 feet), flies in front and uses ‘capture me’ mode for subject tracking and facial locking, takes 5 photos and uses AI technology to select the best one. Locks in and captures the specified subject and then tracks that subject’s activities while taking photos or videos. Smooth Air — State-of-the-art flight stabilization for sharp imaging. S.E.N.D. (Share Experience Now Direct) — Seamless app-based posting to Facebook, Instagram & SnapChat. Also includes editing features.

Next, we identified 2–4 audiences we wanted to test on Facebook

Think of an audience as a type of person — what are their interests, their age, their gender, etc.?

Here are a few audiences we came up with for AIR PIX:

  1. Photography Brands — Those who already want to catch high quality content of moments that they experience in their everyday lives.
  2. Crowdfunding/Tech — An ideal product for those already shopping in the crowdfunding marketplace for something that is affordably priced, cutting edge, and provides a great value.
  3. Travel Interests — Traveling with camera gear (especially drones) can be cumbersome. Focusing on an underserved market of people who are out to capture life’s adventures but don’t want to weighed down by bulky equipment.
  4. Selfie APP/Sticks — Focusing on apps where we know people are posting selfie related content in addition to the tool they are capturing it with.

Test using our Reservation Funnel

Using the angles and the audiences, we’ll next want to program advertisements and send traffic down our Reservation Funnel which can be pictured below:

The ultimate goal of the reservation is get the user to put down a $1 deposit to reserve the product before you launch. Why? Because those that put down $1 to reserve the product before you launch are 30x more likely to buy.

You can learn more about what we call our Reservation Funnel by clicking here.

By putting down $1, users were able to reserve AIR PIX at $65 (34% off retail price). After only $2,000 of ad spend, we knew we had a winner on our hands with AIR PIX. Here were the stats:

  • Ad spend: $2,000
  • Reservations: 238
  • Leads: 2,373

Using our predictive model, we had strong reason to believe that AIR PIX was going to do extremely well. They passed the TestBoom program and moved into Phase 2: LaunchBoom.

Phase 2: LaunchBoom

Once a product reaches Phase 2 of the LaunchBoom system, we are committed to having a massive launch. There’s a lot of small details that go into the process of preparing the launch. For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to focus on the most important details.

Scaling pre-campaign advertising

During TestBoom, we only used a $2,000 ad budget. For LaunchBoom, we increased the budget to $26,410.91 for the pre-campaign. We diversified the ad budget by targeting additional audiences and testing new ad creative. You can see the results in the screenshot below.

Here are the notable metrics:

  • Ad Spend: $26,410.91
  • Reservations: 2,639
  • Cost / Reservation: $10.01
  • Leads: 11,908
  • Cost / Lead: $2.22

The most exciting metrics to us were the number of reservations and the extremely low cost of the reservation. We had 2,639 people put down $1 to reserve the AIR PIX at 34% off. We knew we could expect a very large portion of these reservations to convert, meaning we’d have a very high return on our pre-campaign ad spend.

VIP Facebook Group

We call those that put down the $1 reservation deposit a “VIP”. One of the benefits of being a VIP is they are added to a private VIP Facebook Group. The Facebook Group allowed them to interact with the AirSelfie team as well as the rest of the AIR PIX VIPs. This is a great way for us to create an engaged community of people before we launch.

Having a “LaunchBoom”

With a pre-campaign email list built, we emailed the list when we launched to get funded extremely quickly. You can see in the graph below, the spike of sales on Indiegogo over the first 48 hours.

On the first day, we raised $69,236. On the second day, we raised $45,161. In 48 hours, we were already at $114,397 in funding.

Keeping the campaign momentum going

I like to compare a strong LaunchBoom at the beginning of a campaign to building a strong foundation for the rest of the campaign to build on. The credibility gained by getting funded so quickly makes future visitors to the campaign more likely to convert. Here’s how we were able to capitalize on the strong start and keep momentum going.

Facebook & Instagram Advertising

The best way to continue to drive consistent and profitable revenue, is through Facebook & Instagram advertising. For AirSelfie, we were able to scale spend even better than the pre-campaign because we now had the credibility of getting funded quickly. In the screenshot below from Facebook Ads Manager you can see the results from the campaign.

Here are the important metrics:

  • Amount spent: $67,433.29
  • Revenue: $238,315
  • Return on ad spend: 3.53x

Another reason why the advertising was so effective was because Indiegogo lets you add the Facebook Pixel (Kickstarter doesn’t allow this). By having the Facebook Pixel you can let Facebook do what Facebook does best: optimize the advertisements using their algorithms. Since we know if someone purchases from an ad, we can tell Facebook to optimize the ads and show them to more people like the person that purchased.

Indiegogo Add-On Perks

Indiegogo released a feature in 2019 that makes it much easier for campaigns to raise more money without investing more time or money. The feature is called “Add-On Perks” and acts as a way to sell your backers more product before they checkout. Essentially, Indiegogo added a way to easily create an upsell strategy — which previously, had been incredibly difficult to do through crowdfunding.

Using the Add-On perk to sell the Custom Charging Case, we were able to raise an additional $88,628. That’s nearly a 10% lift in sales just by adding one Add-On Perk to checkout. You can see what the add-on perk looks like in the image below.

Indiegogo Promotions

The Indiegogo team did a great job supporting the campaign with promotions. We were able to unlock many of the promotions because we had funded the project so much through email, Facebook, and PR. Here are some of the ways Indiegogo promoted the project:

  • Email newsletters
  • Homepage placement
  • High placement in the category listing

Because of these promotions and visibility on the platform, Indiegogo directly contributed $604,712.16 to the project.

Indiegogo InDemand

Indiegogo has a great feature called Indiegogo InDemand which allows creators to continue to sell product on the platform after the campaign ends. This is how AirSelife is continuing to fund the project.

Through the campaign funding we rose $750,053 and through InDemand we’ve already risen an additional $412,855 (and we’re still funding!). InDemand is a great way for us to continue to scale on Indiegogo’s platform until the creator is ready to transition to ecommerce.


To wrap it up, here are some of the biggest takeaways:

  • AIR PIX used TestBoom to predict likelihood of success
  • Built a pre-launch email list using our Reservation Funnel to identify people who are 30x more likely to buy
  • Used pre-launch email list to have a “LaunchBoom” and get funded extremely quickly
  • Live campaign Facebook ads drove $238,315 in revenue from $67,433.29 in ad spend (a 3.53x return)
  • Using the Add-On perk to sell the Custom Charging Case, we were able to raise an additional $88,628
  • Indiegogo promotions directly contributed $604,712.16 to the project
  • Used Indiegogo InDemand to continue to drive sales after the campaign ended

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