KickstarterForum.org

Hello everyone!

I posted this as a reply under the Gadget Flow thread but realized maybe this could use a post of its own. I want to share my experience with Gadget flow since we just purchased the Platinum package (highest one) and are a week into it. The point of this is to give an unbiased point of view. They say if your product, campaign & marketing is shitty than nothing can help you. With a 20% conversion rate on Kickstarter, and being called a "winner" product from Hiral, who personally contacted, then called & continues to communicate with us (The creator of the Travel Jacket, the sixth most funded campaign on Kickstarter, raised $14 million off two campaigns and $20 mill for his startup), we really think this would be the best way to gauge Gadget Flows value to crowdfunders.

We first had our product, the HoverCharge, on Kickstarter, only for 2 weeks (rookie mistake, Hiral beat us over it as well) and all the traffic came from Kickstarter. We had a conversion rate of around 20%, based on the people that played the video. The dashboard showed us that 6,200 people hit play on the video, 22.5% finished it (1,395) and we ended up with 1,185 backers. I think that came down to the video, marketing & value of the product (we worked really hard on this). We raised $40k+ in 14 days, while making all the rookie mistakes you can imagine.
http://kck.st/2LuMT6K

No facebook ads, no email lists, no preparation before launch, a short campaign, we did however do a little cross promotion here and there which gave us a great boost. Realizing we have a great product and an awesome conversion rate, instead of going straight to inDemand (which charges you 8% if you come from Kickstarter, compared to 5% if you do a fresh campaign then go to inDemand), we started a fresh Indiegogo campaign, 60-days this time.
https://igg.me/at/hovercharge/x/18886404

16-days into this campaign, we were at $14k+. Few hundred spent on facebook ads, instagram ads. Still no email list (when will we learn). There was a great boost when we first launched, we had a good boost every time we cross promo'd, we used our 1,200+ backers as leverage and people loved to cross promo with us, but the momentum died out.

This is when Gadget flow reached out to us, and we decided to opt-in for their highest package, the platinum. We will post live results of all their promotions here: It's been 6 days since they started promoting us, and so far we have only seen $554 in pledges (13 backers) & 572 visitors from them. This info is from the custom link we provided them with and is displayed in the Indiegogo dash.

We continued to get Indiegogo backers & some other cross promos that we did, we are currently sitting at $17k.

There dash differentiates and states that they have sent over close to 4,000 visitors, which may be a glitch since total visits on our campaign are at 7,359, (most of these during the beginning of our campaign) and that number has only increased around 2,000 since we joined Gadget flow, and 65% of our funds and visitors are still coming from Indiegogo. I will continue to post updates throughout this process.

We received a response from Gadget Flow in the mega Gadget Flow thread, I want to be fair and unbiased so here it is:

"Thanks for your feedback! Happy to help.

Our dashboard displays the total clicks we've sent you and we track everything on a first-click basis. Please keep in mind that Indiegogo doesn't trigger Google Analytics on their app which means that while we track app sessions from our side since the tracking happens before they open the app you won't see that number grow on your GA.

Hope that helps!"

I give Gadget Flow a 10/10 on communication and customer service. Also their web traffic rating is pretty good too, we did some homework before hand and realized they are the real deal. They have told me that it takes a week+ to start seeing real results, so we are hoping for the best. My goal at the end would be to share with you, if Gadget flow is worth it to get the word out there.

With a conversion rate of 20% on Kickstarter, we want to see how far Gadget flow can get us. They say the Platinum package gets 4-5.5M impressions. I understand that impressions doesn't mean clicks, which doesn't mean video plays, which plays heavily into the conversion rate, and Kickstarter conversion rate doesn't = Indiegogo conversion rate (many people are iffy to support Indiegogo campaigns since their is no approval process for tech products) but we can still have a rough breakdown of what type of performance their top package will bring.

I will continue posting updates in the coming days, I really hope Gadget Flow pulls through as a great investment.

Thanks for reading

You've posted a great customer review of an established Crowdfunding service. I wish all clients were so open and communicative as you You're right, Gadget Flow is really approachable and the customer service replies quickly.

All the best with the campaign.

Thanks, Hovercharge for posting this.
We are also considering GF for promotion of our next product, and also Hyperstarter

So it will be really good to see your results, perhaps with the public attention on your post it may spur even better results from them

Will look over your campaign later.

Yeah sure, feel free to get in touch!

This post has been moved to the General Chat + Introduce Yourself section.

I too would be interested in hearing your experience now that another week has passed!

I have gone for the pro plan (has only been two days so far). Gadget Flow do have excellent customer service, however I guess the most important part is the results that are produced.

Sorry its been a while since I posted an update. Since the last post a lot has happened with the campaign. We were sitting at $14k+ about 20-some days into our campaign, around 275% funded, and then we paid for the highest package at GadgetFlow. =

After a week of having GadgetFlow promotions running (the major ones weren't ran yet, we ended up at $17k, less than a $1,000 brought in by GF. The 8th-day in promotion was July 4th, where we only saw a one $62 pledge (but that has more to do with the fact it was July 4th). Then on July 5th I made this thread, reached out to GF on jumpstarting the bigger promotions, so GF started rolling them out, one of them was the dedicated direct email of my product, the holy grail of GF promotion, and my campaign took off.

In the next 7-days, we were sitting at $37,000. That's $20,000 in 7-days, while around this time, the campaign was at the middle of it's 60 day length. Now through the dashboard we could see that directly GF only brought in around 1X ROI of what we paid them . We don't break even on an investment unless it's at least 2X ROI, but with Indiegogo you have to understand that the clicks, pledges, and backers, GF drove us up on the ranks and we ended up with 64% of our backers from Indiegogo. At the peak of our promotion (which was about 1-3 days) we ended up as the 4th most trending campaign on the front page of Indiegogo. That drove us the most backers. This was all done by GF, no instagram, facebook, cross promo marketing at this period.

They helped with promotions practices, kept a healthy dialogue throughout, they fixed my GIF for me, they displayed a GIF on the homepage, any errors were handled in minutes, man it was a great experience.

Even a step further, GF introduced us to people at Indiegogo and we got selected as an Indiegogo Team Favorites Selection. That brought us even more backers. Currently, we are sitting at $47,000+. Their promotions has slowed down, the traffic and pledges have too. I am still not done with the promotion but I have to give a verdict. Is GadgetFlow the must go to for promoting your Crowdfunding campaign?

Well, that depends on your campaign. If your campaign is trash then you have no luck, but if you have a great campaign then 100%. I believe GF is a Gadget lovers hub first and a crowdfunding promo platform second. I don't think you have to go for the biggest package every time, you can always have your product on their platform for the lowest package, and then even if you don't get a lot of hits and results from them you will at least have your product on a great platform. Adds to the social proof.

That being said, I wanted to share another honest experience throughout all off this. There was a feeling on my end that for opting in for the top package the amounts of clicks could have been more consistent. I was in a way trying to see, hey GF, lets see what's the best you can do in terms of promotion for a campaign that is a proven winner.

I say this because the top package lists that for 17-20 days you will be on the HOMEPAGE Slider, Full-Width Slider, & Featured Product, all on the homepage. We are currently in that promotion right now but to be honest they have so many products in that slider that I don't think any viewers look at ours when they visit the website. I am saying like the 10th position at times. I havent once see it be the first picture on those sliders (although we have seen many times our product show up on featured products, and the better placement the better the hits). Those things are all decided by a combination of priority and randomness, but we really thought that could have helped our campaign a lot more. Better placement in full-screen sliders, and more consistent clicks.

But maybe I am not being fair here, instead of going into slider details, I need to stick to the basics, glass GF directly got me my investment back, and made me popular on Indiegogo, got me a lot more backers. But that's the thing. Although I love GF and will use it with all my future campaigns, I was maybe hoping for a shortcut. Lets say if GF had a $10,000 package, and it promised me all these things, and I would be on the sliders, being shown not hiding in the curtains, like same specs as their top package but really pushed out and promoted heavily, then I along with many other people would by that package instantly. I guess this is a hint for GF to maybe offer a higher tier, but really get them consistent results throughout the promotion.

Other than that, Evan and the team are great, since we last discussed, there customer service has gotten even better. I got directly in contact with a lot of different people reaching out to me from GF, they would randomly check up on me, discuss the results, give tips on the campaign, even point out if a link, or gif isn't working properly on our campaign page, which was really cool.

I just saw the reply above, as we were initially asking questions about how you got on.

They've listened to your advice and have a higher tier, so that's good.

We actually spent 2 years or so going through their service and gave a detailed review ranging from their pricing packages to the new unboxing service - check it out:
https://www.hyperstarter.com/gadget-flow-crowdfunding-projects

Thank you for making this post, i just hired them and hopefully i will see results