KickstarterForum.org

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In less than two months 62,242 came together to pledge over $13m to the project. The previous Kickstarter high-mark was set by Pebble, a digital watch. Pebble had nearly 70,000 people pull together just over $10m for the project. The creators chose to limit the number of watches available towards the end of the funding period, slowing down demand. Nonetheless it still held the #1 Kickstarter position for over two years (862 days).

For Coolest, the vast-majority of supporters opted to pre-order their own product, with over 50,000 choosing to spend $185 on a first generation version. Ryan Grepper, the inventor of Coolest, was also surprised by the international attention and backing the product received, with more than 7,000 people opting for a Coolest with an additional $100 international shipping surcharge.

This has grown the Coolest brand and Grepper now sees the scope and opportunity for a range of products and related items within the cooler/picnic/tailgating category. “I’d have to fact-check numbers but I believe around 40 million coolers are sold in the US along,” he says. “That there’s an opportunity for a new product category is very exciting. There are lots of options and directions to take with Coolest.”

Grepper now plans to concentrate on creating a significantly improved first-generation Coolest model. He has already added features such as better wheels, new speakers and the option to buy a second rechargeable battery. He says that he is still looking at other options. Some of the most popular suggestions include a solar charger to keep Coolest’s electronics running for longer as well as a portable grill – a feature in the original Coolest which was cut for safety reasons.

(Before becoming the creator of Kickstarter’s most successful campaign, Grepper had previously tried to Kickstart Coolest but failed to meet his funding target.)

Grepper applied the lessons he learned in the failed campaign to the second attempt. He also certainly seems justified in selecting Kickstarter and the donation/reward based crowd-funding model in general.



The Coolest has established its viability going forward as a commercial product. Grepper did not have to give away any equity in the eventual controlling company in the process like he would have had he gone down the equity-crowd funding route but still raising equity-level capital.

Grepper liked Kickstarter from his previous attempt to launch Coolest and decided that the site’s large user base was an excellent selling point. He also had a list of previous dedicated investors guaranteed to show interest as a result of Coolest’s first launch, he adds.

The only drawback to Kickstarter is that the site lacks some abilities in analytics that others, such as Ingiegogo offer. “There’s very specific data we don’t see in our back-end,” Grepper explains. “For instance you can see which specific blogs and sites traffic is coming in from but you don’t know how many people visited from each site or how many then converted and put money up.”

But although analytics would be a nice addition, it’s hard to argue with the results Coolest has produced using Kickstarter. Now the questions becomes: How long with Coolest’s record last? And if it is eventually broken, what will replace it as number one?