EP #27 Over $1 million raised on Indiegogo for Luna, which makes your bed smart

Get the show notes: crowdcrux.com/podcast

Luna is a cool new mattress cover that makes any bed smart. Using the product, you can "intelligently manage the temperature of your bed, track your sleep, and integrate with your smart home."

After being featured in numerous online publications like TheNextWeb, Forbes, TechCrunch, TheHuffingtonPost, and more, Luna went on to raise $1,114,482 on Indiegogo, with the original campaign having been funded to 1,104% of its goal on March 26, 2015.

Matteo Franceschetti, the cofounder and CEO of Luna was nice enough to sit down with CrowdCrux and have a chat about his experience using Indiegogo and what he's learned from the crowdfunding campaign. You can listen to our podcast interview below or on iTunes.

Show Notes

• Links: Indiegogo Campaign. Company Website.

• Matteo had problems with sleeping and was looking for a product to help him. He couldn’t find a product he liked, so he and his team developed their own.
• Your social life and business life is correlated to the quality of your sleep.
• Luna is a team of 10 people with 6 engineers and employees who assist with marketing and manufacturing.
• Crowdfunding is the best way to see if people like your project and to learn through the iterative process, especially if you are in the middle of a hardware startups’ journey.
• The team is using InDemand, which "lets you continue raising funds after your campaign ends."
• The Luna campaign hit the 100k goal in 5 hours and kept going strongly for 3 days and then hit a little bit of a plateau.
• You can’t rely only on organic traffic. You must always be actively marketing your campaign and sharing information about yourself.
• Indiegogo was helpful throughout the campaign. The Kickstarter community is larger than the Indiegogo community, but you can also run the Indiegogo campaign on your own website and you can learn more information about potential backers on your own website.
• Indiegogo accounted for about 25% of total sales.
• The project’s news got picked up in 75 countries all over the world and a lot of journalists and bloggers wrote about the campaign on their own. They had more than 250 articles about the product. They worked for the first 20-30 articles, but the rest came on their own.

• Matteo was surprised about the engagement and size of the community.
• The team used the Indiegogo referral program and they found that the first program (refer 5 friends to get a Luna for free) was less successful and less viral than the second, where if you refer a friend, you get $25 off and for each additional friend you refer, you get $10 off.
• The Luna team might launch other crowdfunding projects after fulfilling the rewards for this project.