Nina Hooper’s Feel Good Cake: Using Kickstarter

It’s a staple of the past few years that anyone who has come up with a good idea – or thinks she has – has probably thought about putting it up on Kickstarter. And why wouldn’t you?  The online crowdfunding site can bring attention to your brand, give consumer feedback, and provide you with funding – in exchange for a fairly low commission and a pretty minimal set of  obligations.  FBU spoke with Nina Hooper of Holistic Feel Good Cakes about her current project on Kickstarter and how an entrepreneur would go about putting their project up on the site.

Hooper provided a lot of useful feedback about the Kickstarter process as well as techniques she found helpful in promoting her product during the campaign.

In discussing the timeframe for Kickstarter and whether entrepreneurs should try to kickstart a project again if funding did not work the first time, Hooper says they can, but she thinks most would opt not to because of the amount of work involved.

“Typically people chose 30 days mostly because it’s so much work and it’s just exhausting.  But there’s kind of a trend in the funding.  You kind of start with a spike and then it will level out and towards the end you will have another spike in donations.  So having a really long time and having this big intermediate section is not really effective.  You want to use every single day of the campaign as effectively as possible to get people donating. –But you can put it up again.  Say you got very close at the end and didn’t make it, hassling everyone all over again to do the process though would kind of be a nightmare.”

Catch the rest of this interview along with a glimpse inside the world of Harvard’s Innovation Lab (iLab), which is supporting over one hundred student startups this year, from FeedMe Guru, a mobile app for food lovers looking for new and trendy restaurants to Seed Lab, an enterprise aimed at providing investment and human capital for early-stage, socially-focused startups.