Make the Perfect Cocktail with the Elevated Craft® Cocktail Shaker

Roy Morejon:
Welcome, entrepreneurs and startups to Art of the Kickstart, the podcast that every entrepreneur needs to listen to before you launch. I’m your host, Roy Morejon, president and founder of Enventys Partners, the world’s only turnkey product launch company that has helped over 2000 innovations successfully raise over $400 million in capital since 2010. Each week, I interview a crowdfunding success story, an inspirational entrepreneur, or a business expert in order to help you take your startup to the next level. This show would not be possible without our main sponsor, ProductHype, a 300,000 member crowdfunding media site and newsletter that’s generated millions of dollars in sales for over 1000 top tier projects since 2017. Check out producthype.co to subscribe to the weekly newsletter. Now let’s get on with the show.

Roy Morejon:
Welcome to another edition of Art of the Kickstart. Today I am joined with the founder of the Elevated Craft Cocktail Shaker, Mr. Adam Craft. Adam, thank you so much for joining us today on Art of the Kickstart.

Adam Craft:
Yeah. Thanks for having me. Happy to be here.

Roy Morejon:
Yeah. Super stoked to finally get you on the show. It seems like many, many moons ago that you launched your original Kickstarter campaign, raising almost a half a million dollars on Kickstarter, and then over the last two years, you’ve been in demand over on Indiegogo, and you’ve now done over $2.5 million in sales, shipping I think over 50,000 of these products out to the backers, so really excited to have you on the show. But before I get ahead of myself, which I typically love to do on these shows, let’s tell the audience a little bit about your background in terms of what led you to creating this product and being an entrepreneur.

Adam Craft:
Yeah. So my background’s product design. And prior to starting Elevated Craft, I had a product design and engineering consultancy. And so I was exposed to a lot of different types of products, anything from toys to medical devices. And then what kind of led to the cocktail shaker idea was that I designed a series of vacuum insulated water bottles for somebody, so it gave me exposure to the engineering behind that. In that process, made trips to China, going to those factories, and then ultimately kind of started the shaker as just a side gig and just a fine design product project, really.

Roy Morejon:
Yeah. No, it certainly looks like a lot of fun. I think anybody that’s making cocktails these days, I think during the pandemic, we’ve all had a few, myself included there. But give me an idea or give our audience an idea of kind of: What do you attribute to the success of this product? And what was that aha moment that finally allowed you to kind of pursue this full-time?

Adam Craft:
Yeah. So starting it out as in my head, I was thinking more of going straight to Amazon. And I knew that the molds and things for vacuum insulated water bottles weren’t that expensive. I’d saved up a little bit of money, so I thought I can probably finance the first round of 3000 units or however much on my own. But during the design process, having a few moments where there was the kind of cool factor led into the design, and so that’s a prerequisite to doing a Kickstarter. So if I were just to do a cocktail shaker on Kickstarter, it wouldn’t really do that well I don’t think. I think that products that do well always have that kind of like, but wait, there’s more, aspect of it.

Adam Craft:
And for the shaker, at first, the first thing I thought was, “Okay, a vacuum insulated shaker would be good.” Then I added threads to it and made it where it wouldn’t leak. I’m like, “Okay. That solves a problem.” Doing the integrated six ounce measuring top to it was really kind of the, but wait, there’s more, aspect. And that was the turning point that told me this has something that I think could put on crowdfunding. And I was able to start to wrap a story around that and develop the kind of pitch that went into the video and all that stuff.

Roy Morejon:
How’d you come up with the name for the product?

Adam Craft:
Well, I actually came up with the name for the company, Elevated Craft, before the product. So I was on this kind of deep dive of wanting to do a product of my own after developing hundreds for other people, and just having the background as a product designer, I didn’t want … I knew that if I gave myself some structure to design within, then I could come up with something, at least that’s what I hoped. And so my last name’s Craft. I came up with the name Elevated Craft, and that sort of fit within the, could be coffee, it could be food, it could be cocktails.

Adam Craft:
It sort of at least gave some guardrails to the design process, and then kind of serendipitously the designing the vacuum insulated water bottle, going to China, thinking about cocktail shakers. I had some crappy cocktail shakers. Prior to that, I had made home brewed beer in the past. I got really big into cold brew coffee at one point, and so I was sort of in my head as hobbies, I was always doing a lot of this kind of craft related things. Yeah, so the name just came from my last name and giving me some guardrails to design within.

Roy Morejon:
Yeah. I love that fact, and actually, broadening out your potential product line that may come out of this, so interested to know. What was your mission kind of at the outset? And has that changed now over time?

Adam Craft:
Yeah. I mean, the initial mission was I think just to have a successful crowdfunding launch. I’ve been a student of crowdfunding, or say, a fan of crowdfunding since I was in school for industrial design. Well, actually, I’d say after school because it didn’t exist whenever I was in college. And I graduated and had my first kind of real gig and was kicking myself thinking, “Man, if Kickstarter was around while I was a student, every student project, I would’ve been trying to crowdfund.” And that would’ve been the heyday of raising $80,000 selling potato salad and that sort of thing. So from then, I was following more of a professional career, and just got to a point where I’d developed enough products that I thought, “I want to do this.” So first milestone was just have some success on crowdfunding, and beyond that, figure it out, and so that kind of was the initial goal.

Roy Morejon:
What was your first interaction with crowdfunding? How did it come across your path?

Adam Craft:
It’s hard to say. I think just being into product design, I was probably exposed very early. I can’t imagine, I don’t know exactly when. There were some pivotal moments over the years. I remember going to a trade show and seeing that Peak Design had a booth, and it was a really small booth. I think they just had their first camera mount that clips on your belt. And I saw that they had four or six people working the booth. And I just thought, “Oh, man. That’s amazing. They’re a real company now.” I also had a similar experience seeing the founder of Rad Cycles or Rad Bikes, the electric bike company that did really well on an Indiegogo launch. And it was the same thing, I got to talk to that guy.

Adam Craft:
And I’m like, “These are real companies.” Roll that into down the years, I’d go to more trade shows and start seeing more companies like Hydaway Bottle, that was a crowdfunding launch in 2014, and GrowlerWerks, and all these people, and I’m seeing them at the housewares show. And it’s just like, “Okay, so this is starting to get more real.” You can turn a Kickstarter launch into a real company. It’s not just hobbyists. And that made me think a lot more clearly about it and do a lot more research and getting my costs in together and everything else, because I thought if I have a good, successful launch, that’s validation to really do a deep dive and kind of bet on doing another company, doing a new company, and that would be Elevated Craft.

Roy Morejon:
Yeah. No, absolutely. I mean, you touched on, in terms of some of those preparation items that you were going through. And certainly from a product design standpoint, you know kind of what it looks like to get it made, manufactured, shipped, those logistics and things like that. But in terms of preparing for the crowdfunding campaign, how long did you prepare for it? And what were some of those things that you did leading up to the launch on Kickstarter?

Adam Craft:
Yeah. Well, I listened to this podcast and I listened to a lot of other podcasts. I’ve read books. I just did a deep, deep dive on crowdfunding to learn about the marketing side of things, and I knew I needed to take as much ownership of that as possible. There are obviously companies that can help with marketing and everything else, and they’re very valuable in the process. But there’s certain things that just the founder needs to create the voice of the company. You need to create … You need to really be invested in it, and so that’s what I did. So I did as much research as I could. And I knew that the video was a huge aspect of the launch. And basically, after doing prototyping and everything else, and in my product, just as a quick side, because it’s vacuum insulted, I couldn’t fake it until I make it.

Adam Craft:
I tried to C in, C out, a solid piece of steel to make what looked like a good, the final product. But at the end of the day, I had to actually get the product made because just a 3D print or a C and C thing doesn’t represent a vacuum insulated product. So that was all going on behind the scenes, that was its own struggle. That’s actually what made it take so long. But while that was happening, that did give me a lot of time to just think really hard about that messaging and what was going to be in the video during that process actually.

Adam Craft:
So my wife had twin babies, so I was doing the new dad thing as well, which is a lot of holding a baby while it’s sleeping for three hours at a time. And I would just be thinking a lot about the video and about the script. And I was writing it in my head and rewriting it, and that was sort of the start of when I could start to see that it would be successful if I pulled it off the way that I was envisioning it, I guess.

Roy Morejon:
I bet. So we always talk to founders about how important that month, or two, or six, or a full year potentially is in terms of getting your crowd, your tribe, your community amped and ready for this campaign to go live. So I know this was a couple years ago when your campaign went live. But anything that you can recall that really put yourself in such a good position to over-fund this campaign so much early on?

Adam Craft:
Yeah. I think getting the video done early and having that to iterate on and get different versions of it cut. And I think there’s, if somebody’s thinking about filming a video, really knowing that if you put in the work ahead of time, it all leads up to the day that you’re shooting the video is everything’s in place. But something that I didn’t realize is how valuable all that additional B roll, and all the other content that you can get out of a day or two of filming with professionals. And so we were able to redo the video and cut things up, and take the time to do that. That was the major part of the lead up.

Adam Craft:
About a month before the campaign went live, and up to let’s say two weeks, I did an email lead gen campaign. And in doing all the research, basically was hearing that spending $2.50, or $3.00, or whatever it was for an email was worth it, and that if it was costing too much, then you know that your messaging is off and whatnot. And we ran this campaign, and we were getting our email opt ins at 70 cents, way below a dollar per email opt in, so kind of quickly got a list of I think nearly 4000 people for 2800 bucks. And that gave me a lot of confidence. We certainly use that, and we used it a lot during the initial launch. And I also used Kickbooster as sort of an affiliate thing, which for the most part, that didn’t really do that much, but it did provide for a newbie like myself, it gave me a lens to see how these emails were performing and whatnot because it had a pretty helpful dashboard.

Adam Craft:
But to that tune, I think that email list turned into at least $38,000 in revenue. And so on day one, I believe we got something like 65 grand in sales, which created that snowball effect that most people wouldn’t know about, and crowdfunding, where the first three days are super, super important, so that email list helped a lot. But without a good video and good content, then I don’t know that we would’ve gotten the email list anyway.

Roy Morejon:
Yeah. Now let’s talk a little bit about that campaign video. I mean, in terms of the process, what was that like? How did you decide what to include in your video? You spoke at the end of it, which I think is critical to putting a face to the brand. But you also used, let’s say, an influencer in terms of Sheldon, a three time Guinness World Record holding mixologist. What was that like? And I truly love how you get straight to the point immediately in the video and capture someone’s attention and kind of hook them for the rest of it. I think a lot of videos miss that. So talk a little bit about overall that campaign video and some of the process that you guys went through there.

Adam Craft:
Yeah. So my advice is to treat, make sure to be ready to do lots of iterations and treat it like a prototype, like you would anything else. So if you’re a product developer or whatever your background is, just know the day that you shoot with the professionals, you should have a lot of these, quote, prototypes done of the video. And I did that, and I had a lot of failures, or what would’ve been bad videos leading up to what turned out to be a good video. So as an example, I wrote a script that was very much in my voice that was just talking kind of like design speak about all the feature benefits. And I had studied the difference between a feature and a benefit and leading with the benefit, and not just jiving into engineering kind of talk, and some of that jazz.

Adam Craft:
And so I did a first video, and it was fine. I didn’t record it professionally, but I did a voiceover of it. I also went on Fiverr, and I had a professional for five bucks, or 20 bucks, or whatever, I had them read my script to see what that tone would come out to be, and it just didn’t do much. But what it did was, it started to give the keywords around the features and benefits to talk about in the movie, or in the actual video. And it just kind of iterated from there. So then I wrote what I thought would be the funny script, and I knew that I couldn’t pull off that tone, but the backup plan was, okay, if we can’t find somebody to act in the video, then here’s a version that I can probably pull off. And we’ll keep the, the video leads with, your cocktail shaker sucks, and it goes from there.

Adam Craft:
And so the way I would categorize the campaign is like you said, the first five seconds or whatever are really important. The lucky part of it was we … So Sheldon was somebody that I met maybe six months prior to doing the video. I saw some of his stuff on Instagram. And it just so happened that he was bouncing between New York and Phoenix, where I live. And I knew him as a good dude and whatnot, but I didn’t think that he would be in town to actually film the video, and I didn’t want to put all my cards on: Is he actually going to be in Arizona? All that sort of stuff. I didn’t know him that well. I’ve gotten to know him well since then. But so I wasn’t relying on him being the lead character. I was relying on a good script.

Adam Craft:
And then we couldn’t find anybody. Backup plan was that I was going to be the sort of actor in it. And on the Thursday, we were filming on a Sunday, on a Thursday before as a last ditch effort, I’m like, “Hey, Sheldon. Are you actually in town this weekend?” And he was, and it just worked out, so that was luck. The other lucky part was that he was able to deliver the lines and was able to do it masterfully. So at the point that he signed on, we reworked the script a little bit to add in his intro, and just start thinking of all these other clips.

Adam Craft:
And the last thing I’ll say about it is having a good person that knows how to give direction during the filming, so as the creator, I was able to write the scripts and kind of think through the shots and everything. But on the day of the shoot, I did almost nothing because the prep work had been done, and I had a freelancer that knew how to direct actors and knew how to direct the cameramen. And he would say, “Okay. Can you stop? Say that line again. Okay, say it again, but say it with this way.” So working with some pros on that front was hugely helpful as well.

Roy Morejon:
I can imagine. So earlier, you talked about, maybe we were talking before the show. But in terms of when your Kickstarter campaign ended, you moved over to Indiegogo InDemand. Talk to the audience a little bit about why you decided to go that route, why you recently stopped selling on Indiegogo, and how you were able to successfully raise another $2 million on InDemand.

Adam Craft:
Yeah. The InDemand transition is amazing. And I had heard about it, but on the advice I had heard was always, yeah, definitely have InDemand where it starts as soon as your Kickstarter ends because you’re going to still have people linking to it and whatnot. But the common advice was you might get another 10% to 20% on top of the sales and that’s it, and then it’s just going to kind of fizzle. Well, the transition out of kickstart, so the pandemic had hit, factories had closed down. I was far enough along. I had full confidence that once the factories came back, we were going to get it through. And that was throughout from the start, so I had mentioned that I had a working prototype made and all that stuff before the video.

Adam Craft:
So supply chain just slowed to a halt, and Indiegogo InDemand allowed for me to continue to take pre-sales on a platform that I didn’t need to worry a lot about the tech and whatnot. And so I know that on Shopify, there’s sort of a way to take pre sales. I knew that the system was good and that we would get paid every 30 days. And to be honest, whenever it first started, it was pretty slow, and I just kind of thought, “Okay, well, this is sort of a post crowdfunding kind of amount of revenue that might come in.” But as we got on the platform, we used the same video and same ads and just started directing them towards the campaign. And the revenue starting ticking up and up and up. And we did have a huge, when all the lock downs happened and people started working from home, our sales just went through the roof, through Indiegogo InDemand.

Adam Craft:
But the reason that we were on it for so long was more to do with supply chain than anything. It was that I would get a shipping container in, and by the time it would arrive, we would’ve sold those out, and I would’ve ordered another container of goods. And it’s just things took a long time. There’s delays with ocean. And also, a lot of it was my fear of buying so much inventory too. I mean, to be honest, to go from thinking, “Well, maybe we can sell, I don’t know, 10,000 units, 20,000 units a year,” to all of a sudden selling that times three or four and needing to purchase that much inventory is pretty scary.

Adam Craft:
So Indiegogo InDemand allowed for all that flexibility throughout 2020 until pretty recently. And it was just sort of like it didn’t take a lot of upkeep. The ads continued to perform, and we did get a lot of help from Indiegogo. And the difference with Kickstarter is Kickstarter, we never heard from anybody for the … We were only on there 30 days. On Indiegogo, I have a rep that is part of the company that I can email and say, “Can you help with this? Or can we get in this email blast this week?” And they were super good about that.

Roy Morejon:
Yeah. There’s definitely a difference there in terms of the handholding, or the interpersonal-ness of both platforms in terms of how they work with creators. And unfortunately, that’s the way it’s been since I think both have started, so it can be a difference, especially from a first time creator. But potentially, obviously given you product development experience and everything in terms of bringing this thing to market, it sounds like you did everything right. But what I would love to know is: How did you engage both communities? Right? You’ve got over 6000 backers on Kickstarter. You’ve got another 20,000 plus on Indiegogo. Talk about your experience with the backers and how you went about managing their feedback.

Adam Craft:
Well, I mean, Kickstarter backers seem to be a lot more vocal. And you can see with 6000 backers, I think we have, I don’t know, 400 plus comments on Kickstarter, and with 26,000 backers, or however many on Indiegogo, there’s 150, there’s hardly any dialogue. I think there’s definitely a different group of people. It feels like the Kickstarter has a lot more passionate followers, but they want their voice heard, and there’s a lot of demand there. And I feel like the Indiegogo backers were more passive. To that tune though, when we would do some sort of promo or cross promotion with somebody, the Kickstarter backers would yield a lot more results on that.

Adam Craft:
So if I would make an arrangement with another campaign to, if they post a link to our campaign in their update, and then we’ll do the same, I would always see that the Kickstarter backers were way more likely to click on links and just want to be involved. And so it’s a different deal. But to that tune now, if I post something on, an update on Indiegogo with a code, or anything like, hey, join our … We have a private Facebook group that has over 4000 members for … It’s called the Elevated Craft Crew, but people that own the shaker, and they want to share recipes and whatnot. If I post a call to action on Indiegogo, we definitely get a lot of results for that. It’s just not the same scale. So it’s definitely different, but it’s kind of nice on Indiegogo that people treat it more like a pre purchase that they’re just going to wait for. At least that’s what it seemed like our audience was doing.

Roy Morejon:
So I know earlier you spoke about working with Kickbooster. You work with them both on the Kickstarter campaign as well as the Indiegogo campaign. And then midway through the campaign, you also partnered with one of our sponsors, ProductHype. What were some of those considerations that you were looking for in terms of more promotion for the product and for the campaigns?

Adam Craft:
I think all of that is just an experiment whenever you’re first working, you’re doing your first product launch. Anything I looked at those, it’s like, “Okay. If we’re in an email blast, is that going to yield results? If we do Kickbooster, is that going to yield results?” You kind of test things out. So it was always sort of a difficult decision. It was particularly difficult when I was in Kickstarter because just getting the numbers figured out whenever you start looking at all the different percentages and you don’t really, you kind of know your manufacturing costs, but you’re also new with a factory. And you’re like, “Is this going to change?” Ocean freight costs are at a historic high.

Adam Craft:
And so the reason I bring that up is because as you throw on all of these promotional things, you just have to kind of factor in the cost and think, “Is it going to make sense? If I pay a commission on this, is it going to yield a good result?” Commission is great because you just pay for the results. So Kickbooster is about doing affiliate marketing. I just never was able to really push it out there that much. And we really didn’t get much PR at all throughout the campaign, so the ads did the heavy lifting, and just that people repurchasing. I think we have a lot of people that buy multiple shakers and give them as gifts. And managing the community and kind of the voice to keep everything very, very positive and never be like … I would never do an update where it’s like, “Man, the supply chain’s screwing me over because everything’s taking so long.”

Adam Craft:
It was always like, “We’re in it together,” and that sort of thing. And I feel like a big part of our marketing was if we got in an email blast, that’s great. Getting the community to back you and to tell their friends and everything was even better. But there’s so many different tools, I think every campaign, you need to experiment. So long as you aren’t losing money, then why not?

Roy Morejon:
Absolutely. So I notice that the product isn’t on sale on Amazon. Right?

Adam Craft:
Not currently.

Roy Morejon:
So what advice or what kind of process have you gone through in terms of advice that you could give to another entrepreneur in terms of maybe your why, as to why it’s not listed on Amazon yet, and some of the success that you’ve now seen just selling the product directly through your website?

Adam Craft:
I think it’s worth just mentioning on, when you have crowdfunding success, there’s some avenues that you can go. I know a very successful crowdfunding company that does very little eCommerce. And they just went straight to wholesaling and are selling in [inaudible 00:27:06] and the different stores. A lot of people might go straight to Amazon. In my case, I wanted to go to Shopify because we had so many backers already and kind of that would also lead into they’re all sort of on an email list. And it felt like a good transition that we could control. I did have a huge amount of fear on being on Indiegogo InDemand for so long, thinking, “Are we just the cool kids of crowdfunding? And once we go on Shopify, we’re going to lose some of that sort of pre-order magic that probably happens, where there’s a little bit of FOMO.” You are discounting things, that sort of jazz.

Adam Craft:
And I’m really happy that putting together the Shopify and just kind of starting to direct the ads over to Shopify, we didn’t see a drop in sales. And we kind of lose the commission that we were paying to Indiegogo. And so all in all, it’s been a nice transition. My advice is, as it relates to eCommerce, I should’ve started the Shopify store way, way ahead of time. I thought in my head, “Okay, everything’s sort of, it’s there for you. We’ll just knock out the Shopify store in a week.” It took a lot longer than that. And my advice to people that are doing crowdfunding is: Why not just take your content and go ahead and put it all into a Shopify store ahead of time and get that built out? And tweak it before you do your launch, but don’t wait until the very end because there are a lot of …

Adam Craft:
It’s its own thing. Right? Now you can start running promos. You can start doing abandoned cart things. You have so much more flexibility than when you’re on Kickstarter or Indiegogo. And so there’s a lot to learn with that. But we didn’t have any drop in sales. Sales increased going to Shopify. So the question of why not go straight to Amazon was just: If we’re already directing traffic to our own site, why not just, or to our own, say to the Indiegogo side of things and it was working, why not just take that over to Shopify? And so it’s worked out. We will go to Amazon. I’m actually building out Amazon right now. It’s a little bit tricky. At that point, we lose control. We lose a lot of control. And so we’ve had so much success by working directly with the customers and being able to help them on customer service related things.

Adam Craft:
Once we go on Amazon, it’s a different ball game. And the reason that I’m doing it is because I know that our audience are looking for us on Amazon. And I know that a lot of other companies are using our name, Elevated Craft, in their ads in search terms and stuff. And so by being a brand registered, we are, Elevated Craft is a registered trademark, and so we can go in and hopefully dominate the category.

Roy Morejon:
Boot them out.

Adam Craft:
We’ll see.

Roy Morejon:
Nice.

Adam Craft:
Yeah. It’s tricky too because we’ll be the highest listed shaker, the highest priced shaker on Amazon. And we’ve never been compared directly with all these other cheap kind of shakers. Basically, the shakers that we built the ad around saying, “Your cocktail shaker sucks, it freezes your hand, it leaks, and all this stuff.” That’s what’s on Amazon. But will our message translate when you’re just looking at sort of static images, a high price, and then you have to do a lot more research? I’m not totally sure. But I’m completely happy and bullish to the fact that our Shopify store has worked, and great conversion. The ads have performed really well and continue to. And I mean, we’re always above a five X ROAS. But typically, seven plus blend, it’s always great. Shopify is pretty awesome.

Roy Morejon:
Yeah. Those are amazing numbers, Adam, so congrats on that, and obviously, the amazing product that you’ve built that consumers can’t get enough of. So with that, this is going to get us into our launch round where I’m going to rapid fire a handful of questions at you. You good to go?

Adam Craft:
Yeah.

Roy Morejon:
So what inspired you to be an entrepreneur?

Adam Craft:
And these need rapid answers, right?

Roy Morejon:
Not necessarily.

Adam Craft:
I think I was born that way. I think I’ve always wanted to. I have some family members that have been entrepreneurs. But it could be just the growing up in the punk rock scenes and not wanting to work for the man.

Roy Morejon:
I hear you. So if you could have a drink with any entrepreneur throughout history, who would it be.

Adam Craft:
Entrepreneur, first thing that came to mind was Anthony Bourdain, but I don’t think he was much of an entrepreneur.

Roy Morejon:
He created things. You know?

Adam Craft:
He did. Yeah. Just having a drink with Anthony Bourdain would be pretty amazing. Yeah, I’ll just leave it at that.

Roy Morejon:
What would have been your first question for him?

Adam Craft:
I don’t know. I would just want to shoot the hay and have a good time, talk about travel and life.

Roy Morejon:
What cocktail would you make for him?

Adam Craft:
For him, it’s hard to say. I think I would maybe jungle bird. I don’t know, I love them all. It’s hard to say for that.

Roy Morejon:
Shake it until you make it. Right?

Adam Craft:
Yep.

Roy Morejon:
Any books you would recommend to our listeners?

Adam Craft:
Fresh off the top of my head would be maybe Profit First for eCommerce. Just try to make sure you have a good understanding of your income and bank accounts and all that stuff. It’s not exciting things, but it’s a super easy read and helps you figure out how to set the foundation of a business.

Roy Morejon:
Yeah. And speaking of that, what advice would you give to a new inventor or entrepreneur that’s looking to launch their product on Kickstarter?

Adam Craft:
I think … I don’t know. I’d say maybe make sure you have a real good understanding of where your strong suits are, and try to leverage whatever super power you might have. And find good people to fill in the gaps on the other sides of it. And just test, prototype and test. And when I say that, most people think of prototyping as an engineering thing. I use prototyping real loosely, even for if I write something, I put it on Fiverr and let somebody read it, a professional voice actor. It costs five bucks. That’s a prototype in my head, so prototype, prototype, prototype.

Roy Morejon:
Nice. Solid advice there, Adam. Last question. What does the future of crowdfunding look like?

Adam Craft:
I think it’s probably much closer to eCommerce. At least there’s so many categories, so if I’m just talking about physical products in and of themselves, I think that’s much different than a piece of art or something. But my experience with Indiegogo InDemand would be that I can see them transitioning more and more to a closer bridge to Shopify, and maybe even a platform that people don’t get off of. I don’t know. It just feels like it’s so close with my experience, the things that you don’t get make you want to go to traditional, like a Shopify, or an Amazon, or something. But at the point that they integrate in abandoned cart metrics and telling you what your open rates are, and things like that, it’s pretty costly if you’re paying the 5% to 8% to be on Indiegogo InDemand. But for somebody that has no technical background, it’s a great thing. So I think they’ll just get closer and closer to that, at least with Indiegogo. I don’t think Kickstarter will.

Roy Morejon:
Yeah. Well, Adam, this has been amazing. This is your opportunity to give the audience your pitch, tell people what you’re all about, where they should go, and why they should check you out.

Adam Craft:
Yeah, guys, I’d really love you to just check out elevatedcraft.com, and check out the product. And you can kind of see if you also look at the Indiegogo and the Kickstarter, you can find that under Elevated Craft. But I think it’ll paint a pretty good picture for where we’ve started and where we’ve gone. The site is doing well. And yeah, pick up a shaker if you want one. It’s a solid product, and got a good fan base. You’re also welcome to join the Elevated Craft Crew and see sort of what an active community looks like. There’s over, like I said, over 4000 people on that Facebook group. That’s not really a marketing thing. That’s just a bunch of people sharing cocktails and good ideas.

Roy Morejon:
Amazing. Well, audience, thanks again for tuning in. Make sure to visit artofthekickstart.com for the notes, the transcript, links to Elevated Craft, as well as everything else we talked about today. And of course, thank you to our crowdfunding podcast sponsors, the Gadget Flow and ProductHype. And if you loved this episode as much as I did, make sure to leave us a review on your favorite podcast listening station. Mr. Adam Craft, thank you so much for joining us today on Art of the Kickstart.

Adam Craft:
Thanks for having me.

Roy Morejon:
Thanks for tuning in to another amazing episode of Art of the Kickstart, the show about building a better business, world, and life with crowdfunding. If you’ve enjoyed today’s episode, show us some love by giving us a great rating on your favorite listening station. And of course, make sure to visit artofthekickstart.com for all the previous episodes. And if you need some help, that’s what we’re here for. Make sure to send me an email to info@artofthekickstart.com. Thanks for tuning in, and I’ll see you on the next episode.