Crowdfunding is an unusually honest test of brand work. There is no sales team, no retail environment and no second chance. Strangers look at a page for a product that does not exist yet and decide whether to give money to people they have never met.
Six of the campaigns I did brand and launch work for funded.
| Campaign | Raised | Goal | Backers | Ended |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PiJuice | £124,372 | £10,000 | 2,417 | Mar 2015 |
| Strooder | £64,369 | £20,000 | 363 | Jun 2014 |
| PaPiRus | £36,151 | £5,000 | 792 | Jun 2015 |
| IoT LoRa Gateway | £35,173 | £25,000 | 288 | Nov 2018 |
| Pi PoE Switch HAT | £28,817 | £10,000 | 607 | Jun 2015 |
| TiddlyBot | $37,806 | $27,000 | 461 | Jul 2014 |
Five UK campaigns and one run from the US, so the totals are deliberately not added together — a single blended figure would be wrong. Every number above is from the campaign page itself.
PiJuice
A battery HAT for the Raspberry Pi: the thing that lets a Pi project leave the desk. It asked for £10,000 and finished on £124,372 from 2,417 backers, more than twelve times its goal.
I did the brand and the launch end to end — identity, packaging, product photography, the campaign page and its assets. I was freelancing for Pi Supply at the time; I joined them properly the following year.
The interesting constraint with a Pi accessory is that the audience already knows more than you do. They can read a schematic. Overstate a specification and someone will find it within the hour, in public, in the comments. So the work is not persuasion, it is clarity: show the thing accurately, at the angle that explains how it fits together, and be honest about what it does not do.
The rest
PaPiRus put e-paper on the Pi, Pi PoE put power and networking down one cable, and the IoT LoRa Gateway — three years later and the only one after I was a full-time employee — pushed long-range radio onto the same platform.
Strooder, for Omnidynamics in Bristol, was a consumer filament extruder that turned waste plastic into printer feedstock. It raised £64,369 against a £20,000 goal, and it is the only one here that was not a Pi accessory.
TiddlyBot was an educational robotics kit out of Bristol Robotics Laboratory, where I built the launch site and campaign assets at Agilic. It ran as a dollar campaign and raised $37,806. That same building is where I work today.
What it teaches you
Every campaign here is a hardware product photographed before it existed at scale, described to people who could not hold it, and priced before anyone knew what manufacturing would cost. You learn to be specific, because vagueness reads as evasion to an audience who came looking for the spec sheet.
It is the least abstract design work I have done. The feedback is a number.