Daniel Vitiello

And you see this happen with all the project delays that happen to almost every Kickstarter project.

They have a team of engineers, sourcing people.

They have relationships with retailers, with distributors, legal, and they're based in Shanghai in China.

And they have a fantastic team.

So we've been really happy working with them.

So we started thinking about building our audience for Kickstarter and driving traffic for Kickstarter almost from day one of starting to work on the project.

Because we knew that if we just built this coffee grinder and put it on Kickstarter, our assumption was the chance of success would be much lower if we just put it up and hadn't built any people or found any people who were excited about it before we launched.

So right when we were starting with the initial concepts of the idea, we started an Instagram account.

And at the time, we didn't have...

actual grinder so we couldn't post pictures of the grinder but my dad had this collection of coffee mugs with animals molded into them because he's a he's been a zookeeper and

We just always had a love for animals.

So we started posting pictures of our progress on developing the coffee grinder and then also posting different coffee mug pictures with these animal mugs just because we thought that there would be a similar audience.

Yeah, so we're telling our story through Instagram and engaging with a lot on Instagram.

And there's a direct correlation between the engagement that you are actively putting out and the amount of engagement you receive back, like the new follows and the likes and comments you receive back.

By the time Kickstarter launched, I believe we had 5,000 followers on Instagram.

No, the primary source was actually email.

And what we did was we launched Kickstarter in February, February 2nd or 3rd.

But in December, we started a pre-launch campaign.

And what the pre-launch campaign did was it said that

For 30 days, we were going to hold this prelaunch campaign, and we were going to give away the first 25 hand-ground grinders that are made.