SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Creative Way to Get Customers From Instagram with Daniel Vitiello of HandGround
28 Feb 2016
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per top. Five and six million.
He is hell-bent on global domination.
We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark. And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. In the last episode, number 14, you learned how Sean Wycliffe used affiliates and movie theaters to build deal flicks to $240,000 a month in revenue. And you're really gonna be surprised at what he says at minute 13. Okay, our guest today is Daniel Vitello.
Now, Daniel is an entrepreneur and co-founder of Hand Ground, the precision coffee grinder developed by thousands of coffee lovers all around the world. They raised $309,000 on Kickstarter using a very unique pre-launch strategy that played really heavily on Instagram. We'll get to that in a second. So, Daniel, the top tribe is here. They're ready to learn from you.
Are you ready to take us to the top? Let's do it. All right, man. Good stuff. First off, anything in your bio that I missed that you think the listeners need to know?
No, I think that covers it.
Okay, great. So tell us a little bit about hand ground. Why start the business and what's it do?
Yeah, so Handground is a manual coffee grinder, and we developed it out of our own frustration with the existing grinders on the market. A couple things that are different about it is it has the handles actually mounted on the side, so when you're grinding the coffee, it's a more ergonomic motion, and it's
The second big thing that's my personal favorite is there's a coarseness adjustment ring, which lets you choose different coarseness levels with one twist. And they're predefined, so you can always get to the coarseness level that you're looking for. Or some of the competitors, they have a... Um, it's sort of like a nut on a bolt and you have to spin it.
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Chapter 2: How did Daniel Vitiello raise $309,000 on Kickstarter?
There's stainless steel axles that drive the burr mill. And then there's gears that come together. So there's actually about nine different materials that make up our product. And we were looking, we decided to look for someone with more experience in doing a complex consumer good. And that's when we landed on platform 88. And what is that? Is that a website?
So platform 88, they're a startup and, um, their vision is to build a, they're almost, you can think of them like where projects go after Kickstarter. Uh, so, so they've been manufacturing in China. Their, their co-founders have been manufacturing in China for over 20 years. And, um,
they've seen this problem of all of these companies and startups launching a physical product on a crowdfunding website, and then they turn to China to get it manufactured, and they run into tons of trouble. And you see this happen with all the project delays that happen to almost every Kickstarter project.
So Platform 88 basically solves all that pain. Exactly.
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.
Well, we'll certainly link to that in the show notes at nathanlatka.com forward slash the top. Now, Daniel, I can kind of hear listeners begging for me to ask this. Walk us through, again, you had a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign, pre-sold $309,000 worth of these things. Walk us through, like, how'd you think about the Kickstarter page? How'd you get traffic to the page?
How'd you start building that audience?
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...
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Chapter 3: What insights did Daniel gain from his experiences with physical products?
And that's been driving sales every day since the campaign has ended.
And when did the campaign end? Was it in March? March 6th, I think. So it's now, what, July? So over five months, how much revenue have you guys done post-Kickstarter?
We haven't publicly disclosed our revenue post Kickstarter yet, but sales every day.
What about, so volume of customers? What about that? I mean, have you, has it been, well, let me ask this. Has it been more, have there been more sales post Kickstarter than there were during Kickstarter?
No.
Okay. But you've basically set up systems like the image at the top of the Kickstarter page that where you're driving essentially momentum and sales every day. Exactly.
Since the Kickstarter campaigns ended, we've been 100% focused on product development and working with our engineering teams. And It's interesting that that's taken more time than we expected, but the product now is also, I would say, an order of magnitude better than where it was when we launched Kickstarter.
If you are loving this episode, you will love episode number eight, where we talk to the head of strategy at Gopro. responsible for taking them from $300,000 a year in sales to $300 million in sales. And to celebrate the top tribe, I am giving you guys the chance to win a GoPro and my top three favorite business books. In order to win, simply text the word Nathan to 33444.
Again, N-A-T-H-A-N to 33444. for your chance to win hundreds of dollars in prizes every week. The first one is a GoPro and my favorite business books. It's amazing. I mean, the success you've had, you know, you started with Instagram, 5,000 followers to an email list, to a referral system, to 390 grand in sales. It's really, really amazing.
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Chapter 4: What challenges did Daniel face in finding a manufacturer?
has personally given me a lot of insight to help me kind of second guess or not second guess, but just take time to think on why am I actually making decisions and try and uncover cognitive biases from influencing me.
All right, great. Number two, is there a CEO that you are following or studying right now? Um,
Elon Musk, I think, has been the CEO that I've been paying the most attention to over the course of the last few months. He's just doing incredible things. And Larry Page as well recently.
Great, both extremely popular choices. Number three, what is your favorite online tool, like Evernote?
I would say Trello. It's what we use to stay organized and do all of our task management.
Okay, great, and we'll link to Trello in the show notes along with all the other great links you've referenced here in the episode. So number four, Daniel, how many hours of sleep do you get each night?
I get at least eight hours. I don't set an alarm typically in the morning. So my body kind of, when I go to sleep, if it's within, you know, a varying three to four hour period in the evenings and wake up about eight hours later.
Got it. So, you know, more and more people are giving that answer in past episodes and they all have different reasons. Internal time clocks, it's natural, it's less abrupt. So it's more flexible. So interesting there. Number five. Now you're what? You're 24, 25, 23, 24.
Recently turned 24, yes.
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