A detailed review of the company's comprehensive services, highlighting key features that set it apart from its competitors.
I'm Giles, Founder of Hyperstarter, and I've wanted to review The Crowdfunding Formula (TCF) for a while now. I want to explain the full spectrum of services provided by TCF, a HUGE agency in the field of crowdfunding marketing.
I was first introduced to the CEO at the time, Narek around 2018 by ex-CEO of Gadget Flow, Evan Varsamis. Back when I was developing Hyperstarter, Evan and I were having regular calls, and he often praised Narek's hard work and, based on his opinion, TCF would be the biggest crowdfunding agency.
Having spoken with Narek over the years, I'm proud to see TCF grow and expand the team (to over 100+ staff!). The team's focus when starting a campaign, is help design and execute a growth strategy tailored to the client's product and audience.
But, why choose their services and how can they help?
As a crowdfunding agency owner, there are only a few well-known agencies that actively promote Kickstarter and Indiegogo campaigns well. TCF is one of the most established companies in this space, and they suggest they can help companies raise an average of $1.2M on Kickstarter or Indiegogo!
This review post has been a long time coming. I've done my research on TCF, and would only write a review on companies I know and trust. They are effective at helping campaigns with their A-Z and marketing packages...but how do they do it? Let's go into the details.
If you go through their company profile, they have a huge list of over 100 experts. They're ranked on Kickstarter and Indiegogo as Experts, and we've worked alongside them for a couple of projects. The company works by having a dedicated separate team for each project they work on, ensuring specialized attention and expertise for their crowdfunding campaigns.
As an all-in-one full agency, TCF’s success is rooted in its methodical approach to crafting and executing crowdfunding campaigns. From my understanding, they use a data-driven approach on each project’s strengths and weaknesses.
They build a brand image and message that resonates with their specific target audience. They then create a tailored marketing strategy. What makes them stand out, is that they can do this at scale and by using their own tools like Prelaunch, they're generating instant buzz and interest.
I'm impressed with how Narek has built up a cool eco-system of sites that wrap around The Crowdfunding Formula agency, as they compliment their work quite well.
At Hyperstarter, we help campaigns at all stages, particularly once a campaign has already funded and the project owner needs a better boost.
The Crowdfunding Formula offer a full A-Z service: From project strategy, campaign branding and messaging, digital advertising, email marketing, content marketing, video supervision, page copywriting and design, social media marketing, affiliate marketing, PR and outreach, post-campaign management and fulfillment.
So what makes them special and stand out? Let's look at some of their most successful projects and how TCF made an impact.
One of The Crowdfunding Formula's biggest campaigns that caught my eye early on was the Fuel Flluid project on Indiegogo. Here's a break-down in detail as to how TCF helped Fuell Flluid.
From experience, we've worked on bike campaigns in the past, but the problem was always justifying the pricing-point for such a high-ticket item.
Instead, by looking at the campaign - they cleverly solved this issue by offering installment plans, and a really nice and clean campaign page, that showcases clearly exactly what a potential backer would be getting for their hard-earned money.
With embedded YouTube reviews of people trying out the bike (to prove it's beyond a prototype), press features and quotes from massive sites and influencers (InsideEVs, Forbes, electrek, and many others), this all helps to show off the Flluid's "trust factors" and build credibility. Great job, TCF!
This campaign also used Prelaunch.com, the latest site from TCF to collect leads via their landing page. I spoke to Narek recently about how Prelaunch was developing and using AI tech to adapt to visitors, and their needs. From what I understand Prelaunch.com helps to validate market interest, before diving into the campaign execution. This is something really exciting, and I'm interested in doing a review to find out more!
This quote comes from their site, as to how they helped the project:
"As with every campaign, we made sure to treat this campaign as its own unique thing, taking on a custom approach. We directed online traffic from many different sources like social media, and niche communities to us through aggressive advertisements, influencers, Facebook posts, and used a diverse range of PR strategies. We used everything in our tool belt and delegated the work to the experts in our team and made this one of the most successful crowdfunding campaigns in the industry."
On Kickstarter, campaigns such as Phantom and ChessUp were long-time leaders on Kickstarter for the niche of chess. In 2023, GoChess came along and blew the competition out the water with over $2 million raised, plus another 1M on Indiegogo, with $3m in total raised.
The issue I see is that the pricing point is quite low at $199 upwards. So to find 5,492 backers is really, really good.
I saw in the "About the Creator" box that TCF offers "Full Campaign Management" services, and includes other promoting companies under The Crowdfunding Formula umbrella: Tech I want, Gadget Flow, and TCF PR.
Looking on Kicktraq, I can see that (surprisingly!) this campaign didn't raise the majority of their millions on Day 1. Instead, they raised over $350k on their launch day, and continually kept up the momentum by averaging over 50 backers per day, until the end of the campaign.
Direct from The Crowdfunding Formula website, they gave this brief review of how they helped the project:
"Our strategy was dynamic, involving extensive A/B testing of ads aimed at various audiences. Through a data-driven approach, we discovered that emphasizing strategic thinking, intelligence, and problem-solving skills resonated most with our audience. This insight informed our content marketing strategy and was instrumental in driving interest in GoChess."
"Our multi-pronged approach also incorporated PR activities, influencer marketing, and social media campaigns. This not only boosted the campaign's visibility but also sparked immense curiosity and enthusiasm around GoChess."
One of the main achievements of TCF is their ability to promote unique projects like this - a hotel called Oculis Lodge, situated 2 hours drive from Vancouver, BC and about 2,5 hours drive from Seattle.
The initial problem I see is that it'll be really hard to find such a niche audience who are interested in staying at this specific lodge, in this specific city. Especially, when Indiegogo and Kickstarter are marketed worldwide.
Niche PR features in Robb Report, Travel + Leisure, The Travel Bible and Inhabitat, all helped the campaign gain traction. TCF provided a detailed case study on how they helped Oculis Lodge overfund.
Essentially it was the work of narrowed and targeted ads, local media, niche specific pitches to niche specific media channels, and a really well designed campaign page (showcasing how well agencies like TCF and Launchboom can work together) that explained everything clearly, with some professional looking visuals included.
After speaking with TCF, I found that they didn’t really work together on this one (they worked on Moonpass with LB). However, Launchboom started the campaign and raised $100k, then The Crowdfunding Formula took over with only 3 weeks left, restructured it and raised another $1M, so the campaign ended at $1.1M.
