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Last Friday, we wrapped our third Kickstarter, The BioLite FirePit.
With the support of this community, we closed as the 65th most funded project OF ALL TIME on Kickstarter (and 15th most funded in Tech). 10,238 people showed up and pledged $2,534,017 to bring the FirePit to life.
We're humbled, we're excited, and we're incredibly motivated to get crackin on producing these FirePits. In the meantime, here's a quick recap of some highlights from the campaign that helped make it our most successful yet:
Let’s start off with the most exciting highlight:
WE HIT OUR STRETCH GOAL.
We promised that if we hit $2.5M by the end of this campaign, we’d greenlight a six-month digital cookbook project that includes developing specific dishes requested by our FirePit backers, recipe-testing community submissions, adapting popular recipes found in our emerging markets, and collaborating with some noteworthy chefs on some one-of-a-kind woodfired favorites. We’ll also select a few of these recipes and feature them in a video series, where we’ll also be able to incorporate user tips, questions from the community, and special features.
Without further ado, it's time to collect a master list! Got a recipe or a dish you want us to explore? Share it below as we kick off our first round of research:
Requests & Recipes
Press: Holding Our Feet To the Fire With Real-Time Reviews
Prior to launch we ran around the country, FirePit in tow, burning for a handful of top-knotch editors. Additionally, we shipped out 5 prototypes to product testers to get their honest first reactions with the FirePit. The result? Over 137 press hits, fueled by a cohort of in-depth reviews that helped potential backers know this product is real, does what it says, and cooks a damn fine steak.
Don't have time to read'em all? We got you, here are a few of our favorites:
- Outside Online did a lot of grilling.
- InsideHook took a tour of our office and shared the origins of FirePit.
- GearJunkie left us in the rain.
- Engadget went in depth and came out with the most photo-rich recap of them all.
The Proof is In The Streaming: Our First Kickstarter Live
Something that was brand new to us was streaming a Kickstarter Live as a way to connect with our audience in real-time and answer popular questions. More importantly, this live feed meant no clever cutaways or edits; this was an unfiltered look at how the FirePit performs. Check it out here in its entirety and see Tim, Erica, and Ryan handle 60 minutes of on-air multitasking.
From Livestreaming to Live Action: FirePit Goes Public at New Lab
With the success of Kickstarter Live under our belts, we wanted to take our demos one step further by showing them in-person. Seeing it on camera is great, but feeling the heat and NOT seeing or breathing the smoke is a whole other level of understanding. We took three of them to the 1st birthday celebration of New Lab, a tech incubator in the Brooklyn Navy Yard (where we also happened to have filmed our Kickstarter Live). We burned for 4 hours, fed s’mores to 3,000 people, and had a blast watching first timers react to the FirePit in action.
Getting By With A Little Help From Our Friends
Campaign momentum is clutch and this time around we kept things going with a series of special collaborations with some pals we'd definitely want around our next campfire.
First of all, we knew we wanted to be comfy around a campfire. There's nothing like being bundled up around a campfire with beers in our hands, so we turned to our friends at Rumpl to team up in offering a Puffy Throw along with some Beer Blankets -- all in custom colors chosen by our backers.
Another thing that we always do around a campfire is sing and do jam sessions. We looked to our friends Kala to offer the Waterman Ice Soprano, a water-resistant transparent travel ukulele. This pledge level also includes an exclusive digital songbook and quickstart guide to get our backers jamming in no time.
Finally, the key to a campfire is to keep it going, which means we’d have to chop wood. This is all possible with the help from our third Fireside Friend, Man Made Co. Their pledge level offered the Old Henry Hatchet which is hand made in the USA, and will be painted in BioLite flagship colors as a limited edition offer to our backers.
To get more inside scoop on how we did things differently during this campaign, listen to this podcast episode from Art of the Kickstart, where they sit down with our Director of Marketing to about the Kickstarter process.
Thank you for an amazing campaign -- we're heads down now on next steps and gearing up for Holiday 2017 (mark your calendars for 11/15, trust us). We hope you're enjoying fall camping season – see you outside.
The FirePit is now available for preorder.