Fake it 'til you make it: harnessing kickstarter for growth.

• Author: Andra, Jacob
• Position: Lessons Learned - Financial report

Salt Lake City-based Ravean (or, if you prefer, the Ravean Heated Jackets Project) makes heated outdoor wear. The company started from scratch and will clear "between three and five million" for the 2016 calendar year, according to co-founder Bryce Fisher. Its first product, a 150-gram jacket, raised a total of $1.3 million over the course of its Kickstarter campaign. Its Kickstarter goal had been $100,000.

Ravean's latest product, an ultralight variation on the 150-gram jacket, had been live for 10 hours as of my phone call with Fisher. "It's already done $70,000," he tells me. Clearly, Ravean is on to something.

"We've created a pretty efficient template for launching products on Kickstarter," Fisher says. "It's worked every time so far." So well, in fact, that Fisher and his team found themselves deluged with questions from other entrepreneurs. How, their inquirers wanted to know, had the RHJP team managed to harness the power of Kickstarter to create a multimillion-dollar business?

The secret

"Kickstarter's great," says Fisher, "because it allows for a full product launch with very little upfront cost." No inventory investment. No need to risk large sums for manufacturing, unsure of whether the product will sell. Ravean Heated Jackets Project particularly stands out from other Kickstarter users, however, due to its pre-Kickstarter protocol.

According to Fisher, "each product is thoroughly customer validated before it ever reaches Kickstarter." RHJP prefers risk avoidance; pre-launch validation all but guarantees success. Ravean's validation system involves three steps.

The fake website

All three of the steps occur inside a website--"fake," Fisher calls it, though the site itself is real enough--that Ravean builds for a putative product. After developing a prototype, Ravean creates a stylish site complete with full-page sliders, product photos, models modeling the product and perhaps video as well.

"Our photographers and video production folks work on a contingency basis," Fisher tells me. They've seen our launch success rate"--100 percent--"so they don't have a problem with it." Essentially, Ravean's upfront cost totals that of the prototype and the website, the latter of which is easily replicable from one product validation to the next.

With a live site, the team uses Google pay-per-click advertising, social media ads and other forms of online targeting to drive traffic to the page. This is where the three steps begin.

In the first...