Time to read: 5 min
WeIn this Spotlight we’re lucky to share our conversation with Lisa Fetterman, CEO and Co-founder ofNomiku，在家后面的公司sous videmachine. Lisa is a dedicated entrepreneur included in this 2015’s福布斯食品和葡萄酒30岁以下30and a young hardware veteran with hard-earned product development and manufacturing experience, having lived 2 years next to her factory in Shenzhen.
After raising $1.3M across two Kickstarters, we wanted to get the inside scoop on how she did it and distill that knowledge into a few tangible strategies on how to build strong community around a hardware product.
The Inspiration
Building your product is important, but it’s all for naught if you forget about the real people you hope will actually buy the darn thing. In this exclusive interview, Lisa shares her personal experience that inspired her passion for food, her passion for her product and how that passion has inspired the growth of an invested and engaged community of customers.
When Lisa first moved to the United States as a kid from her hometown in China, the superficial differences were vast. “To me, just living in a house with stairs meant I was richy rich. Everything was so different.”
Such superficial differences resulted in schoolyard ridicule. “I didn’t know you were supposed to change your clothes every day so I would wear my clothes for a whole week because as a kid you don’t smell and you love your bugs bunny tshirt. I would get pretty shunned for it,” Lisa recalls. “People would come up to me and hold their nose.”
Until one day, one of Lisa’s schoolmates went over to her house and were served thousand-year-old eggs, a delicacy in China. The next day she was surrounded by her classmates, all of them asking if they could be invited for dinner as well. “It really internalized for me that food connects people,” Lisa says. “When I couldn’t speak the language and I was a weirdo, this made me cool.”
This experience of how food could bring people together is a seed of Lisa’s infectious passion forNomiku。她以这种热情激发了一个对自己的产品充满热情的客户社区，而强大的社区只有100人开始。
1.找到100位真正的信徒
100是将产品提升到新的成功水平所需的热情支持者的数量。丽莎说：“您必须找到一个专门的100个真正的信徒。”“我的意思是，当您的产品推出任何地方时，他们会给您钱的人。”她从朋友大卫·朗（David Lang）的书《零对制造商》（Maker）的书中得到了这句话。
“success begets success”
Those 100 dedicated early supporters will give you the initial lift you need to boost a crowdfunding project or a product launch on your website. “It follows the old rule that success begets success,” Lisa adds.
作为这一理论的证明，只要看看她的第二个Kickstarter项目，Nomiku在第一天就赚了最大的钱，总计7.5万美元的$ 200万美元。她说，为了集会这100个核心支持者，久经考验的邮件列表是关键。丽莎强调说：“培养您的邮件列表。”“检查以确保这些支持者可靠地参与您的工作。”
那么，您如何找到那些前100个真正的信徒？
2.启动简单
Before there was a polished Nomiku product, there was a maker kit. “We had the bare pcb and sold hundreds of these sous vide maker kits,” Lisa shares. “The people that bought these kits, these were our first true believers.”
With the Nomiku maker kit, Lisa took the maker in the kitchen and empowered them to be a hardware maker as well. She met them where they were at, inspired them, and in turn they were willing to build the product themselves just to have it. “We sold out every time we had a new batch for our maker product,” Lisa recalls. “We were like, ‘Damn! People are so desperate for this they’ll learn how to solder!’”
“只有通过与我们的第一批客户交谈才能使我们能够尽可能地走。”
开始简单，只是为了获得将购买您产品的真实人员的反馈。丽莎说：“您将学到很多有关您的市场的知识，这是关于如何处理物流以及如何处理您的第一批客户的很多信息。”“他们喜欢什么？他们想要什么？跟他们讲话。只有通过与我们的第一批客户交谈，才允许我们走到自己的范围内。只需在某个地方开始看看您可以得到什么样的牵引力。”
3. Do Non-Scalable Things
When Lisa was first focused on selling the sous vide maker kit, she would occasionally drive to peoples’ houses to help them build the machine if they needed the extra help. “Somebody would buy the kit and they would call me up (because I had my phone number on the website) asking me how to make it,” Lisa says. “So I would drive to their house, bring my soldering iron and make it for them right there and then!”
People would also reach out to her on Twitter seeking solutions for their unique needs. For example, one time a cheese maker wanted to use temperature control to make his cheese. So Lisa essentially took something like a chicken roasting pan and for $80 hacked it into a special sous vide machine for the guy’s cheese vat.
是否开车去客户的房屋来建造其制造商套件或将特殊产品砍掉以符合独特的用例可扩展活动？当然不是，但这是时间密集型，不可衡量的行动，它将建立100位真正信徒的基础，您需要进行可扩展的增长。
4.加倍英里
Beyond the stage of non-scalable activities, you should continue to go out of your way to help your customers and respond to their concerns and disappointments. “I met a founder who hand wrote notes to his first 500 customers and now his customers bounce up and down with excitement for the product!” Lisa enthuses. “I want that! That’s why I go the extra mile for my customers.”
“热爱您的产品，展示您的激情，人们会回报”
此外,现实情况是,无论多么built your product is, things will inevitably go wrong. But it’s how you respond when something goes wrong that truly matters. “With Nomikus in the wild, there are going to be some malfunctions,” Lisa explains. “For example, somebody once wrote to me saying he cooked this beautiful dinner and it was ruined because his machine messed up. So we did the usual stuff where we get his machine back, send him a new one and I also hand wrote him a note and gave him a check for a whole new meal. Now he is one of my biggest evangelists. It’s one person, but he touched on probably 10 other people.”
According to Lisa, growing your community is really not that complicated. “Just love your product, show your passion and people will reciprocate. I’m surprised by how many people don’t have much passion for their products,” Lisa says.
So there you have it. Love your product, show your passion, and people will love it back.
Oh and one last important piece of advice from Lisa!美国东部时间上午8点 @上午8点启动您的Kickstarter。“It’s the start of the news cycle and if you launch any other day you will have wasted a day in your fundraising schedule,” Lisa says. “Launching on Friday is like showering and putting on your makeup for a date on Monday! No one checks the internet on Friday.”
