Dimide's Kickstarter Experience

With a prototype Dimide Clamp finally manufactured, it was time to figure out how to raise the funds needed to bring the clamp to market. This is when we turned to the crowd to help raise funds.

As we quickly discovered, running a Kickstarter campaign takes a lot of work. You need to reach a large audience with nothing but a prototype. This requires getting creative with how you create content and reach out to potential customers on social media. We chose one of the largest fabrication expos in the world, Fabtech.

We also learned the importance of having a promotional video for our Kickstarter campaign. This is when we teamed up with a local videographer to produce our launch video.

Dimide Clamp Kickstarter Video 

Once our website was live and our video uploaded, we had to find another way to further drive awareness of the Dimide Clamp. We began by contacting editors at major fabrication publications. After countless attempts, we were excited to have received interest from the ffjournal, the fabricator and fabricating and metalworking. The ffjournal wrote the article A Faster and Stronger Clamp. The Fabricator wrote the article Reimagining the C-Clamp. Fabricating and metalworking wrote the article Strong C-Clamp Gets to Rated Load Fast. In addition to approaching editors, we also ran Facebook ads to help bring awareness of our Kickstarter campaign.

In order to succeed on Kickstarter, we knew we needed to raise at least 50% of our total goal in the first 3 days. With our goal set at $70,000 and only a few thousand raised by the third day, we accepted that it was time to start focusing on other means to launch the clamp. Despite this setback, we were grateful and encouraged by the amount of support we received from our early backers.

After Kickstarter had passed, another opportunity arised which allowed us to keep working at bringing the Dimide Clamp to market. Now, every day that passes brought us closer to the day we finally began shipping the Dimide Clamp.