The key to creating content for a product that doesn’t exist yet
Posted: Mon Feb 10, 2025 6:31 am
I’ll tell you, when we rented this Airbnb out in San Francisco, we were preparing for something called the launch festival, so that we could launch this on stage in front of a few hundred people. When we were on-stage, I raised my hand, I said, “Who here wants a Rocketbook,” after giving a demo and people raised their hand. I said, “Well, that’s great. You can back us now on Indiegogo.” So people could go back at us. We got a few hundred backers. People pre-ordering the book and a promise that we’ll deliver it later. The next day we made $5,000, and the next day $10,000.
Then we woke up. Indiegogo gives you a little notification when you get a new backer, you get a little ding on your phone. It’s pretty cool. We woke up that Saturday morning and it was like, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. It was like popcorn. It was popping off, or our iPhones were broken. It was crazy. Then Indiegogo put the project in their newsletter and we made over $99,000 in one day in pre-sales, which was so cool. We looked at each other. We were like, “I guess we have to really make this product work and work well.” Then we were on another year long saga of making the product work well and getting it out to backers. We thought we had given ourselves plenty of sweden phone data time to deliver. We had projected a November 2015 delivery date to everyone who backed.
We said, It really wasn’t until the next year, deep into February that we got everything out to people. It was some of the hardest months of my career. Just hearing from backers, wondering where the product is, if I was serious or was I scamming them and I took their money. Sometimes death threats. But we finally got a decent product. It wasn’t perfect, but we got it out to people. They enjoyed it.
The success really came from the next product that we launched the following year that is now called the Rocketbook Core. It’s really all of our sales today. It doesn’t go in the microwave, but it is an extremely popular product on Amazon. In December, I got some metrics, roughly 18% of all paper notebooks sales on Amazon were Rocketbooks, if you can imagine that. We are owning and dominating the paper notebook category in a really important channel. Now we’re getting it out to other channels like the Walmarts and the Targets and more and more strength in those channels.
Then we woke up. Indiegogo gives you a little notification when you get a new backer, you get a little ding on your phone. It’s pretty cool. We woke up that Saturday morning and it was like, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. It was like popcorn. It was popping off, or our iPhones were broken. It was crazy. Then Indiegogo put the project in their newsletter and we made over $99,000 in one day in pre-sales, which was so cool. We looked at each other. We were like, “I guess we have to really make this product work and work well.” Then we were on another year long saga of making the product work well and getting it out to backers. We thought we had given ourselves plenty of sweden phone data time to deliver. We had projected a November 2015 delivery date to everyone who backed.
We said, It really wasn’t until the next year, deep into February that we got everything out to people. It was some of the hardest months of my career. Just hearing from backers, wondering where the product is, if I was serious or was I scamming them and I took their money. Sometimes death threats. But we finally got a decent product. It wasn’t perfect, but we got it out to people. They enjoyed it.
The success really came from the next product that we launched the following year that is now called the Rocketbook Core. It’s really all of our sales today. It doesn’t go in the microwave, but it is an extremely popular product on Amazon. In December, I got some metrics, roughly 18% of all paper notebooks sales on Amazon were Rocketbooks, if you can imagine that. We are owning and dominating the paper notebook category in a really important channel. Now we’re getting it out to other channels like the Walmarts and the Targets and more and more strength in those channels.