Martin Källström
knowledge / projects

Memoto Kickstarter Campaign

In October–November 2012, Martin Källström launched Memoto — a tiny wearable camera that would later be renamed Narrative — on Kickstarter with a modest $50,000 goal. The goal fell in five hours. A month later the campaign closed at $550,189 from 2,871 backers, more than ten times the target, and it became one of the notable hardware-crowdfunding stories of that Kickstarter era. What Martin took from it wasn't just the money: it was a lesson in multi-channel launch coordination, in how little Kickstarter money actually buys you in a hardware business, and — the hard way — in what "success" costs the day after the campaign ends.

The numbers

Launch day

The Kickstarter Launch. Martin describes setting an alarm to publish the campaign page at 7am from his sister's apartment in Stockholm while the team gathered elsewhere. Within a minute of going live he got an email announcing the first backer — so fast he was surprised, since it seemed too quick for anyone to have watched the pitch video. Backers then kept arriving continuously; the $50,000 goal fell in five hours, and by a month later the campaign had raised $500,000 on top of another half-million in pre-orders. ▶ 8:30

Built for momentum: the pre-launch groundwork

The speed of the launch wasn't luck — it was assembled in advance:

Pricing and pledge tiers

Stretch goals and the $700K accessory line

Hitting 1,000% funding unlocked a $700,000 stretch goal built around three hardware accessories, laid out in detail in a Kickstarter update:

Rather than build these features into the core camera, Memoto chose to ship them as separate accessories — keeping the camera simple and avoiding a delay to the promised February 2013 ship date. By early February 2013 they were roughly 100 cameras short of the $700K mark, counting both Kickstarter pledges and continuing Memoto.com pre-orders (which the team kept open after the campaign specifically to help close that gap). Kickstarter ↗ · Narrative Blog ↗

Success brings a crisis

Narrative Kickstarter and the customer support crisis. Martin describes the campaign's success as exciting but not what the team was prepared for: the moment it closed, an overwhelming wave of customer-support requests hit, and the small team had to work around the clock just answering messages on Kickstarter and elsewhere. It became a formative lesson — that planning for a crowdfunding win has to cover post-launch support operations, not just product development and manufacturing. In Martin's words: "What we weren't at all prepared for was the overwhelming customer support load that immediately comes with a crowdfunding success. We had to spend 24 hours a day just answering messages on Kickstarter and outside." ▶ 11:33

What Martin took away

Worth remembering