Bird Buddy's $11m marketing strategies unpacked

George: 0:00
Hi there. My name is George and I help independent creators launch their products and games on this podcast. Those creators share their journey from an idea to an actual product and everything in between. Today’s guest is Peter Drole head of performance marketing at the legendary Bird Buddy. They raised over 11 million on their two crowdfunding campaigns on Kickstarter and subsequently on Indiegogo in demand. And that makes it one of the most funded projects in crowdfunding history. Welcome Peter.

Peter: 0:29
Hi George. Thank you for inviting me. It’s a pleasure to be here.

George: 0:32
Absolutely. Thank you so much for coming on the show. A lot of people who are into crowdfunding know about Bird Buddy, but for those who might be unfamiliar, can you give a quick introduction on what this product is?

Peter: 0:43
Yeah. Basically Bird Buddy is a company that produces smart bird feeders. And they look quite like normal bird feeders, but inside there’s a camera, which activates when a bird lands on the bird feeder, and then it can take really awesome photos. And video of birds picking the seeds and feeding themselves. And this is the hardware part of the product. And then the software part is a really cool app. And inside it, it’s AI powered actually. So basically it can recognize different bird species that land on the bird feeder.

George: 1:18
And I think the hardware is obviously well known because that’s the first thing that people see, but the app has also gotten a ton of praise because of not just the AI recognizing birds, but also that the user interface, the UI how you get these little presents popping up when a new bird has been spotted and you can swipe left and right to save your photos. It’s an absolutely beautiful product, I think, both from a hardware and a software perspective. You joined the team as the head of performance marketing after the first Crowdfunding campaign. So a little bit later in the journey, but talk us through the origin story of how did this company start in the first place?

Peter: 2:00
I have to correct you. So I joined as a, just a performance marketing specialist and later on I got promoted. But yeah, basically I think this story started when two of our founders got together and, they are very entrepreneurial, so they always have a lot of new ideas. And I think one of our founders, Ziga, who is also responsible for the nice app that you’re talking about. I think he saw the the viral video where a seagull stole the GoPro camera. And so it had this amazing video on it face to face with a seagull. And I think it snowballed from there. He was really inspired. He said, Oh, you can never see the nature this close in everyday life. Wouldn’t it be awesome to, to have a product that can enable you to do this? They are very data driven. So of course they did a lot of testing and they saw, okay, this idea resonates with people it might be worthwhile to work on it. So they went to work and then two, three years, later, here we are.

George: 3:07
It’s pretty incredible because this has been one of the biggest crowdfunding campaigns in history. Crowdfunding plus regular sales, how many people in the world own a Bird Buddy right now?

Peter: 3:18
It would be around 150,000 something like that.

George: 3:23
That is a lot. Those are a lot of bird feeders. When you first joined the team, what surprised you most about the company and how it operates?

Peter: 3:33
This was my first time working in a startup. And I didn’t know what to expect, but when I came in it was really cool because we started working in a regular house with two floors top floor was like marketing marketing and developers and below, I think it was product and the founders was really small, tight knit group. It was really awesome for me because, I came from corporate background, so I never got to speak with the CEO or the founder or whatever. And here we were like drinking coffee together. So that was really awesome. And then a cool thing is that they’re really always open to new ideas. So whenever something cool pops in your head, you can be like, Hey, what about if we try this? And like I said, they’re always data driven. So they say, okay, if you test it and if you see good results, we can go on with that. Those would be like two main things that I’m really there was really like surprising when starting to work in a startup.

George: 4:28
And when you joined the first Kickstarter campaign, it already happened. A lot of data had been gathered, but the company recently had a second campaign at bird buddy, summer of birds. Why did you as a company or as a team decide to do another Kickstarter and not just take pre orders on your own e commerce site?

Peter: 4:49
Kickstarter in a way is you can safely put the product there and if it doesn’t work, you have this safety net of saying, okay, we pushed it out. It didn’t work instead of pre ordering hundred thousand of new product. And actually nobody wants it. So that’s one, one thing. Another thing is. We wanted to build the new product together with our. Users are customers, basically. We really feel we have this community of people who are, I don’t know how, but they’re really trying to help us. And it’s really cool to see this. They have a lot of suggestions for improvement of the app of the feeders. They come up with ideas like, oh guys, we think you should do a hummingbird feeder, or something else. And we really wanted to build it with them. And it was a lot easier to do this through Kickstarter and, make them feel like they’re a part of actually of our company. And we always want to make them feel that. And I think the third reason. Is you get a lot of good PR. I would say that’s what we learned from the first Kickstarter. If you manage to, to have a successful one, there’s a lot of that.

George: 5:58
Okay. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think it is one of the unique properties, right? Of Kickstarter that you can engage the community. People can leave comments. It’s. It’s a common goal you work towards, which is way more than if you just put a preorder button on your Shopify site. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Okay. You are Mr. Performance marketing. I am Mr. Performance marketing. Let’s dive deep into the woods. Talk us through the marketing plan, strategies, execution of this latest campaign. What did you do?

Peter: 6:31
All right. First of all, like I said, we wanted to engage our core audience, the people that we already have. We started with talking with them. Feeling out what would be what they think would be a good direction to take in terms of product in terms of features. What could we do, and then looking at our own capabilities of what can we do and then trying to sync up together and see try to form a goal where to go. And then obviously. Things are a bit different in performance right now than they were in 2021. So back then you could just put your campaign on Facebook click a button and off it goes. So now it’s a bit more complex. We did a lot of AB testing, trying to polish out what would be a good name for the product? What would be a good USP for the product? What has the biggest conversion rate? If we put, I don’t know, coming bird feeder, or do we put the whole conservation hero bundle? I think, I believe you saw that we offer that as well on Kickstarter. 1 important learning is you start early. So if you have a planned launch of 15th of May, I think we started February or January already preparing, testing everything working on our copy, copywriting working on our creatives and seeing what works and what doesn’t work. And then, then it’s just execution, bringing everything together. You need to make sure that you have in the first day a lot of people who are ready to order it. You probably should be doing some lead generation before before the launch. I think we had quite a huge database of existing and some new leads. And we really nurtured them throughout this process. So they had a saying how they want to shape the product, et cetera. And I think that really helped them to start off with the momentum. So it’s almost like instead of, going up the hill, you start at the top of the hill and then you ride down and that was it. After the start of the campaign, there’s not that much you can do, it’s not like you can completely revamp the landing page or whatever. So it was just about executing the advertising part. We did mostly Facebook and that’s it.

George: 8:43
Did you do all the ads in house so that you work with an agency?

Peter: 8:47
We had a 50/50 partnership with an agency. We did everything by ourselves and then they came up the, we started to work with them in the middle of the campaign. Up until the end.

George: 9:00
And was that one, was it useful? And two, were they able to do something that you think you couldn’t have done yourself?

Peter: 9:08
I think it was very useful for us in terms of at the beginning even before we launched, they had some really good points regarding our product and how we should think about the next kickstarter. Don’t go with too many products, be really focused on what you’re trying to achieve, have a 1 main product and then build around it. So they really helped us in that stage. And then, and I would say, unfortunately for them, they came, we started to work together in the valley of death, basically in the middle of the campaign when everything is at its slowest point. So I wouldn’t say anything bad about them. But I think in the end we managed to really achieve the goal together or overachieve it actually.

George: 9:57
Yeah, pretty much. What channels let’s go specific on some tools. You mentioned Facebook or meta ads. Do you guys also run a Google ads?

Peter: 10:07
Yeah, but we had some, we didn’t know actually how to go about it due to. Kickstarter being a bit behind the times with regards to tracking, et cetera. So we didn’t put that much focus there. It’s also specifically for our product. It’s a bit difficult. There’s not so many searches that you can target. But what we did actually, we see that there’s been a spike in smart bird feeder searches over the last 2 years. So whenever somebody came to our side, there was a pop up that led them to kickstart your page. We managed to divert the traffic where we wanted it to go.

George: 10:47
And what do you guys use for your email marketing? Do you use Klaviyo, Mailchimp

Peter: 10:53
yeah, we use Klaviyo because I think that’s the golden standard for e comm.

George: 10:58
Yeah, we love it where look, we’re full disclosure. We’re an official Klaviyo partner agency, but but it is because we genuinely believe it’s the best solution out there. So this wasn’t planned. Another question I have very specific to your performance marketing is it’s a niche product in the sense that you need to be into birds and you need to live somewhere where this is viable that sort of birds are there, or you need to have a yard or some kind of outdoor space. So there’s a limited, there’s a finite number of people who might be able to buy this product. You already have so many people who bought a smart bird feeder. How do you still find new audiences, new people within your ads in general? To back and buy this again.

Peter: 11:43
First of all, I have to say that I guess it’s not really that niche if you think about it. So you don’t really have to be into birds. It’s usually. There’s like a whole segment of people, like people, some people just like cool new techy stuff and they buy it, and then you have this whole segment of if you have children and you want them to have some interaction with technology, et cetera, it’s a really cool way to start introducing nature to them in this kind of digital world. Yeah. To a phone and they can see it out the door as well. And it’s not necessarily limited by occasion because I think birds are everywhere. I have to admit that the US has some pretty cool birds. So it’s unlike Europe in this respect. There’s a lot of more variety there. But basically what we’re trying to do is We have our creative strategist and she knows this better, but there’s a whole bunch of how could I call it like topics around which you can work? So why would you buy a bird buddy? Are you a bird watcher? Like you said, and then we make creatives based on that. Or are you a tech geek like that? And then we make it around that. So maybe focus on AI recognition. Or are you just looking for a cool gift for father’s day? I know most fathers are into birds you have that. So there’s a lot of topics you can cover, not necessarily just like for the bird lovers, but you can go out of that and search there. And then the other thing is we try to expand on new channels always. Some of our biggest successes were with viral TikToks. And most of them were not even planned. It was when people were recording. Birds with the bird buddy, and then they just posted it and it just went viral and we were like, what’s happening to our sales? And then we dive deep and we see, oh, there’s like a viral TikTok going around. So there’s that, and then we’re always experimenting with connected TV. We’ll probably start doing native advertising. So there’s a lot of opportunity, I think. Out there and you just have to test it out and some work, some don’t work, but it’s important to try. Test everything

George: 13:52
with TikTok. So there have been viral TikToks that just happened and those boosted your sales. Have you been able to recreate that yourself on TikTok? Have you been able to make a video that you think this is a great video and then it, it goes viral, or is it always organic?

Peter: 14:08
I would say most of it is organic. We do have our content team working hard on TikTok. They post a lot. And I think it, it happened like once or twice, they hit it, hit the nail on the head and it went viral. But I don’t know, maybe it’s just my observation, but I think TikTok from TikToks from brand pages are more difficult to go viral. That’s what I believe. Unless you’re just like making jokes like Ryanair does. We do, we also advertise on TikTok and we try with spark ads. So there’s a lot of that as well.

George: 14:41
But meta Facebook is still the best performing platform for you.

Peter: 14:46
Yeah, I think so. You can imagine we try to grow aggressively. And that is still the best platform. You know how to use it and if you complement it correctly with other channels, like Google, for example, and then you have to understand this dynamic that sometimes you invest in Facebook, but Facebook doesn’t show you direct growth and revenue. But you can see that on Google, their things are starting to spike up or trend up and then you can understand. Oh, that’s because I’m pushing the demand on Facebook, but people may be tracking is not okay, or people don’t want to buy. They remember it next time.

George: 15:23
Yeah. Does performance marketing in any way influence product?

Peter: 15:29
I would say not because one of our founder is a chief product officer. And I would say, I hope I don’t get really Ridiculed about this, but he’s not so much of a performance marketing guy. So I think with our company, it’s always product first. Like you mentioned, it’s really, everything is really into detail. And everything is thought out, thought through. So we don’t have that much influence. We can sometimes pass on maybe the comments that we see on the ads. Or if we. When we’re doing marketing research, we see some stuff and we say, Oh, maybe that would be look, they’re doing that. Maybe we should do this, et cetera, but I wouldn’t say that we influence the product.

George: 16:12
No. So if you say we need to increase our average order value or cart size or whatnot, The founders are not going to be, Oh let’s add 10 more add ons.

Peter: 16:23
I have to say that it’s usually the other way around. So they have a bunch of ideas what to do. So we get, we always get this stuff in time, it’s always, Oh, next month we can, we’re trying to do this. Awesome.

George: 16:34
One of the other things that I think your company does exceptionally well is. Community management and community building. The product has built in community already. People can share their photos from their bird buddy online, which is very addictive. I often watch to see what kind of pictures pop up. You have a huge Facebook group. How do you manage a community at scale?

Peter: 16:58
Yeah, it took a lot of organizing. So we have a customer experience department. And it’s really branched out and we try to cover all different sectors of how our customers interact with us. And it’s really maybe even the top priority for us, to have this amazing customer experience. And I can, I just, today we had an all hands and our founders shared the story where they met up with Potential investor. And he said, guys, I tried to order bird buddy, but I got really mad that the shipping date is, was so far away. So I canceled it, but man, it was an awesome experience canceling it because everything was really fast. Everybody was, you guys are really. Trying to help me understand why it’s late. So you send a lot of emails explaining what you’re doing, how you’re doing it, how are you trying to expedite stuff, et cetera. It was really funny if you think about it. But yeah,

George: 17:58
the investment did not happen.

Peter: 18:00
I don’t know about that. But yeah we were really focusing on that. And then we also have. 30% of our sales that we can attribute is because family and friends recommended and we really want to get that number even higher. And we believe that is because of a good customer experience, right? We see a lot of. Data actually pointing out that we’re taking the right steps or actually the steps in the right direction towards that.

George: 18:28
And how do you still listen to feedback? Because earlier you mentioned where you were preparing for the second campaign. You talk to your customers, you talk to your community about what they want to see when you have such a big community. How do you even pick 10 people, a hundred people and talk to them?

Peter: 18:44
I think it all started like in the beginning of the company, it was just about seeing who writes to us the most, who’s commenting our ads all the time, or who’s emailing us all the time. Like the, a lot of customers actually want to talk to companies, want to express their opinion. Like sometimes maybe negative, sometimes positive, but it’s. And you can learn from everything, right? So you just have to listen. And I think over the course of time it actually we found a group of people we really trust who have proved really valuable and have contributed a lot to our company. So there’s something called hatchery, which is a. A closed group of our most loyal customers, and then they usually get a lot of the features 1st and to test it to get feedback suggestions, et cetera. And besides that, we’re always using these social listening tools like sprout performance, regularly checks the comments below the ads if there’s a trend for something. So we really try to hear the customers.

George: 19:52
Yeah. Doing a crowdfunding campaign is a pretty unique experience. You’ve lived through one of them and a huge one. What tips and advice do you have for other creators embarking on their crowdfunding journey?

Peter: 20:06
I would say first do a lot of testing so even if it’s just with lead generation campaign try to first get a feel if it’s a good product. So first you want to test the product and then benchmark the cost per email with. Whatever you can find on the Internet, and then if that works out you try to focus on the messaging and see. Just try to do as much testing as you can beforehand, just to be really sure about what you’re doing. And then another tip would be, like I said before, start early, start getting those emails, have a huge customer database of people who are there with you, who maybe, I don’t know, respond to emails, or you can see that they’re opening emails, reading them, whatever. And then try to get those people into to deposit so that you can guarantee that there’ll be the ones who are buying it first on the first day have a a really good offer for them. This pre backer special that we use. And just try to do as much as you can beforehand, because once the campaign starts, it’s like there’s not much you can do and the time is really limited, right? So every day counts and you want to be on top of your game when it starts.

George: 21:31
Yeah, I think it’s a very important point because once the clock starts taking on the campaign, you don’t have time for testing anymore and testing different interests, be creatives takes 24, 48 hours. Yeah. Sometimes it takes even 24 hours for an ad to even publish. So that, that is 30 times that you can test something and that your campaign is over. So I think that’s very solid advice. Now that you know exactly how to plan and execute a massive crowdfunding campaign, are you ever tempted to just start your own project?

Peter: 22:03
Maybe someday I think like most of the people are just waiting for really cool inspiration for that one winning idea to start a business of their own.

George: 22:13
Actually, you just started a really big project. You just had your first child. So I guess that keeps you busy.

Peter: 22:19
Yeah, that’s true as well. Maybe I’ll put out something. In the baby niche.

George: 22:23
Peter, thank you so much for your time. This has been absolutely incredible. The campaign is over, but people can still order a bird buddy, right? They go to yeah. Yeah. Get bird buddy. com.

Peter: 22:33
Yeah, correct. And the good news is that we’re now dispatching it in three to five days. So we have it on stock in the U S. And you’ll get it like almost immediately.

George: 22:43
Thank you so much. The link is going to be in the description. So people can get their own bird buddy, but just clicking on the link in the description. And

Peter: 22:51
by the way, do you have a bird buddy?

George: 22:52
I do not because I never had a garden. I used to live in Asia where I used to live in. The high rise towers on the 30th floor. And I wouldn’t even know how to open a window there, but I recently bought a house with a really big rooftop terrace. The only thing I’ll tell you that scares me a little bit is where I live. We have really big eagles that very frequently pick up a pigeon or any other type of smaller bird. So it might turn into a gore feed. Oh my God. That’s my only concern, but I’m going to try it. I should definitely try it. You can write to me later. Maybe this be one of your viral talks. Yes.

Peter: 23:29
maybe not. I would trust you to do it. Good. But it could be right. Yeah.

George: 23:32
Yes, absolutely. Peter, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time and this has been some amazing advice.

Peter: 23:38
Thank you for inviting me, George. It was a pleasure talking to you.