u/Socra_tease

Is this something you'd be interested in?

This is just a prototype but I'm curious if there are others out there like me that want the option of a watch attachment without needing a whole other band.

Let me know what you think!

Context:

My product is Clackerball, a competitor product to Spikeball offering better durability, more consistent playing conditions, and a much better setup experience.

We're currently live on Kickstarter with close to $15k raised. I've technically hit my goal, but the real goal is actually closer to $80k. Like every Kickstarter these days, the goal was set low in order to get fully funded in 24h and trigger "trending" status on the platform.

I miscalculated and didn't hit that threshold in time, but I have a ROAS of around 4x-5x so I could likely make my target with some aggressive ad spend in the ~$15k range.

The ask:

I'm not sure I should pull the trigger on that ad spend. I've learned a lot about my market through this first leg of the campaign, and I'm concerned that I'm launching a fundamentally unprofitable company.

The details:

• I've observed significant price sensitivity in the market. My ROAS gets significantly worse even going from ~$120 to ~$135. Anecdotally, I'm getting a lot of comments on instagram saying "really cool, but too expensive for me personally." The general sentiment is that people love the idea, but not enough to pay a premium for it.
• My COGS are high -- I'm projecting around $60 post-Kickstarter, not including last mile delivery costs. It's a complicated product with some irreducible cost drivers unless I scale back on the feature list quite a bit.
• These two points together mean I'm looking at margins of maybe 50%, but I know there's going to be extra costs in various places that I'm not accounting for properly here. It feels like it would be very hard to scale the business.

I'm looking for advice from people that have built good (or bad) companies before and can offer some perspective on whether this business model is worth sweating for. How much do you expect I might whittle down my COGS? How much might the market price sensitivity cool down once my brand is more established? Based on your experience, what does your gut say about my prospects?