Tile Location Device Blasts Past $1,000,000 Crowdfunded on Goal of Only $20,000 (Updated)

Crowdfunding Success as Creator Preps for Appearance on CNBC.

The Tile Location device blew past $1,000,000 crowdfunded on a goal of only $20,000 or a beat of over 5800%.  With 7 days left in their crowdfunding campaign the amount stood at over $1.1 Million funded by over 21,000 supporters.  The amount was well in excess of their targeted amount as the device caught the attention of many tech sites as backers pre-ordered the Tile in droves.

Tile has labeled itself the “World’s Largest Lost and Found”.  As previously reported on these pages, Tile put a new spin on location devices, by allowing other Tile devices to work in concert with eachother as a sort of crowdsourced location application.

The device was designed by Reveal Labs.  The organizers decided to self crowdfund their product, using Selfstarter, as opposed to using Kickstarter or Indiegogo.  Reveal Labs was co-founded by Nick Evans and Mike Farley. Evans had previously worked at Lockitron which had attempted to crowdfund using Kickstarter but were turned away.  Instead of searching for another vendor the Lockitron team build their own crowdfunding platform which is now Selfstarter.

Crowdfund Insider reached out to Nick and Mike to hear more about their incredible crowdfunding success.  The pair responded saying,

The continuous growth has been amazing and the campaign has been met with tremendous support from consumers, validating that there is a real need for this in the market. We have already received 50x our original funding goal, and have just passed 1 million in funding! Currently at 1, 209,076 with 6 days to go.

Asked about their decision to use Selfstarter Evans and Farley responded,

We think that the story of Lockitron is incredible.  After being rejected by Kickstarter, they started their own open-source crowdfunding platform, Selfstarter, hit their 150K goal in the first 24 hours and continued to be extremely successful throughout the campaign. Lockitron’s story is truly inspiring to us, so we decided to take the Selfstarter route as well as we feel like that matches Tile’s vision.

 We wanted to use Selfstarter rather than other platforms because we believe it makes the most sense for hardware startups and has a lot of advantages. First of all, we are able to verify the market demand before we build a bunch of units, secondly we get the exact number of units we should build and we receive the capital required to do the production run. Doing a Selfstarter campaign also allows us to get feedback earlier, creating an experience similar to widespread beta testing – which will help us bring the best product and features to our users. We wanted to use Selfstarter rather than other crowdfunding platforms, because it gave us complete control over our product, again allowing us to listen to our consumer base and bring the best product to the market.

Evans is currently scheduled to appear on CNBC’s Power Pitch to discuss his Tile location device which should aid in capturing broad exposure.

The Tile device is available for pre-order for only $18.95 making the device highly accessible to a wide audience.  The crowdfunding campaign has proven there is a market for this location device even with a good number of competing devices already on the market today.  Recently a growing number of crowdfunding campaigns have been used as market research or  “Pretail” to gage consumer acceptance, Tile now has good understanding of consumer interest for their product.

Asked about next steps for the Tile location device the two founders stated;

There are an endless number of features that we would like to develop for Tile.  However, right now we are very much focused on delivering a rock solid Tile version 1.  We can’t wait to share some of the upcoming features of Tile v2 with you in the future!

 

 

 

 

Editors Note:  The article was updated to reflect the comments from the two founders which were received after the initial article had been published.