PooPail — the world’s only 2-in-1 solution for cleaning dog poop — raised almost $500k on Kickstarter in 2020. Behind this success was a lot of work preceding the campaign itself. Read on to find out how PooPail scientifically validated its product-market fit on Prelaunch.com to ensure the project’s success during the campaign.
The Brand
CEO and Creator of PooPail, Sandy Stinson came up with the idea of PooPail a few years ago — 2 dogs and a large backyard will do that to you!
Like any dog parent, she enjoyed spending time and playing fetch with her doggos. But aside from being cute and playful, her fur babies always left behind some nasty “surprises”.
For her, that meant 28 piles of “jewels” to pick up each week, and 28 trips to the garbage, which was 10 houses away! To solve the problem, she tried a whole lot of contraptions and pooper scoopers, but none worked the way she wanted.
So she decided to create something herself — PooPail, the world’s first 2-in-1 system for scooping and storing dog poop!
With PooPail, she could pick up dog poop in seconds and store it for a whole week without having to take countless trips to the dumpster. And her backyard was now always clean too!
She thought more dog parents would be interested in her creation. So Sandy decided to launch the product to a wider audience. But when she launched her first version, less than 100 people helped her raise under $10,000… something was wrong.
But she didn’t give up. Instead, she realized that she could test her product-market fit and price, and validate her concept before launching.
That’s when she discovered Prelaunch.com.
The Position
For the positioning, we tried out a series of main messages:
- The only sanitary poop pick-up scoop and a week of odorless poop storage
undefined - World’s first dual-purpose system for scooping & storing dog poop
undefined - World’s first 2-in-1 system for scooping and storing dog poop
undefined
With 10,000 visits on our page, the testing revealed that the best working headline was the third one.
The reason was the fact that there were no contraptions in the market that allowed for both scooping and storing dog poop — this was intended to be a lifesaver for dog parents!
Thus, this messaging was clean and catchy, which helped us proceed further with our testings and make relevant conclusions regarding the further success of the crowdfunding campaign.
Other Elements
On the landing page, we also emphasized the ease and speed of cleaning dog poop with PooPail, as well as the opportunity to store it in an odor-free pail for a week. All these points were derived from our previous research on our buyer persona and their pain points, which included the annoyance of cleaning dog poop, the time spent on this, as well as the need for frequent trips to the garbage.
The Tone of Voice
The tone of our messaging was humorous and clean at the same time, trying to present the product through persuasive copy and cute images.
Market & Price Validation
The key things we tested during the Prelaunch.com campaign were the market interest and the price. Overall, we had three tests, and accordingly three price options.
Version 1
Here are the Facebook data we got for the 1st version, namely the $79 price offer.
- Impressions – 44,190
- Clicks – 2,827
- Click through rate – 6.40%
- Cost per click – $0.16
- Spent – $463
Aside from this, we got the following data based on our sample size of 2,626 visitors:
Market Interest
As can be seen, the market interest was close to the benchmark indicating that the product idea, concept and design were appealing and of interest to the crowdfunding audience. This was confirmed by the fact that the CTR was 6.40% and the ‘Learn More’ button click rate was very close to the benchmark. Price validation
As for the price, while testing Version 1 the performance of PooPail was 5.5 % lower than the benchmark. Specifically, the ‘Buy Now’ button click rate indicated the purchase intent was around 2x lower than the price validation benchmark. This was an indicator that the price was a hindering factor for people to show purchase intent.
Moving forward it was straightforward that a different price point was required to be tested and we decided to focus on the Funding per Visitor metric to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of the future crowdfunding campaign. The goal was to get to $1 Funding per Visitor.
So gradually lowering the price was the strategy along with optimizing the ad targeting.
Version 2
Based on the conclusions of Version 2, we set the price at $59, which brought us the following Facebook insights:
- Impressions – 90,631
- Clicks – 3,449
- Click through rate – 3.81%
- Cost per click – $0.22
- Spent – $746.62
The resulting testing data was as follows:
Market Interest
Along with lowering the price, we can see that in Version 2 the market interest got even closer to the benchmark than in Version 1. This meant the audience got even more interested in the product when it was offered at a lower price.
Pricing – $59
For the price validation the performance of PooPail was higher than for Version 1 but still 5.5 % lower than the benchmark. This meant we could still lower the price to get better results.
So we decided to try once more…
Version 3
Finally, for the 3rd version, we set the price at $39. And we got the following Facebook insights:
- Impressions – 32,367
- Clicks – 935
- Click through rate – 2.89%
- Cost per click – $0.27
- Spent – $255.78
As for the testing data, we got the following results:
Despite a decrease in market interest, during this test pretty much everything increased!
Funding per visitor hit the required benchmark of $1. Price validation saw a 65% increase compared to the first test. And the subscription rate improved as well. This was a sign that we finally found the audience which was not only interested in PooPail but had a high purchase intent to buy it at the set price.
Based on all these tests, we concluded that $44 would be PooPail’s ideal launch price. And that it had a potential crowdfunding raise of $400-600k.
Thus, thanks to Prelaunch.com, we were able to arrive at a good price for Sandy’s product and ensure the market interest was high too.
Ads
Another important thing that we tested were the ads — both visuals and texts.
During the initial testing, the most engaged audience were females from 25 to 54 y/o from Australia, the US, Canada, and Great Britain. So along with price reduction ads were optimized to this audience more effectively.
Here are the main best working visuals we used:
The CTR for this visual equaled 2.15% — a low indicator probably because of the artificial poop.
After the testings we also came to the following conclusions regarding the best working texts, directions, and target countries:
Best Working Texts
- World’s First 2-In-1 System For Scooping & Storing Dog Poop
- No more poopy days! Keep your yard and pets clean 🐕🦺
- Cleaning dog poop has never been this easy 🐶
Best Working directions
- Dogs
- Dog toy
- Dog health
Target Countries
- USA
- Canada
With all this data at hand, we gave the green light to Sandy, and she went ahead with her launch. Over one month, PooPail generated $463,831, with the help of 5,322 backers!
This was over 40x more than the first time she launched without Prelaunch.com’s conclusions.
If you want to discover what Prelaunch.com can do for your brand, click here.
