A crowdfunding campaign is won before it opens

Monday 4 May, Serre dei Giardini Margherita, Bologna. We tell the people who follow us about the results and goals of play2match, then aperitivo and feedback, as always. At the end of the evening we do the math: €83,000 in pre-commitments. In one evening. (Yes, we counted twice.)

A little over a week later, pre-commitments had reached €100,000, and the campaign wasn't even open yet. In mid-June, online for just a few days, we were in overfunding at €165,000. In August we celebrated a quarter of a million, which was the goal we'd set ourselves in April.

The work nobody sees

Nothing magical happened that evening. What happened was months of update emails and KPIs sent, one after another, to the people following us. Sometimes even slightly boring emails. But every month whoever opened them saw the same movie: what we'd said we would do, what we had actually done, where we'd got stuck.

So when we asked people to come in, many didn't have to decide from scratch. They had already decided, one update at a time. And the craziest thing is that among those who invested there are also people from our community: people who play in our matches. That's when I realised the product was working for real.

Who came in

Among the investors there are people who know a thing or two about community, product and B2C. For an early-stage startup it's the best compliment there is: you get picked by people who already do what you do.

And we're not management software, we're not the usual B2B stuff. We're building the simplest way to meet real people in your city, play sport together and turn strangers into friends. Italian cities need this (maybe the rest of the world does too, who knows 😅).

The lesson

A crowdfunding campaign isn't won the day you open it. It's won in the months before, when nobody's asking you for anything and you tell them how you're doing anyway. It's like preseason conditioning in the summer: nobody sees it, but by March it's crystal clear who did it.

If you want to see what we're building, the easiest way is to come and play a match.