With Elizabeth Granados, Creator and CEO of Little Nomad
The Successful Kickstarter Story
Elizabeth Granados returns to the Steve Pomeranz Show to follow up with us about her exciting journey to entrepreneurial success of her company Little Nomad. She first joined us in June 2016 after a successful round of fundraising using Facebook to generate awareness of her product and capture emails of interested consumers and Kickstarter to solicit seed money, as well as email to promote pre-sales. The whole process enabled her to take her product from concept to production and to accelerate brand and sales momentum. Today we talk with Elizabeth about how she skillfully utilized these online resources, what has happened since launching her product, her appearance on Shark Tank, and how the business is evolving.
Elizabeth describes how she first took her idea—illustrated foam play mats for babies and toddlers—and created a photoshop image to share on Facebook groups that she belonged to which targeted moms of small children. The photo enjoyed some free grass roots advertising as it was also reposted on other group pages. This boosted Elizabeth's confidence that there was a legitimate interest in her idea, and she acted adroitly to add a link to the photo that directed people interested in learning more to a landing page where they could sign up for email notifications. In the meantime, she was working on creating a 30-day Kickstarter campaign to encourage pre-sales and invite investment capital. When that was ready, she announced the Kickstarter campaign and the ability to pre-order the product to her list of Facebook emails.
Successful Kickstarter Campaigns
The campaign raised over $100,000 in the first month, more than enough to manufacture the first batch of Little Nomad play mats. That first round of mats fulfilled all the pre-sales, leaving her with a healthy inventory with which to continue to grow the business, and money left over to invest in the business. She credits the Kickstarter campaign with enabling her to side step using her own capital to get the business rolling. Apropos the manufacturing process, Elizabeth admits that she wished she had gone about it slightly differently. Manufacturing requires a “final sample prototype” on which the fabrication of the product is based. With the business growing quickly before a single play mat had been made, she felt a time crunch when it came to creating this sample prototype. Ultimately, however, the prototype was created and the play mats were shipped and arrived on time. Elizabeth enthusiastically adds that sales have more than doubled since the Facebook/email/Kickstarter campaign.
Little Nomad on Shark Tank
Steve asks about Elizabeth's recent appearance on Shark Tank, ABC's popular show that pairs early-stage entrepreneurs with high-profile business people. She talks about how, as a huge fan of the show, she'd long wanted to appear as a guest. The application process was daunting, she explains, but she finally made the cut. As Elizabeth tells it, she spent a long time preparing for her appearance on Shark Tank, reading the Shark books, memorizing her pitch, and learning as much as she could about her own business. Not only did she demo her play mat, she brought along her 18-month-old daughter to clamber around on it. While her baby did have a minor crying jag, it didn't interrupt her pitch too badly. Steve shares that his impression was that the panel of judges was favorable overall and that the incident with the baby came across as funny rather than a distraction.
One of the goals of the Shark Tank appearance was to raise more funds by offering ...
