We’ve founded eBlocker with the idea in mind of bringing real Internet privacy to every user – no matter of technical knowledge. While this idea is popular among the end-users it’s not very popular with the Internet industry. Journalists often don’t like writing about eBlocker, the media is not happy and getting media coverage is really difficult.
Even though we want to stay independent from venture capital and investment firms to follow our vision without any compromise, we still need funding to feed our families. With an early stage “gift investment” from a local governmental fund and significant investments from our founders, we have come very far. Our products are almost finished and we are ready to deliver very soon.
Thanks to our first crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo in 2015, we found about 700 early adopters willing to invest into our idea. Next to getting some funds, the main goal of the campaign was finding users with a technical background willing to share first hand experiences in their network environment. This very international community from over 32 countries has helped us a lot to fine tune our software, find bugs and for valuable feedback on feature prioritization and great ideas.
Now we are ready to release eBlockerOS version 1.0 in March and start the eBlocker series production. Unfortunately even a small series production is very expensive and needs high up-fronts for tooling and machine setup – and our supply partners are asking to prepay all orders – preserving liquidity is key to our success. That’s why we’ve started another campaign with Kickstarter in 2016 to pre-sell the first eBlocker devices at cost and estimate demand for negotiation with our manufacturing partners.
To sum up: Indiegogo was to get technical feedback at an early stage of software development, while Kickstarter was focused on pre-selling the products to fund the series production. We have given Kickstarter the favor over Indiegogo for the second campaign since according to our analysis the audience is less technical than on other platforms. Today we are very happy that we’ve succeeded with both campaigns, so we can follow our strategy independently and make our dream come true: Building the best and easiest privacy solution on the planet.
Thanks to everyone for your great feedback and support!