Quarantine Babies
And our spot in the unpredictable arc of trends and happenstance in business
In a recession, cheap foods like ramen noodles sell better, and we all know that some events lead to booms in the baby-having department. There are already memes and articles talking about the likelihood of the Coronavirus social distancing practices leading to a bunch of babies 9 months down the line.
Friends, it’s 9.5 months or 38 weeks, and we actually call it “40” because we count gestation from the last menstrual cycle before conception. So that’s something. Now you know.
But also. My company is making a baby product. The kind that you look for and learn about and pick out in the second trimester of your first pregnancy. And our IndieGoGo is scheduled for late summer.
Traditionally, products in our catagory way underperform in crowdfunding campaigns. At CES this year, I attended the big crowdfunding event and met some awesome folks from that world that have had some of the most notable successes on those platforms, and each (yes- every single one) told me flat out not to spend any money on it or expect too much, because ROI is going to be super low for a baby+hardware campaign. Moms tend to make the decision on a product like this instead of dads, and it turns out that, while women-run crowdfunding campaigns actually over-perform, there are far fewer women engaging on the other end. Anyway, for us, this is more about building a community and excitement around the product than the actual funds raised, so it’s still in our roadmap basically to prove that there are people willing to pay money for thing we are building and make new moms aware of it.
Now I’m hearing from folks that we should consider this likely boom when setting our goals and expectations. Me. I’m folks. But some other people smarter than me are folks, as well. And while it’s entirely possible that they won’t be willing to go the crowdfunding route when something extant can be shipped in 2 days, there is a good chance we are right about more new moms looking for the product, which would get us more exposure and the associated bump in orders for that increase in traffic.
We hit the same thing with a program we did as “ethics in start-up culture” began gaining attention and from there into the world of data privacy and consent. Suddenly, I’m on panels and speaking at fancy universities and whatnot about what we are building and how and why. If our timeline hit just 6 months earlier, no one was caring about ethics and data privacy at the volume and depth that we have now. Just 6 months later, and we’d be just behind the curve instead of riding the crest of the wave.
Lucky timing is so critical to success for the sort of thing we do- it’s amazing and exciting and tragic at times to see how these effects rule businesses essential or dead. Stay tuned, friends. I’ll let you know how this all shakes out later this year.
