Weight Weight… Don’t Tell Me

How a weighted blanket that raised $4.7 million on Kickstarter can help you position your startup idea to grow

Gravity — a “weighted blanket for sleep, stress and anxiety” — raised over $4.7 million on Kickstarter. I don’t know if the founder meticulously orchestrated this awareness strategy or if he fell ass-backwards into it.

What I do know is that you’ll need to get people excited about your idea before you have traction or users to help it spread. You’ll need to make a promise your customers want you to keep.

Getting anyone to do anything is tough. Gravity got thousands of people to spend $200 on a heavy blanket, sight unseen. That’s crazy, and it’s worth exploring.

So I explored. What I found will help your startup grow.

The Three Questions

I ask every founder that applies to Tacklebox the same three questions. I look for founders with good answers to two of the questions and an exceptional answer to the third. It doesn’t matter which answer goes with which question.

1) Why you?

2) Why now?

3) Why at all?

For Gravity, let’s ignore question one. I don’t know if their supply chain is scalable, if the margins work, or even if the product does what it claims to. That’s founder-driven stuff. For our “awareness” purposes, its irrelevant. The other two questions are very relevant, and Gravity nails them.

“Why Now?”

Gravity couldn’t have existed ten years ago. No Kickstarter, no Gravity. Kickstarter empowers entrepreneurs to do what they do best — tell stories.

Ten years ago, a weighted blanked would’ve lived at Brookstone’s between vibrating chairs being decidedly uncool. We’d never give it a second look.

Now? Kickstarter has created a platform that gives life to products that need some level of education to thrive. They’ve established the ground rules. As customers, we’ve entered into an agreement with the entrepreneur: you tell us your story in a short, well produced video, and we’ll play our own mini game of Shark Tank. If you’re able to make a promise we want you to keep, we’ll fund you.

This creates a natural level of urgency, something entrepreneurs kill for. Customers are forced to make a decision - buy or miss out. When the campaign is up, we no longer get the early adopter price. This feels distinctly different from a sale, so the brand isn’t diluted.

All of this allows founders to flex their empathy muscle. They get a chance to prove how well they understand their customers problems. And they get 2–3 minutes to do it.

Storytellers win, and Gravity’s story resonates right now. And the reason it resonates so strongly spills into the next question…

“Why At All?”

In short? We’re all f’n stressed and our core behaviors have changed.

Stress isn’t new. But this particular brand of stress plays directly into the strengths of Gravity as a product. Whichever way you lean politically, I doubt you consumed anywhere near as much news 18 months ago as you do today.

My humor / startup podcasts have been replaced by political podcasts. I’ve traded reading books or articles I enjoy for political articles that scare me. My WhatsApp group titled “Gmen,” a group of high school buddies who for the last five years talked about… the Giants… is now 90% political. No more Netflix binges or Westworld — I’ve got depressing hour long news shows to watch.

And I bet I’m not alone. I bet you’ve made similar shifts in what you consume. And since we’re all busy, it’s zero sum. Out with relaxing, stimulating content — in with the chaos.

This is bananaland. Humans never change behavior. What we did last year is what we do this year. So as bad as this may be for our mental state, this behavior change is gold for an entrepreneur.

Founders spend their lives (often unsuccessfully) trying to get people to make tiny changes in their existing behavior. Now we’ve overhauled our consumption habits overnight.

And this is why Gravity seems so compelling. They’ve latched onto this giant shift in behavior that we’re not all completely aware of yet, and offered a simple, targeted product to help.

That’s why we jumped when we heard a heavy blanket might be the key to reducing our stress levels. And just $200? Give me three.

That value prop, that sentence, is the last leg of a very strong table.

Magic Beans — The Simple, Differentiated Promise

Your product will only grow through word of mouth early on. Jonah Berger taught us that 93% of product talk is face to face.

This means you’ve got to arm your customers with a simple, differentiated value prop they can remember and share. Something they can clearly envision themselves getting benefit from.

And that’s why I think Magic Beans get a bad wrap.

Magic Beans are the goal. That’s the Holy Grail. You want to know your customers well enough to solve their biggest problem without requiring them to poke one toe outside their normal process. If I’m a farmer, I want to swap beans I’m planting that don’t grow with magic beans that do. Done. It’s easier to get people to switch gyms then start exercising.

Meditation apps, yoga studios — they’re promising to remove my stress, but there’s a lot of effort on my part. They’re changing behavior. I need to “start exercising,” in yoga’s case, literally.

Gravity is pitching me Magic Beans. I can picture myself using the product immediately. I already have a blanket. I’ll just swap it out with this heavier one. I can picture myself lounging on my couch, relaxed, reading a book. No more stress. I’ve got 25 pounds of blanket taking care of that.

When our BS meter wakes up, we’re soothed with “weighted blankets can increase serotonin and melatonin levels, and decrease cortisol levels.”

As a customer, Gravity has made me a promise I want them to keep. A heavy blanket that gets rid of all this new stress I’ve got. You need to do this, too.

And it doesn’t just go for consumer products. If you’re pitching inventory management for restaurants or a hot sauce subscription box or a mystery novel, you’ve got to have clear, differentiated, promise your customer wants you to keep. Straightforward, but hard.

The simple, bold solutions are always the most attractive.

Against Whisper Ideas? Come to Tacklebox