With the emergence of crowdfunding and many success stories you sometimes wonder how it’s all done. However everyone needs to understand that only a small of campaigns actually succeed. With innovative products, entrepreneurs need a prototype to maximise their chances of getting crowdfunded successfully. Prototypes show that you are willing to put your own skin into the game and risk everything you have. It shows you are making your best effort.
For the audience to understand, it’s best to show off your product idea with an aesthetically pleasing and functional prototype. You want to keep costs low but produce something that’s effective. A minimum viable prototype is quite similar to a minimum viable product. The idea is to focus on the important product functions and features that allow you to illustrate what the product will do. This is an MVP, you don’t necessarily have to focus on all aspects of the functionality initially, this could be much more in terms of product development. You want to keep things simple at first. To keep costs down and not to confuse anyone.
Prototypes can give an enormous value to your company. The quality of the prototype gives potential funders first impression and reason to back the project. You want to provide the best impression so that people immediately recognise your work and everything that went into the project in terms of value. You want them to visualise everything and understand things. Also a prototype will show if you have a true innovation, a game changer or an improvement over an existing product. If you make it look good and functional, it will increase your chances of being successfully funded by ten fold.