Phase 1
The initial campaign Rainier created focused on the “possibilities” of what could be accomplished with the Adapteva device – Rainier and Adapteva collaborated to invent the “Server in a Smartphone” campaign. Rainier arranged analyst briefings, conducted a massive twitter campaign, and aggressively pitched key media.
Phase 1 Results
The first phase of the campaign generated:
- 15 independent articles
- Adapteva’s website traffic climbed to over 15,000 daily visitors.
Phase 2
Phase 2 focused on the geometry shrink of the Adapteva technology, with continued emphasis on the “Server in a Smartphone” messaging – more briefings and massive pitching.
Phase 2 Results
19 independent articles with coverage in 25 different countries in 13 different languages.
Phase 3
The next phase, which Rainier titled “Supercomputing for the Masses,” focused on promoting Adapteva’s Kickstarter program. Rainier secured 21 analyst & media pre-briefings before the Kickstarter clock even started ticking, and 7 more briefings during the campaign itself. Rainier also created Facebook and Linkedln pages for the project, as well as a dedicated Twitter stream. Finally, Rainier posted regularly on relevant developer forums (Slashdot, Ubuntu, etc.).
Phase 3 Results
- 98 English-language articles
- 28 articles in other languages, from 15 different countries
- 6,058 tweets posted in 30 days 1,127 followers on Twitter 2,417 followers on Facebook
- 85 posts on Adapteva’s Facebook page
- 38 tweets for @Adapteva during the campaign (more than l per day)
- $898,921 raised on Kickstarter from 4,965 backers – the highest funded Kickstarter hardware project ever. It was the fifth most funded technology project and the twenty-fifth most funded Kickstarter project of any kind.
The numbers alone don’t tell the whole story. Here’s what some of the media had to say:
- The Wall Street Journal – “Radically new”
- GigaOm – “Adapteva could change mobile computing”
- Forbes – “There’s nothing like it on the market
- Boston Globe – “A major boost to processing power without draining batteries”
- VentureBeat – “Supercomputing for the Masses”
- The Register – “It breaks new ground: the picture of an exceedingly affordable desktop supercomputer emerges.”
- Business Insider – “A Supercomputer In Every Living Room”
- O’reilly Programming – “Blowing open the doors to low-power, on-demand supercomputing”
- EE Times – “I am completely blown away by Adapteva!”
After the Campaign
After the campaign ended, Rainier used the campaign’s success as an excuse to make even more news, and to keep the momentum going:
- GigaOm – “How Kickstarter helped save a chipmaker that puts a supercomputer inside a cell phone”
- VentureBeat & The Wall Street Journal – “$3.6M for the most energy efficient parallel computing chips”
- Red Herring – “Widely known for its Kickstarter campaign, which crowdfunded almost $900,000 for a $99 computer the size of a credit card”
- Pando Daily – “Supercomputer for the masses”
