Quick show of hands! Who likes doing laundry? Didn’t think so!
Gal Rozov didn’t like doing laundry either. After a stint in the Israeli Air Force where he learned software development skills, Gal met the woman he would marry. After their honeymoon, they returned to their small Tel Aviv apartment with two enormous duffel bags of laundry. Gal thought there had to be a better way to start a marriage than by loading up the washer and dryer. And FoldiMate was born, a startup Gal created with the vision of building a laundry-folding machine that would fit under a counter and eliminate this most dreaded chore.
As Gal developed prototypes, he realized he had a problem. FoldiMate needed investors, but investors wanted to see market interest for a product in a new category that wouldn’t be available for a year or more and would cost roughly $800. And, there were already laundry-folding machines on the market produced by giants such as Samsung.
Killing Two Birds with One Stone
FoldiMate came to UPRAISE with two goals: generate 100,000 consumer pre-registrations at $50 each and to make the FoldiMate name go viral. All on a shoestring budget. Together, achieving these two goals would demonstrate market interest for investors. And because they were burning through money quickly, they needed results right away.
UPRAISE built a marketing/public relations program from scratch in less than two weeks, creating social media accounts, organizing lead management, updating the website, and more. We focused both on entities that could purchase hundreds of FoldiMates at a time – real estate developers, building managers, hotel and hospitality chains, as well as consumers. Our strategy included focusing on the revenue potential for businesses, and multiple angles around convenience for consumers.
Our consumer campaign was built on generating fun, interesting, compelling content, securing widespread media coverage and building a large social media following. FoldiMate had very little content to promote, so we went to work. We used FoldiMate’s existing video, which we re-edited for media and social media consumption. We surveyed families and learned that the average household will spend 152 days of their lives folding laundry! The survey also revealed that people considered laundry a family-nurturing activity and were concerned that FoldiMate wouldn’t fold as well as family members do.
Within a month, we earned FoldiMate more than 70 articles, 20,000 Facebook page likes, 4.3 million YouTube views and nearly 12,000 Twitter visits.
Best of all, FoldiMate received more than 125,000 preregistrations. Not a bad month’s work!
FoldiMate Gets Panned and Then Go Viral
With this content in hand, we began outreach. Our content began to go viral almost immediately and ironically, what drove the viralness was a negative article. Responding to our first pitch, an editor from The Verge panned the product concept in an article writing, “who needs another device and do we really need something that folds laundry?” Comments blew up within 24 hours with 4,500 postings like, “I do!” “Where can I buy one?” and “I hate folding laundry!” With that, media coverage appeared rapidly.
And our success didn’t end there. We also:
- Nailed 4.3 million YouTube views (goal was 1 million)
- Generated 12,000 Twitter visits (goal was 2,500)
- Landed 590,000 Facebook views in two weeks (goal was 100,000) and 20,000 likes,
- Secured 275 articles in total over six months (goal was 100),
- Earned 6 awards (goals was 2) and
- Received 150,000 pre-registrations (goal was 100,000).
Behind the scenes, we set up a CRM and organized the complete marketing infrastructure to handle the large number of leads that our campaigns earned for the company.
The 150,000 pre-registrations resulting in FoldiMate accumulating $7.5 million, against which they could fund operations while raising VC funding.
Most important, FoldiMate received investment from three VC firms and was able to continue investing to build prototypes.
“UPRAISE’s success with media put FoldiMate on the map as the leading innovator in automatic laundry folding machines and the technologies built in. Their work also gave us the funds to continue development at a critical time.”
Founder and CEO, FoldiMate
