This is BIP-03 — the third monthly build-in-public report. Month one was about getting started. Month two was about choosing a roasting partner. Month three was about deciding how to launch the actual products: Kickstarter, Indiegogo, or direct preorders on our own site.
If you have not read the previous BIP reports, you can start at month one. If you have, you know that we spent most of February locked in a spreadsheet trying to model these three options against each other. This post is what we found and what we picked.
/ 01The numbers, first
Per the BIP tradition, we start with the actual numbers from month three before any narrative.
/ 02What the three options actually look like
// 02.1Kickstarter
The big platform. ~5% platform fee plus 3-5% payment processing, all-or-nothing funding (you set a target; if you don't hit it, no funds change hands and backers are not charged), strong brand recognition, mature backer infrastructure, decent press attention for funded projects.
Pro: Built-in audience that browses Kickstarter looking for projects. Project virality is real if you hit early momentum. The "Project We Love" curation can drive significant traffic. Trust is high — backers expect Kickstarter projects to ship eventually, even with delays.
Con: The food/beverage category is competitive and fee structure is the same as for hardware. Coffee margins are thinner than the products that traditionally do well on Kickstarter (cookware, tabletop games, gadgets). The platform takes meaningful effort to "do well" on — campaign video, pre-launch list building, daily updates, backer comments management.
// 02.2Indiegogo
Smaller platform, lower brand recognition, but more flexible — supports both fixed and flexible funding (flexible means you keep funds even if you don't hit the target). Fees are similar to Kickstarter (~5% + payment processing).
Pro: The flexible funding option is meaningfully different from Kickstarter's all-or-nothing. For a first-time brand, this reduces the binary risk of campaign failure. Indiegogo also allows continued post-campaign sales through "InDemand," which Kickstarter only added later and less smoothly.
Con: The audience is smaller than Kickstarter's. The platform's reputation has been damaged by some high-profile failed campaigns over the years. Backers tend to be more skeptical, which means harder conversion.
// 02.3Direct preorders
Run our own preorder campaign on hexroast.com using Stripe and a custom-built campaign page. We control everything: pricing, fees (just Stripe's ~2.9% + 30¢), customer relationship, data, timing.
Pro: Highest margin per unit because no platform fees. Full ownership of the customer email and purchase data. We can run the campaign on our timeline and adjust as we learn. The customer relationship is direct from day one — we are not on someone else's platform with someone else's rules.
Con: No built-in audience. We must drive every visitor ourselves. No social proof from a public funding bar. No press from "successfully funded on Kickstarter" framing. If the campaign fails or feels small, we have to manage that publicly without the cover of a platform.
/ 03The framework we ended up using
After three weeks of going back and forth, we organized the decision around four questions:
// 03.1Who is our actual audience?
Our waitlist (389 people, growing) and our content readers (5k+ monthly) are mostly developers and designers. They came to us through technical content, not through coffee discovery. Kickstarter's coffee-curious audience would not be additive to our core audience — it would be a different audience that converts at a worse rate, because we are talking to them in a vocabulary they do not share.
This was the biggest factor. Kickstarter's value is the audience it brings. If the audience it brings is not our audience, the platform fee buys nothing of value.
// 03.2What is our launch goal?
We are not trying to maximize launch revenue. We are trying to validate that the people who follow our content will actually buy our product. A small, high-conversion-rate launch tells us much more than a larger campaign with diluted signal.
This pointed toward direct preorders. Our existing audience converting at 3-5% (a reasonable benchmark for a warm list) gives us the answer we need without external traffic muddying the data.
// 03.3What can we afford to lose?
Both Kickstarter and Indiegogo carry real risk: a public campaign that visibly underperforms damages the brand. With 389 people on a waitlist and growing, we are in a position where a soft public failure would meaningfully hurt the next year of growth.
Direct preorders have the same downside risk in absolute terms, but the failure is much less visible. If our preorder campaign sells 30 units instead of 100, we know it but the public does not. We can iterate without a permanent record.
// 03.4What does month four through twelve look like?
The launch is one month. The relationship with customers from launch lasts much longer. Direct preorder customers are our customers. Kickstarter backers are Kickstarter's customers who happen to have backed our project — Kickstarter owns the email, controls the messaging, and shapes the relationship.
For a brand we plan to operate for a long time, owning the customer relationship from day one was worth a meaningful amount of money in fees we will not pay.
/ 04What we picked
We are going with direct preorders.
The campaign launches in early August on hexroast.com. We will offer three preorder tiers: a single-bag tier ($24), a three-bag bundle ($65), and a six-month subscription tier ($120, billed monthly post-launch). The campaign runs for 21 days. The funding target is modest enough that we expect to hit it from waitlist alone, with any external traffic being upside.
We will publish the campaign infrastructure, the conversion numbers, and the post-mortem in BIP-04. If the campaign fails, you will hear about it. If it succeeds, you will hear about that too — including the rate at which our content readers actually convert into paying customers, which is the most useful data point we will produce in the brand's first year.
/ 05What we are not saying
This is not a "Kickstarter is bad" post. Kickstarter is excellent for the right product, the right audience, and the right business. For a hardware product targeting a tabletop-game crowd, or a kitchenware product targeting design enthusiasts, Kickstarter is probably the right call. For us, the audience math did not work.
If you are building an indie brand and trying to make this same call, the framework above is more useful than our specific answer. Audience fit, launch goal, downside risk, post-launch relationship. Reason from those four. The platform conclusion follows.
/ 06What's next
Month four is execution: building the preorder page, finalizing pricing, getting the first 30 bags packed and ready, and writing the launch announcement that will go out to the waitlist. BIP-04 lands in mid-July with the actual campaign data.
If you joined the waitlist this month, thank you. The first 100 preorder slots get an unannounced bonus we are still finalizing. We will email you when the campaign opens.
Month Four will have actual numbers from whichever path we picked.
BIP-04 lands in mid-July with the first 30 days of campaign data, conversion numbers, and what we'd do differently. The waitlist gets it before it goes public on the main feed.
Join the waitlist →