A few months back, Landon McCoy watched his second Kickstarter campaign cross the finish line at $312,239.
That’s 229% of what his first successful campaign raised back in 2022.
But here’s what makes this story interesting: Before that first successful campaign, Landon had already failed once. He canceled his very first Kickstarter attempt with just two days left when it became clear he wouldn’t hit his $25,000 goal.
Most 19-year-old college students would have given up. Landon didn’t.
Instead, he learned the hard way that there’s actually a science to launching crowdfunding campaigns. You can’t just build a great product, click the launch button, and wait for the crowd to show up.
They won’t. You have to follow a system which I’ll break down in this case study.
Contents
The Accidental Company
Chaos Audio started as a side project in 2019.
Landon was studying electrical engineering at the time. His younger brother Chandler, who Landon describes as “an absolute killer on guitar,” had just gotten his first guitar pedal. It was an orange distortion pedal, the same one Kurt Cobain used to get that classic Nirvana sound from the 90s.
As an engineering student, Landon’s first instinct was to open it up and figure out how it worked.
That curiosity led to a question: Wouldn’t it be cool if there was one pedal that could get you all the different sounds?
There are thousands of guitar pedals out there. Distortion, reverb, delay, overdrive, EQ effects, modulation, flanger, vibrato. But for a college student trying to build a complete setup, you’re looking at either buying all these individual pedals for around a thousand dollars, or getting a briefcase-sized system with 16 switches on it.
So Landon started building what would become Stratus, a guitar pedal with advanced hardware and software that could do it all.
It was just a side project to learn Android app development and embedded hardware. Then he met Steve Millaway, the owner of a startup incubator in Panama City Beach, Florida. Steve’s previous company had actually invented USB 2.0 before it was acquired in 2002.
After a few meetings, Steve offered to invest a small amount in exchange for equity in the business.
Chaos Audio was born.
Key Takeaways
- Fail fast, then relaunch smarter: Canceling an underperforming campaign isn’t failure. Learning why the first Kickstarter campaign didn’t work out and applying a structured system to the relaunch made it dramatically more successful.
- Pre-launch demand is everything: Building an email list and nurturing a VIP audience before launch created pre-launch momentum and triggered platform algorithms.
- Show the product with honesty: A clear, benefit-driven video that demonstrates real use beats a “slick but empty” pitch. Substance converts far better than style alone.
- Transparency builds long-term trust: Even with an 18-month delay, consistent updates and honesty kept backers supportive, proving communication can save a campaign when execution faces a challenge.
- Test with discipline, not emotion: Setting fixed budgets and timelines for ad testing instead of reacting to real time trends leads to real insights, better decisions, and scalable results.
The First Launch (That Didn’t Work)
In November 2021, Landon launched his first Kickstarter campaign for Stratus.
He set a goal of $25,000. With two days left in the campaign, he was sitting at $19,000.
“We had no idea that there was a science to launching these crowdfunding campaigns,” Landon explains. “We kind of just assumed that all these other companies that were doing really well were just making a campaign, clicking the launch button, and then waiting for people to show up and buy their stuff.”
That’s when someone from LaunchBoom reached out. The advice was simple: You should probably cancel this campaign. There’s a way to do this right in 10 Proven Steps and Tactics to Launch a Successful Campaign.
So Landon canceled it.
Most people would see that as a failure. Landon saw it as a learning opportunity. He set his sights on the next attempt, eight months later in June 2022.
What Changed the Second Time
The second Stratus campaign raised $132,000 from 170 VIP reservations.
They hit their $10,000 goal in four hours and earned the Projects We Love badge from Kickstarter. The campaign was successful enough that Jellop, a crowdfunding advertising agency, agreed to work with them after initially denying their first application.
So what was different?
“It was absolutely doing some pre-launch marketing,” Landon says. “That made a huge difference. I think we only got 170 VIP reservations on the second campaign before we launched, but that was enough to hit $10,000 in the first day.”
The first campaign had no pre-launch strategy. No email list. No VIP group. No Facebook ads that actually worked.
The second campaign had all of those things.
They built a reservation funnel. They collected emails first, then pushed people to put down a one-dollar deposit. They set up a VIP group on Facebook. They kept close, warm communication with everyone who showed interest.
The Kickstarter video was also completely different. The first video sounded like a used car salesman, heavily edited but with no substance. It looked professional but didn’t actually explain the benefits of the product.
The second video had meat and potatoes. It showed what the product actually did and why it mattered, following our guide on Kickstarter Video Production: How To Create a High-Converting Crowdfunding Video.
“We followed kind of a meat and potatoes approach,” Landon explains. “Make sure you’re doing the reservation funnel, make sure you’re collecting an email first, make sure you’re getting the one dollar, set up a VIP group on Facebook.”
The campaign was successful. But the real challenges were just beginning.
The 18-Month Delay
Landon told his backers they’d receive their product in six months.
It actually took 18 months.
“We had never mass produced a product before,” Landon admits. “We told all of our backers that it was going to take six months to receive their product. It actually took 18 months for them to get their product.”
That’s a year-long delay.
Most campaigns would have faced serious backlash. Chaos Audio managed to maintain trust through one simple strategy: constant communication. They published at least one update every month, sometimes two or three, documenting the entire manufacturing process.
They showed what was going on. They explained the delays. They were transparent about the challenges.
And when backers finally received their products, Chaos Audio gave them lifetime access to any Chaos Audio software as an apology.
But the delays weren’t the only problem. Margins were also an issue.
“Margins are a big thing,” Landon says. “There were some issues with pricing our hardware a little bit higher if this was actually going to make sense. But then it was kind of outside the range of what made sense for competing products.”
It was a major learning experience with a first-generation product. They eventually introduced paid software that enabled them to bring the hardware price down. But by that point, they’d exhausted a lot of capital through mistake after mistake.
They had to slow down. Marketing efforts in 2023 and 2024 were minimal while they readjusted and pivoted.
But during that time, they were working on something new.
Building Nimbus
For the last two years, Chaos Audio has been developing Nimbus.
It’s a 70-watt stereo instrument amp and Bluetooth speaker. They call it a “music studio in a box” because it can also function as your audio interface. You can plug in two different instruments at a time, plus XLR inputs for singing.
Landon and his team were using it for beer and karaoke two nights before the campaign ended.
The product was built on customer feedback from the 1,700 customers who had received Stratus pedals. They knew what worked. They knew what didn’t. They knew what musicians actually wanted.
And this time, they knew how to launch.
The $312,239 Campaign
The Nimbus campaign just ended at $312,239 from 712 backers, more than double what Stratus raised.
They surpassed their entire Stratus campaign total on the first day.
“Seeing that improvement tick up, we surpassed our Stratus campaign in the first day with this campaign,” Landon says. “That was such a cool feeling.”
So what was different?
First, they had experience. They understood what it takes to mass produce a product. They got manufacturing quotes before launching the Kickstarter, not after. They knew their costs, their margins, and their timelines.
Second, they had the Ultimate Product Launch Strategy to follow.
“I’m really happy that I decided to actually work with LaunchBoom,” Landon explains. “It was very nice having a very structured step-by-step process that I could reference with decent timelines along the way. That kept my ADHD brain from screwing everything up.”
For the Stratus campaign, Landon was doing everything himself. He made the campaign page. He ran all the ads. He figured out how to make the Kickstarter video and who to hire. He was the only full-time employee.
This time, he had systems in place. He knew what to expect instead of flying blind.
“Having everything very organized and timely and strategic made me more confident in a lot of those decisions instead of flying blind,” he says.
The Pre-Launch Strategy
Chaos Audio invested about $80,000 in pre-launch advertising.
That generated 10,800 total leads, with 1,719 of them putting down reservation deposits before the campaign launched.
About 20 to 25% of those reservation holders converted to backers.
For the Stratus campaign, they had only gotten a 32% conversion rate on VIPs, so this was actually lower than expected. Landon thinks it might be related to broader consumer behavior changes, possibly due to economic uncertainty around tariffs and other factors.
But the pre-launch strategy still worked. Those reservations gave them momentum on day one, which triggered Kickstarter’s algorithm and earned them organic traffic from the platform.
The most effective ad creative? User-generated content.
“Definitely UGC,” Landon says. “Very organic looking vertical style Reels format videos.”
Chaos Audio had built relationships with guitarists who were also creators on Instagram and TikTok. One of them, Jacob Dickinson, helped create videos with strong hooks, clear benefits in the middle, and strong calls to action.
For the most part, those vertical UGC ads performed better than static images when it came to actual conversions.
What Worked During the Campaign
Beyond the pre-launch ads, Chaos Audio partnered with several newsletters to drive traffic during the campaign.
One partnership with Pledge Box generated $13,000 in a single day.
They also ran Meta ads throughout the campaign, though Landon admits the return on ad spend during the middle of the campaign wasn’t great. It was strong the first three to four days, then picked up again in the last seven days, but the mid-campaign slump was rough.
“I want to figure out what we did differently this go around that led to that conversion rate dropping a little bit,” Landon says.
One thing they didn’t get this time was press coverage. For the Stratus campaign, they’d gotten coverage from Guitar World, Gizmodo, and Music Radar. This time, despite sending out three press releases, they couldn’t get any traction.
Landon thinks he should have focused on developing relationships with those outlets before launching, rather than just sending press releases during the campaign.
The Testing Mindset
One of the biggest shifts in Landon’s approach was how he thought about testing ads.
In the past, he’d throw ads together, hit the run button, and then take a magnifying glass to the results. If something wasn’t working after a day, he’d make a change. Then another change the next day. He was constantly micromanaging and nitpicking.
This time, he had a systematic approach to testing.
“I think that was kind of the biggest mind shift for me,” Landon explains. “You can’t get any data and understand if something’s going to work without going into it and understanding that you need to spend X amount on testing these different ads.”
He’d set a specific budget for testing, like $1,500, and commit to spending that full amount before making decisions. He’d let ads run for seven days, then compare results across different ad sets that had all spent the same amount of money over the same time period.
That gave him actual data instead of just guesses.
“If you don’t do that, you actually don’t have any idea what you’re changing,” he says. “You’re just guessing.”
What’s Next
Chaos Audio has four new products in the pipeline.
Landon won’t say exactly what they are yet, but he’ll share this much: They’re moving into a new product category in the professional musician space. They’re getting access to a new processor that’s 10 times more powerful than what they’re currently using.
That means they’ll be able to add features like four channels instead of two, with more plugin algorithms chained together on each channel. They might even be able to add built-in AI features directly in the embedded hardware.
“I’m really excited,” Landon says.
And he’ll be back on Kickstarter to launch them.
Advice for New Creators
When I asked Landon what advice he’d give to someone just starting out, his answer was simple.
“Just talk to people.”
Too many creators are scared to tell other people about their ideas. They think someone will steal it, or they’re worried people will think it’s dumb.
“You can’t execute without the help that you can get from other people,” Landon explains. “There are so many doors that just open if you just randomly email people.”
He remembers emailing Peak Design before launching Stratus on Kickstarter. They gave him an essay-long response with detailed advice about what they focused on and what worked for them.
That happened again and again with different companies and people.
“There are so many people out there that are not in the scarcity mindset,” Landon says. “They’re in the abundance mindset and they are absolutely more than happy to help you because they want to see you succeed.”
His advice: Send cold emails. Talk to people at your local startup incubator. Ask for advice. Stay excited about your product. Don’t let yourself get into a mindset where building your business feels like a chore.
“Focus on the excitement of the making of the product,” he says. “Don’t let that falter either because that’ll keep you motivated.”
Landon calls it being “cautiously optimistic.”
That’s how you go from a canceled campaign to $312,239 in just a few years.
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