The Fidget Cube is a desk toy with different switches, buttons and wheels on each of its six sides. (Courtesy Antsy Labs)
Clicky pens never paid off like this.
Two Denver brothers have capped one of the most lucrative local Kickstarter campaigns ever, netting $6.4 million to make a toy for antsy customers tired of sitting on their hands to keep from clicking a pen or twiddling their fingers.
Brothers Matthew and Mark McLachlan watched the Fidget Cube – a desk toy with a different dial to spin, button to toggle or gear to turn on each of its sides – blast through its $15,000 minimum funding target on its first day, Aug. 31.
By Sept. 7, it was up to $1 million. And with more than a month to go on Sept. 16, the first time BusinessDen wrote about the project, the Fidget Cube campaign had hit $4.4 million.
The project closed Oct. 19 with more than 150,000 backers.
The Fidget Cube was catapulted to the top of the Kickstarter charts in part by a shortened promo video, which was circulated by popular Facebook page NowThis.
The video puts Denver center stage. Mark McLachlan enjoys a cone of Little Man Ice Cream in one scene, then drops into Highlands restaurant Linger in another.
The McLachlan brothers have built a career by launching original products on Kickstarter and selling other inventors’ crowdfunded gizmos, but the Fidget Cube is by far their most successful campaign.
The pair has garnered $10,000 for a wooden tabletop game and $500,000 for a charging station for the iPhone and Apple Watch. Other projects, like a coffee table book profiling Kickstarter inventors and a tweaked version of the charging station, came up short of their funding targets.
Before launching their current company, Antsy Labs, the brothers co-founded e-commerce website TinyLightbulbs, which exclusively sold crowdfunded products.
The Fidget Cube is a desk toy with different switches, buttons and wheels on each of its six sides. (Courtesy Antsy Labs)
Clicky pens never paid off like this.
Two Denver brothers have capped one of the most lucrative local Kickstarter campaigns ever, netting $6.4 million to make a toy for antsy customers tired of sitting on their hands to keep from clicking a pen or twiddling their fingers.
Brothers Matthew and Mark McLachlan watched the Fidget Cube – a desk toy with a different dial to spin, button to toggle or gear to turn on each of its sides – blast through its $15,000 minimum funding target on its first day, Aug. 31.
By Sept. 7, it was up to $1 million. And with more than a month to go on Sept. 16, the first time BusinessDen wrote about the project, the Fidget Cube campaign had hit $4.4 million.
The project closed Oct. 19 with more than 150,000 backers.
The Fidget Cube was catapulted to the top of the Kickstarter charts in part by a shortened promo video, which was circulated by popular Facebook page NowThis.
The video puts Denver center stage. Mark McLachlan enjoys a cone of Little Man Ice Cream in one scene, then drops into Highlands restaurant Linger in another.
The McLachlan brothers have built a career by launching original products on Kickstarter and selling other inventors’ crowdfunded gizmos, but the Fidget Cube is by far their most successful campaign.
The pair has garnered $10,000 for a wooden tabletop game and $500,000 for a charging station for the iPhone and Apple Watch. Other projects, like a coffee table book profiling Kickstarter inventors and a tweaked version of the charging station, came up short of their funding targets.
Before launching their current company, Antsy Labs, the brothers co-founded e-commerce website TinyLightbulbs, which exclusively sold crowdfunded products.
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