Hello there, visionaries, and welcome to another HSiF blog post. I’m Ema, aka this year’s Marketing Fellow, and following up on our workshop Crowdfund Your Idea, I decided to sit down with Mateo Kaiser. 

If you’ve been following along, you know that Mateo has appeared in HSiF news more than once. With a buzzing business for beekeepers, he won the Grow Prize during our Winter Pitch Event in December 2024 and spoke about his crowdfunding campaign during the HSiF Workshop Series. We got to see Mateo’s idea grow and flourish and today, we got to hear directly from him about the trials of crowdfunding, paid media and the importance of community.

But I won’t spoil any more, scroll below and soak in Mateo’s insights by yourself! 😉

Introduction

Ema: To start us off, can you tell us a little bit about your venture and what inspired you to start it?
Mateo: The really broad description for it is lead generation and data for beekeepers. I got into beekeeping during the pandemic – this was my COVID hobby. The way I started was by catching a swarm of bees in a neighbor’s yard. I’d been thinking about beekeeping, and one day I saw this swarm of 60,000 bees flying through the air and landing on a tree. A neighbor who heard I was into bees called me, and I went over with a cardboard box and caught them.

From then, I was hooked. During lockdown, I learned everything I could. It’s a niche but essential space – beekeeping in the U.S. alone is a $20 billion industry, supporting a $235 billion crop industry. I saw the same tech innovations in beekeeping – AI, hardware, IoT – that you’d find anywhere else. Eventually, like many entrepreneurs, I wanted to solve a problem I had: finding new bee colonies every spring.

Beekeepers lose up to 50% of their colonies each winter. Buying bees is expensive, so many of us try to catch swarms – wild colonies that land on homes, fences, or cars. But finding those swarms is hard. People don’t know who to call, and hobbyist beekeepers often lack business websites. That’s where my idea came in.

I built a site where people could report swarms and notify nearby beekeepers, based on their travel radius. At first, it was a personal web dev experiment, but people used it and it’s grown into a fully fledged business.

On Industry Misconceptions

Ema: What are some common misconceptions about the industry?
Mateo: There’s a misconception that honey bees are endangered, but really, beekeeping is just getting harder. We had a record number of colonies last year and a record number of deaths. The worry isn’t necessarily extinction, it’s burnout.

Using Crowdfunding to Relaunch with Purpose

Ema: At what point did crowdfunding come into play?
Mateo: About a year in. I wanted to improve the dashboard, which was…embarrassingly primitive. But I didn’t want to charge beekeepers. So I turned to Kickstarter – not just for the funds, but to do a big spring relaunch and engage users.

Ema: And it worked – you were fully funded in under 24 hours, right?
Mateo: Our goal was $3,000. We raised over $21,000. It wasn’t the rewards that did it – crowdfunding software is tough. I think people simply believed in what we were building. They wanted the upgraded dashboard, the new features. Offering lifetime access as a one-time reward helped seal the deal.

More than anything, the campaign was proof of demand. People paid to see this built. That’s more validating than any user survey.

Ema: What Else Made the Campaign So Effective? Mateo: We tied the campaign to spring – the start of swarm season – and promised to deliver quickly. The dashboard was already 90% done when we launched. People weren’t backing a dream; they were backing the final push.

I also spent time writing out the story and building a clean campaign page. Even if beekeeping isn’t the most design-heavy industry, it helped explain the mission clearly.

Ema: What Would You Do Differently? Mateo: I hoped to reach beyond beekeepers and get media attention, but those efforts fell flat. I paid for press releases, but they didn’t do much. And my non-beekeeper reward tiers barely got any traction. So two goals – broader reach and media – weren’t met.

That said, the campaign helped double our user base. I ran ads and gained thousands of new sign-ups. So in a way, we did broaden our reach – just not to the general public.

Crowdfunding Lessons for Student Founders

Ema: What’s your biggest takeaway from running a campaign on Kickstarter?
Mateo: Kickstarter doesn’t bring the audience – you have to. Over 50% of my backers were first-timers. I spent a lot of time on pre-launch sign-ups to reduce friction and guide them smoothly onto the platform. Beekeepers aren’t always the most tech-savvy, so it was important to know my users and fine-tune my approach for them.

Ema: And what about your marketing strategy overall?
Mateo: Email was everything. I sent about 20,000 emails to a 3,000-person list before and throughout the campaign. I kept it personal, grounded, and not salesy. Just me, Mateo from Swarmed, asking for support.

Paid media? Meh. Most of my ad spend went toward bringing people to the website, not directly to Kickstarter. Once they signed up, they’d get the campaign emails. I ran Facebook and Google Ads, but more for community-building than conversion.

I also tried an affiliate program. It didn’t really work. Maybe it could have, but for this niche, it wasn’t worth the effort.

SEO, Friction & the Long Game

Ema: How’s the SEO game treating you?
Mateo: Brutal. I’m doing all the textbook stuff – alt text, H1s, press links – but it’s slow. Traffic jumped with ads but we’ll see how it holds. I’m still waiting for that big break: the viral article, the .gov backlink, the one thing that spikes everything. Until then? Slog.

Final Advice for Early Founders

Ema: If you had to give one piece of advice to someone starting out, what would it be?
Mateo: Crowdfunding? Great. Paid marketing? Risky. It doesn’t align with lean startup methods. Unless your product has a high average purchase value, it’s hard to justify. Focus on email lists. Get 1,000-3,000 users who actually care. If you can’t get organic traction, ads won’t fix that.

Ema: Where can people follow your journey or support Swarmed?
Mateo: You can follow me on LinkedIn. I don’t post much, but I’m there. Or visit the website: Swarmed and our new sister project, Citizens of the Hive. We’ve now collected over a million data points on honeybee health – open source and ready to be explored.

I hope you enjoyed this insightful conversation as much as I did, and that Mateo’s hands-on advice will serve you in the future. It’s not every day that a founder opens up about the bumps on their entrepreneurial journey, so let this one be a source of value and inspiration to you.

Thank you for reading and we’ll talk to you next time!