Johannes didn't come to Ziga with a company. He came with a product concept and a supplier promise. He'd previously used motorised walking pads himself, found them prone to burning out, and wanted to build an affordable, durable manual version for home offices. Office Walker was born. His engineer said the first prototype would be ready in four to six weeks. Johannes planned to run a Kickstarter campaign three months after that. He reached out to Ziga Berce expecting help to execute that plan.
Ziga grounded the plan on the first call.
"I basically didn't have a business, I just had the idea of this manual walking pad, a more affordable version of something that I already bought previously. I had an engineer who promised me to deliver the first prototype within four weeks or six weeks or something. So pretty unrealistic."-
Johannes's background is software engineering, which runs on iteration cycles measured in days. Hardware runs on different physics. The prototype that was supposed to take six weeks ended up taking roughly 18 months, and the campaign Johannes thought he'd launch in three took over a year to get to the starting line.
Six weeks becomes eighteen months
The real cost of an unrealistic timeline isn't the missed deadline. It's the missed pre-launch window. A Kickstarter page without an audience launches into silence, and Johannes was about to walk straight into that failure mode.
Ziga's fix was structural. Before writing campaign copy, Johannes needed to spend months on audience building - email list, followers, community.
"He taught me to really factor in some time for some weeks to build up the campaign page, some months to build up the audience, an email list, and so on."-
This is the trap most first-time creators fall into. Kickstarter's algorithm rewards early momentum on day one, not late discovery in week three. You don't get to fix an empty launch after the fact. Johannes spent the long months of prototype delays building the thing he'd actually need when the page went live. He wrote blog posts, ran pre-launch ads, and grew an email list. By launch day, a real community was there to back it.
Rewriting the page Johannes wanted to ship
When the page draft was ready for review, Ziga's feedback was direct and structural. Johannes had written it the way engineers often do - leading with what's broken about existing products, then positioning his own as the fix.
Ziga flipped it.
"The initial structure wasn't great, the wording, the framing. I had too many negative statements like 'this is bad about existing walking pads', stuff like this. He basically told me to rearrange the whole page, to structure it differently, to focus more on the positive sides instead of the negative."
The page went through multiple review cycles. Each one tightened the copy, reordered sections, and moved the strongest proof points higher. By the time Johannes hit launch, the Kickstarter page bore little resemblance to the one he would've shipped on his own - and that gap, he thinks, is one of the biggest reasons the campaign performed the way it did.
Two clocks, one campaign
The single most useful piece of advice came at a moment of decision paralysis. Johannes couldn't pick a launch date. The prototype kept not being good enough. Every week a supplier slipped or a part arrived wrong, and he pushed the date back again.
Ziga offered a reframe that broke the deadlock.
"He advised me to see the campaign and the product development as two separate things. You have a prototype that works already quite well. It needed some more work, but he basically said that this is product development and I should see it separately from the marketing or the campaign."-
The implication was practical. Set a launch date based on marketing readiness, not prototype perfection. Be transparent in the campaign copy that development continues after funding. Let backer momentum fund the remaining work rather than waiting for perfection before finding out if anyone wants to buy the Office Walker at all.
"This allowed me to have some peace of mind that I didn't have before, like when to start, when to launch. Just set a launch date, see what happens."
Johannes did. Once pledges started coming in, the product development question answered itself - the market had voted, and the remaining engineering work was now being done against real revenue rather than hope.
A shipping date you can actually keep
One more timeline intervention mattered after launch. Johannes had originally committed to March 2026 shipping. Ziga told him to move it.
"He said don't do that, that's unrealistic. I pushed it back to July."
Over-promising on Kickstarter shipping is one of the fastest ways to burn backer trust, and thousands of campaigns have learned that the expensive way - angry update comments, refund requests, and a damaged reputation for the next launch. Johannes didn't. He set an achievable date, communicated clearly through email and Instagram updates, and kept backers in the loop as development continued.
Where the €1.4M actually came from
Johannes is careful about attribution. Ziga didn't write the copy, run the Meta ads, or build the prototype. But the strategic architecture of the campaign - the sequencing, the messaging, the launch decision, the shipping timeline, the overall framework - was shaped throughout by Ziga's input.
"It's hard to quantify, because he didn't actively work on the stuff. He gave a lot of advice, so the campaign page was heavily influenced by him. He reviewed it multiple times. I think it would have looked quite a bit different from what we have now, and I think that was definitely a contributor to the success of the campaign."
Without the mentorship, Johannes thinks he'd have done what most first-time creators do. Spin up a Kickstarter page without an audience. Launch on the original optimistic timeline. Watch the campaign quietly underperform.
"You cannot just spin up a page and then hope for the best for people to come. You need your audience, you need your strategy, you need your pre-launch emails."
The mentorship also mattered in less measurable ways. Building a physical product as a solo founder is isolating, and the pre-launch period is a stretch where every signal feels ambiguous. A pre-launch community of a thousand people might convert well or might not. You don't know until the credit cards come out. Ziga's outside perspective - and his access to other Kickstarter creators through his community in Slovenia - gave Johannes a reference point during the moments where the data alone wasn't enough.
The founder this mentorship is built for
Johannes's recommendation is specific.
"I'd basically recommend Ziga to anyone who wants to run a crowdfunding campaign, especially people who haven't had experience with it yet or failed previously. You need some time before the campaign. If you don't have experience with it yet, Ziga is great. He has lots of experience to share. He has a big network, so that's really helpful."
Ziga brings three things that are hard to find together: direct crowdfunding experience from campaigns he's run and advised on, an operator's view of the specific failure modes first-time creators hit, and a network of Kickstarter creators that mentees can draw on for tactical questions outside formal sessions.
The thread running through Johannes's story isn't any single tactic. It's the cost of not having someone in your corner who has done this before. Crowdfunding campaigns fail for reasons that are obvious in retrospect and invisible in the moment - wrong timeline, no audience, perfectionist launch delay, negative framing, over-promised shipping. Every one of those traps has a specific intervention, and every one is cheaper to avoid than to recover from.
If you're planning a campaign of your own, you can work with Ziga through MentorCruise - whether you're pre-launch, mid-campaign, or preparing a second attempt after a first one fell short.
