How one startup turned backers into believers: MAGFAST broke the crowdfunding mold

Picture Kevin. It’s 2014, and on Kickstarter he has just backed the Coolest Cooler, a portable cooler with a built-in blender, a Bluetooth speaker, and a USB charger.

Finally, an innovative product that lets him host the perfect beach party. To Kevin, it feels like he’s caught onto something unique, fresh, exciting, before everyone else. He eagerly tells his friends about it and checks his email for updates.

Then, he waits.

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The campaign has raised $13 million from over 62,000 backers and become one of the most-funded projects in Kickstarter history, which makes the silence that follows all the more confusing. News breaks that the company has started selling the product on Amazon while thousands of original backers still have nothing. The Coolest Cooler eventually collapses, and a third of its original backers, like Kevin, never received what they paid for.

Kevin’s story is not an isolated example about one campaign. Only about 39% of Kickstarter campaigns ever reach their funding goal (search logistics), and on Indiegogo, just 24% of projects raise more than $50,000 (TCF), with the average campaign bringing in roughly $8,000 total (fitsmallbusiness) – far too little capital to fund a meaningful production run. According to a Wharton School study of Kickstarter outcomes, backers should statistically expect about one in ten projects they support to fail outright. For every Oculus Rift billion dollar acquisition, there are hundreds of beautifully produced campaign videos for products that never make it past the prototype stage, leaving behind a trail of frustrated backers. You’re betting on a vision, and more specifically, betting on the people behind it.

A perfect reason for understanding and respecting what Seymour Segnit has built with MAGFAST.

Seymour’s first foray into crowdfunding shipped tens of thousands of chargers but grew too fast and ultimately ended in failure.

He regrouped, consolidated the learning, and, in 2017, launched MAGFAST.

MAGFAST wasn’t a single device. It was a big vision for a new type of integrated charging system, a modular, magnetic family of products designed to work seamlessly together.

He saw that there was a huge and fast-growing market for a better charging solution. He recognized that charging cables are ugly, get tangled and break, and he developed a cable-free charging technology that would snap to charge, anticipating the magnetic-wireless future that Apple would later brand as MagSafe. He understood that chargers sit prominently everywhere, on walls and kitchen counters and office desks, but with almost no attention paid to convenience, durability or design.

Seymour approached the challenge with an unusual set of credentials: starting out as an engineering student at Oxford, he then spent years writing copy and managing ad campaigns at some of the world’s top advertising agencies, hosted a radio show at London’s Capital FM, and co-founded a venture-backed Silicon Valley startup. It’s a resume of experiences that would cultivate an unflappable and rounded leader.

The market validated the idea of a premium, integrated charging system almost immediately. MAGFAST generated over $250,000 in pre-orders within the first 15 minutes of launch and crossed $600,000 by the end of day one. By any measure, Seymour knew how to create demand.

MAGFAST

Building the things turned out to be considerably harder. Consumer hardware manufacturing is unforgiving in ways that are difficult to fully appreciate from the outside. “Critics cry ‘scam’ and ‘fraud’ when things go wrong for small, underfunded companies,” explains Segnit. “Sure, we’ve seen bad actors try to make a quick buck. But that’s far from the norm: the entrepreneurs I know are hardworking, optimistic and determined, and my team is perhaps the most dedicated of all. Getting a hardware startup off the ground requires real grit for the long term.”

All the advantages go to big companies with big marketing budgets and massive volume. Smaller startups have to battle to find customers and cover higher unit costs.

The original manufacturers chosen for MAGFAST underestimated both manufacturing schedules and unit costs, and as timelines stretched and updates became harder to deliver with optimism and confidence, a portion of the backer community lost patience and walked away, some loudly and publicly.

But Seymour and MAGFAST kept showing up (they’ve now published some 300 video updates!). Not with empty reassurances designed to sound apologetic while nothing moved forward, but consistently and personally. He told his community exactly what was happening. The first products in MAGFAST’s integrated family finally started to ship, to considerable acclaim, but never in enough volume to make a profit.

In 2024, with encouragement from the team at their equity funding partner Netcapital funding portal, Segnit took radical steps.

He cut ties with the original manufacturers, cut overheads, rebuilt the supply chain from scratch, and cut out the middlemen, managing factory relationships directly rather than relying on intermediaries.

Throughout, Segnit resisted all temptation to hide the company’s challenges from its supporters, over 5,000 of whom had become part owners of MAGFAST through crowdfunded share offerings. .

It cost the company real money. But transparency was more important.

The resulting shifts in the company’s fortunes were dramatic. The first deliveries of MAGFAST Gen2, a completely reimagined product family that includes some of the world’s most advanced charging devices, started landing in customer’s hands in late 2025.

The customers who stayed noticed, and when Gen2 arrived, they understood what they had been waiting for. David M writes, “It’s been a long ride. I’m an OG customer and didn’t get the first product, stuck with you guys and happy with the service and quality of the final product.  Thanks for holding up to the commitment in the tough times. It’s paid off for all of us.  Looking forward to QI 2.2, pixel watch charging and beyond!  Also, can’t wait to try out the passport order x 3!”

Lux Pro USB

MAGFAST Gen2 products feel genuinely different from anything else in the category. Acknowledging that charging cables won’t disappear altogether for some time, MAGFAST‘s Lux and Lux Pro USB cables are best-in-class, high performance, silky to the touch, but tough as nails. Air Pro is the world’s only charging base station that will charge three devices wirelessly, simultaneously, at full power, and more over USB-C. Air Pro’s aluminum exterior, weighted base, integrated circular (yes, circular) Database Pro connectivity hub and exquisite modern design mean it’s the only charging device that can take pride of place on your hall table. Passport is the world’s first power bank offering extended battery life through Iontra’s charge technology, rethinking how batteries are charged at a molecular level.

These are the products of a founder who refused to deliver something he was not proud of. They owe their existence to Seymour’s insight that it would take exceptional communications to overcome the disadvantages of the small startup and those early manufacturing bumps, and to build an excitable community devoted enough and patient enough to let him get there.

That patience has produced numbers that reflect genuine loyalty, and are hard to find in consumer hardware.

Today, 75% of the company’s investors are also customers. 37% of customers who receive a MAGFAST product come back and order more, and, of those, 57% do it more than once, averaging nearly three additional paid orders after that first revisit. The company’s most engaged customers, under 5% of the total base, account for 32% of all revenue with a lifetime value averaging $1,551 (around five orders each). Among the most highly engaged buyers of the MAGFAST community, about a third of all repeat customers (46%), also invest in the company. Seymour has described opening Shopify on a given morning and finding customers on their seventh order, their tenth, some on their thirtieth… People who came back not because they ran out of something or because a promotion landed in their inbox, but because the products and earned it.

Seymour mentions that acquiring a new customer is expensive. The marketing environment is competitive, attention is split across numerous media platforms, and building awareness for a premium charging brand is muddied by an oversaturation of bad charging options. But once MAGFAST has a customer, they tend to stay. The trust built over years of honest communication directly influences purchase behavior, which in turn drives the kind of lifetime value that attracts investors’ attention.

MAGFAST has now generated at least $25 million in orders and preorders and raised over $10 million from its investors, almost entirely everyday people: the community that funded it is the community that keeps buying from it. The Coolest Cooler built a huge profile but finally sputtered out of existence, not for lack of innovation but because the necessary relationships weren’t powerful enough.

MAGFAST continues to be guided by simple but powerful principles. Build things worth coming back for, always tell the truth – particularly when things are hard – and trust the community you’ve built to recognize the difference.