"I didn't know it was international." Support came in from countries he couldn't ship to, "so we had to return all the money." That accounted for about 10% to 12% of the early money.įinally, the Bug-A-Salt, a dream he'd had since he was a teenager, was a real thing. However, Maggiore realized his crowdfunding campaign had a big problem. The original video has been viewed more than 3.5 million times. Maggiore was trying to raise $15,000 to pay for one container of 7,000 Bug-A-Salt guns to be shipped from China. Suddenly, "it was surreal." orders came pouring in. "So I called my buddy and he's like, 'We'll try Indiegogo." Indiegogo did agree to put up the video, and after a couple weeks, BuzzFeed caught wind of it. Maggiore isn't sure why, but he suspects Kickstarter didn't think he was being serious, that this was all a gag. "I said, 'What's Kickstarter?'" In 2012, he put together a hilarious short video demonstrating the effectiveness of the Bug-A-Salt with a lot of slo-mo action shots. I have no plan!"Ī friend suggested Maggiore make a video for Kickstarter to raise money for production. "It's ready for the world, but I have nowhere to sell it. "I'm just sitting in the hotel looking at this thing that I've done," he recalls, laughing. He would eventually spend $70,000 of profits from his wallpaper hanging business, along with about $30,000 from an angel investor he met through a friend of the family. Maggiore maxed out his credit cards and went to China to spend two months working with a prototype toy maker. "I just looked up at the sky and said, 'Ok, I'm going to try this again.'" "She was really kind of a fan of mine, or a supporter." He decided at that moment to give the idea one last shot. "It was really crude." Then, in 2009, Maggiore's sister passed away. He tried to make and market one in the '90s, but it didn't go anywhere. "It's fun, and it's ridiculous," Maggiore says. But he always had this idea to make a gun to kill flies.
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