“We had both agreed that money wasn’t the end goal at all,” says Christina Ha, one of the co-founders of the Meow Parlour, which opened on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in mid-December. Like other cat cafes, Meow Parlour is a space where people can cozy up with a few feline friends.

Instead, Kickstarter was a way for Ha and her co-founder Emilie Legrand to get early adopters into the space to help them work out the operational kinks before opening to the public. The Meow Parlour works on a reservation basis, with guests able to book anywhere from half an hour to five hours at a time. The first Kickstarter donors were offered the chance to reserve a timeslot before the cafe officially opened -- a win for cat lovers in the city and an opportunity for the founding team to improve their processes ahead of their public launch. Ha and Legrand needed to get a sense of consumer behavior in a cat cafe. How long do customers stay? How do cats deal with people?

The crowdfunding campaign was also a way to make people aware that the cafe would soon be opening. Ha had learned about the marketing benefits of crowdfunding when she managed a campaign to raise money for the expansion of her Macaron Parlour to a second location in New York. “We went way past our Macaron Parlour audience to other people who wanted different kinds of rewards and ways to participate, even without having been a customer,” she says. That was invaluable.

The Kickstarter campaign for Meow Parlour hit its $2,000 goal in less than 24 hours, and went on to raise $6,500 total. Ha and Legrand had to go back and add more perks, once the pre-launch reservation spots were booked.

Watch this video, complete with adorable cats, to learn about the less obvious benefits of running a crowdfunding campaign and get some helpful hints on how to prepare for running a crowdfunding campaign.