10 things I wish I knew before I launched my Kickstarter campaign

I recently ran a successful crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter. I’ve compiled a list of 10 key lessons I learned from the process, hopefully you will find them useful if you are about to embark on a similar journey. While I’ve focussed on the Kickstarter platform, most of the below points are equally applicable to other reward-based crowd-funding platforms (Pozible, Indiegogo, etc) – and they are generally relevant to product launches.

1) Start building a crowd today

Start building your crowd early – in particular if you are a new startup with no existing customer base or supporters. If you decide to rely on social media in doing this (which most probably you will have to), don’t just focus on one platform. Just because you may use Facebook rather than Twitter or Instagram, this doesn’t mean that your target market does as well. So unless there is an obvious connection between your product and a particular social media platform, start building a presence across a number of different platforms to ensure you are reaching as broad a market as possible (you may want to research typical demographics associated with different platforms, and how these may relate to your market).

Start early, as you want to start engaging with supporters and prospective customers several months ahead of your launch date. This may mean investing a little money in Facebook advertising (using the magic of its targeting tools), or identifying existing Facebook groups that are likely to be interested in what you are doing. On Twitter, start researching which hashtags most resonate with your target audience. Consider a ‘social media calendar’ of up-coming events which you can latch on to in your PR activity. Use followerwonk.com to identify journalists, editors or bloggers on Twitter, and try to build a rapport through Twitter (consider the ratio of emails to direct tweets they probably receive). If you are fortunate enough to have a product which can be used to create beautiful images, or can think of creative ways to generate appealing media out of your product, get active on Instagram and Pinterest. Pinterest is better suited to driving traffic to your website and ultimately sales, whereas Instagram is perhaps more of a brand building tool – though if used judiciously can create a lot of leads as well.

One strategy I used to good effect was to post different designs of our product on our Facebook page, and prompt our followers to ‘vote’ on their favourite design by liking it – and also committing to making whichever design ended up with the most likes. This drives engagement and involves people in your ‘maker’ journey, and they will be more likely to support you when your campaign goes live. What’s more, when your campaign is up and running you can drive Kickstarters to your Facebook page by posting a link to your ‘voting’ post on your campaign page.

2) Do your research

Read crowd-funding forums, do lots of online research and speak to others who have been through the process of running a campaign. If you don’t know anyone and can’t get introduced, try searching for groups and forums and you should be able to track down people willing to share their experience. You’ll naturally be drawn to others who have completed successful campaigns, but I’d suggest it’s just as important to pick the brains of those who have failed, you’ll often get more valuable insights from them, and chances are they will be less busy and more available! In fact, the problem with very successful campaigns is that they get so many pledges, it becomes quite hard to identify which particular strategies worked well and which didn’t (even with the use of clever tracking technology like bit.ly links). On the other hand, a struggling campaign will get fewer pledges, and therefore have better visibility on which activities had an impact and which didn’t. With our campaign for instance, we had one period of about five days with practically no pledges. The silver lining was that this enabled us to understand that the PR and marketing activities we had on the go at that point in time were not working.

3) Invest $30 and ask other campaigns for tips

Identify other live campaigns (preferably with something in common with yours, like same city or same product category), make a $1 pledge to each, and then ask the creators of each to share a tip or an insight they wish they’d known before they launched, in exchange of your support. Your $1 bid is retractable, so if you don’t get a response you can always reverse it if you’re worried about that… Do this thirty times, it will cost you $30 and less than half a day’s work, but will provide you with a lot of invaluable insights. What’s more, if you message them again later, after you’ve launched your campaign, most will probably pledge you $1 back anyway!

4) Know the rules

Read the Kickstarter rules and FAQs in detail. Don’t get taken by surprise by something after you’ve launched. For instance, we didn’t fully appreciate that photorealistic renders were not allowed to be used on Kickstarter (they are however permitted on other platforms). The reason for this presumably is to prevent campaigns from misleading unsuspecting backers that a computer-designed mock-up of a product is the actual finished product. As we only found this out at the last minute, it had quite a big impact on how we were planning to present our product and what media we could use on our Kickstarter page. If we’d made ourselves aware of this rule earlier, we probably would have put together a better campaign page.

5) Launch early, don’t postpone

Notwithstanding the other tips here about getting things done before you launch – launch earlier rather than later! Don’t wait until everything is perfect with the product or technology and its presentation, until you have all the features in place, sometimes you just need to move quickly and get feedback and validation from your target market through the campaign.