Four counterintuitive tips for winning Kickstarter

If you’re a linguistics nerd, I recommend listening to this A16Z podcast with @Kieransnyder. Kieran runs a linguistics analytics company called textio and she talked about a study her company did, analyzing Kickstarter projects from a purely textual perspective. They searched for textual patterns on projects that did well on Kickstarter.

They looked at things like length of project description, types of words used, and fonts. The content of the project did not matter at all. Sadly the study hasn’t been published but Kieran talks about some of the findings in the podcast and shared some more with me on Twitter.

Most of them seem quite counter-intuitive! What’s your take on why these work?

1. Go way overboard with text length!

Forget short and concise. On Kickstarter, long texts lead to success. Kieran found that successfully funded projects have descriptions from 750 words up, “until a stunningly high word count”. Maybe long descriptions suggest you’re willing to put in extra effort to make the project work?

2. Don’t be stingy with font styles…

Do away with minimalist design. Mix font styles, and use plenty of headers of varying sizes!

I don’t have an explanation for why this works… perhaps it’s that variation keeps readers alert as they scroll along the long text.

3… but use few adjectives

Kieran said she found that successful projects “use fewer adjectives than you see in other media”. So if you want to describe your soon-to-be crowdfunded gadget with terms like elegant, sleek, beautiful, amazing, powerful, light, slim, substantial, smart – yea, just scrap those! Why? Maybe using less adjectives makes you sound more sincere?

4. Address the audience

Apparently, people want to be addressed directly to feel compelled to fund an idea. Kieran suggests that project descriptions that use “you” a lot do well on Kickstarter.

There you go, I hope you enjoyed these tips to help you win on Kickstarter.