I had my first successful Kickstarter. Here's what I learned

Hey all

First and most importantly, I will - not - be linking to my Kickstarter page, nor will I be saying what the Product/Service was that got funded. I am not going to post an ad - I simply want to relay my experience from the side of a creator.

The reason I'm writing this is for those of you in the GB community who either want to know what to expect when creating their own Kickstarter, or for those who simply have a curiosity about what goes on when you put yourself and your dream out there.

The first thing to expect? Holy hell, do not neglect marketing.

I felt my idea was a very strong one, and I was extremely passionate. I took the time to create a ton of assets (videos, prototypes/examples, etc) and the passion was clearly visible to anyone who looked through my page (I later got messages to that effect). I carefully crafted the backer rewards with clever wording and good value, and gave many updates - even during the dry middle season between the start and end of the campaign. The thing is... It was a month-long campaign, and during the start, I spread it to one major group: My friends on social media, who I implored to share the campaign if they weren't able to financially support it. I felt that I had a deep enough friend pool on Facebook who could have a connection to the subject of my project (let's say ~800 people), and if even half of those people shared it with their respective friend lists, that could be a potential reach of ~10 000 people, roughly. If even 1% of those 10 000 people supported, that's 100 backers. Well, let me tell you, from that first week, I got exactly 10 backers - one of which was my dad, the others were a mish-mash of my best friends. There were no names I didn't recognize.

I am extremely grateful that my friends supported me like they did - truly, I phoned each of them to thank them personally. The problem was that I was almost two weeks in, had 10 backers, and 17% funding. At that rate, I wasn't going to make my goal, and that scared me - I'd already started putting my own money into the project, and was counting on the campaign being a success to recuperate those funds (for clarification, these were costs associated with the project, nothing personal like groceries or a wage). At this point I should note, I was the only person associated with this campaign and project - not even a partner, I had to take care of everything. I needed to to revamp. I took my focus away from the project for a few days, and fully dedicated myself to the campaign. I made a plan, and it was aggressive.

Marketing, marketing marketing. I reached out to potential investors, a few people I know who were experts in what my project was aimed at, and researched social media groups who could be interested in it. I beefed up my project's social media presence - legit facebook, twitter, and instagram pages. Made about 10 ads that I could send out which looked professional (and kind of cute), and treated it like an actual business. I spent some money on Facebook ads, with a very targeted group for my audience (~10 000 people again) and made it so if they came from those ads, I'd throw in some bonuses to their backer rewards (I also messaged all of my current backers at that point to know that their backer rewards would basically double for having been early supporters). All of this was the best thing I did, and I wish I did it from the start.

I talked with an investor who agreed to put in 40% of the project's goal. When people started seeing that the project was over halfway to being funded, it got a lot more interest. The Facebook ads were running, I was engaging with the social media page, posting on specialized communities on Reddit, and generally spending 80% of my time on the campaign. In the last week, it pulled through. We ended with over 100% funding, and 3/4 of the names of my backers are names I didn't know beforehand. That is a really, really cool feeling. Knowing that your work and passion actually caught some attention, and now these people who you don't even know are willing to support you? That made the whole thing worth it, and gave me 10x more drive to put my all into the project.

Alright. That was a lot of motivational crap, but guess what else you should expect. SPAM. Oh my god so much Spam.

I must have received over 200 emails over the course of the campaign which were boilerplate, generic, copy & pasted with a name replace junkspams from all over the place. These largely ended up in my email inbox, but also in Twitter DMs & Kickstarter DMs. I ended up trying one of them, a service which promised to share your campaign with millions of potential backers for a low-low fee (like 10 dollars). Yeah, they spammed it, and no-one payed attention to it. My only thought is to stay away from those, unless you get one from a reputable human. Research every name - company and individual. I found a few that were cool, and those were the ones that said things like "hey I saw that your project is almost there, nice! want to support my campaign for $1 and I'll do the same for you?" These were nice because having more backers gets you more attention from Kickstarter's popularity algorithms.

Also expect that the internet will be the internet, and some people will be rude and abrasive towards you for seemingly no reason. That's fine, I have a lot of patience and made sure to deal with any negativity like a hostage negotiation - peacefully, calmly, and never returning aggression. I can't say whether or not this did anything, but I felt like it represented the whole project in a better light knowing that negativity could be handled in a civil way.

Anyways, the biggest takeaway I have for people starting a Kickstarter is to not give up. If you don't find success in the first few days or weeks, keep on giving it your all. It isn't over until the clock ticks down to 0. Maybe your project will be the 0.1% that gets a huge amount of attention and gets 1000% funding; but, they can't all be that. If you're like me and just want it to succeed, I hope this has been at least a bit insightful =)

I hope this blog finds its way to someone who can get some use out of it =) I wish all of you the best of luck with your Kickstarters, Indiegogos, Gofundmes, or whatever you end up doing!!!

Interesting read thanks for posting!

Congratulations on getting it done!!

That is great advice. I have a feeling that Kickstarter is in my future for some coals I have in the fire and had the impression there is quite a few tricks to it.

Some questions for you, feel free to not answer if any are too business sensitive.

-The investor, was that something you had explored before the campaign started? Did you go out and find them or did they approach you?

-Knowing what you know now would you of invested some of your own money into marketing before the Kickstarter went up? Had you done any promotion beforehand at all?

-When you put together backer rewards how did you work them out? Did you look at other campaigns in the same field or just try and put something unique together?

Thanks for reading =D

I'm more than happy to answer some questions =)

- The investor was someone I had been in talks with before who had expressed general enthusiasm with the idea, and was one of the first people I let know that I would be making a Kickstarter. I approached them mid-way through the Kickstarter, promising (x) and (y) (don't know if it's uncouth to share those details) in return. I had not originally explored having the entire project funded by an investor, but the investor was happy to know that if they joined in, they would be "unlocking" everything else that came from the other backers - if that makes sense.

- Absolutely. I thought that launching the Kickstarter itself would have been enough to get people interested; but, if I were to do it again, my first step would be making all of those assets I made halfway through. The professional-looking social media, the cute/funny/nice ads, getting word out to groups that "hey this is coming." I would have gotten the name out there at least a week or two before the actual campaign, so that when it did hit, there would have been more of an initial burst. I feel that would have gathered more momentum. I guess I was just lucky that my mid-way realization pulled through.

- They were totally unique =) The nature of the project made it very, very easy to make rewards that provided value to backers. I'll try to be ambiguous. Let's say I have multiple products which cost $50, $100, and $150. I made sure that if they backed at $50, they got 1.5 worth ($75 value). $100 -> $175 value; $150 -> $300 value. Tbh this isn't actually how it mapped to what I made, but it's just an example =) Providing value with the product/service. I did not do any t-shirts or things like that.

Hopefully this helps, and I am more than happy to give a further hand later if you ever need! Feel free to PM me any time =)

Wow, congratulations. So the backer rewards aren't the only thing the investor is getting? I thought that might be against some Kickstarter rules or something. Anyway, if you don't mind me asking, what made you want to go the crowdfunding route rather than getting investors?

Spam is the worst. I run an e-commerce site *cough* name *cough* and I get it all the time on Instagram for free stuff, spam emails. Chinese businesses trying to scam me out of money via false copyright claims etc.

The investor actually opted to receive no backer reward =) The stuff offered is more about having some control over some aspect of the project. It is, thankfully, not against the rules of Kickstarter. I decided to go crowdfunding because I was looking to get more random people interested than just investors, and it was a combination of good press (occasionally) and people talking about it/spreading it naturally. I'm glad I went with crowdfunding than just investors.

Right?

@bassman2112: Really great writeup!

Could you give a vague non-identifying range for what your $ goal was and how you determined what you would ask for? I hear some people saying that they purposely lowball it and hope that it overfunds once people see it at a higher funding percentage.

Also could you share some more information about the investor part? 40% is a huge amount of the total! How did you find the investor and what kind of returns are they expecting? Would you pursue that option again in the future?

I hope your project goes well!

Thanks =D

It was between $4k and $8k USD, and the way that total was determined was to literally itemize every cost associated with the project, and aiming for the lowest cost of everything. I set the goal as about $200 lower than my final calculations, so I suppose I lowballed it; but only a little haha.

It is definitely a huge amount! Truth be told, they were not demanding. They weren't searching for an ROI, but were willing to contribute that significant amount if I was willing to let them into the process of the project. Sorry for ambiguous language, if I use any more targeted language, it may be easy to know what I'm talking about haha. Regardless, I knew them beforehand and they were excited about the project well before the start of the campaign =) I just asked if they'd be up for contributing in a major way, and thankfully they were ^_^

And thank you!

Great post!

Your point about creating and managing proper, pro-looking pages on Instagram and Facebook (my twitter is me, so that's better for other stuff I release later on) is holy-cow apparently important. There are so many people in those places that even having the account and posting here and there will has a chance of getting some decent attention.

I know someone at work with a successful Kickstarter for a game project and he also mentioned that getting a booth at Gen Con (we live in Indianapolis, therefore no travel necessary) was insanely useful, and not even that expensive (sub $1000 for his small table I think he said). Essentially, that accounts for the personal touch of people meeting you and knowing you're not out for a quick buck and have some real passion (something I can't convince people of for the life of me, honestly).

Slight tangent (don't hate me, I'm just relating): my first crowdfunding attempt was such a horrible failure that I essentially - without admitting it to myself for a while - gave up on the whole thing. Luckily I don't need proper funding for what I'm finishing up, just the time to handle the social media stuff and edit most of the stank out of my garbage. Most of it...

And yeah... that spam. My main twitter feed is complete nonsense from people / accounts / people with multiple accounts trying to "tweet my ****" or whatever to help me get sales. It's a good thing I'm broke (like Tom!) or I'd occasionally get the urge to throw a few bucks in the waste bin at one of the more popular accounts of those after release to see what happens.

High fives, duderino!

It's so true, even just having content with no likes/retweets/favs/whatever is good, because new people who check your stuff out can see "oh, this company has actually been posting quite a bit." Rather than "oh, this is barren." It doesn't need to be amazing content every single time IMO, just enough to have a presence =)

Definitely, I think being able to have a physical presence and have people see you & your work firsthand makes a huge difference. When I lived in Boston, one of my favourite places to go was FIG - Festival of Indie Games. Got to see a ton of games that I otherwise never would have heard of, and also got to meet the people making them. Ended up supporting several of them, and still talk with a lot of their creators today =) Community is super important.

Glad that you ended up continuing your project, haha =D It can be extremely disheartening to see failure, or, at the very least, not see success. I actually made a point to look through a list of Kickstarter projects that were ending around the same time I did. I'd say at least 50% of them had between 0% - 10% funding at the end, and that made me realize a combination of how many projects are going on at any one time, as well as the fact that you really need to stand out to get any kind of support.

Yo, spam. I don't even know if it's worth it to throw a buck or two their way, all it did was add noise IMO.

Again, high fives!

www.kickended.com

Wow, that is quite a collection. I keep hitting Random, and can't stop.

Right? And these are just projects which didn't receive ANY backers. I'm sure it was a harsh lesson to learn.

People are not going to Kickstarter to look for something to fund. Kickstarter is more like a place to gather money and people around once they are interested in a project, not a platform to be find an audience.

Absolutely. Unless you have a big name (developer, publisher, or franchise in the case of games) associated with the project, you can't just launch a surprise Kickstarter and expect success. You need to do a lot of work building an audience and gauging interest before you ever think about launching your crowdfunding campaign. It hurts to see people make that realization days or weeks into it and then start desperately trying to drum up interest by spamming forums and Reddit. Some of them manage to pull it off, but it's very rare.

@chaser324:

Indeed, I am that very rare case - and I absolutely recognize that at this point. That's why I definitely feel strongly that if anyone makes a Kickstarter, they really need to drum up support beforehand.