How To Get Funded on Kickstarter: A Quick How-to Guide
You have a great idea. You have the vision and ambition to make it happen. Now, you just need to convince a large group of strangers to give you lots of money to make this dream a reality. And, at the same time, knowing there’s no guarantee that your finished product will ever see the light of day.
Sounds like you’re ready to get funded on Kickstarter.
Start-ups on a shoestring love the concept of crowdfunding. Sites like Indiegogo and Kickstarter are great for funding new products and ideas, and for testing the viability of those ideas.
Risk is minimised – the project doesn’t go ahead if the funding goal isn’t met, which often means re-evaluating the concept and why it failed to attract interest when presented to the market.
If you are a fan of the lean startup method, then you will love Kickstarter. Maybe.
Running a Kickstarter project has many ups and downs, but if approached with open eyes and a good plan, you can gain a lot from the experience:
Test the concept:
The best way to test your product, before injecting large amounts of cash into development, is to show it to public and see what they think. People will often say they love the idea, but you really only know the truth when they actually reach for the credit card and buy your product. Backers often give feedback to suggest improvements and features they would like see developed, which creators use to help shape the end product. Early stage feedback could be just the encouragement, or wake-up call, you need. If the project sinks on Kickstarter, the creators need to ask whether the concept needs to be reimagined or abandoned.
Build brand awareness and raise your profile:
In the early days of your startup, public relations (PR) is the best way to get your brand noticed. Work the Kickstarter angle into your brand story, and build your PR plan around it. Pitch your story to the right press people and with a little luck you’ll get a nice PR bounce from your campaign.
– Boost search engine rankings: Press coverage on mega sites like TechCrunch, Mashable, Wired, and the like is great for SEO. Articles written about you on high authority domains would normally contain links back to your website, which in turn will give your website ranking a shot in the arm. Add your main keywords to your Kickstarter title/description and you’re likely to get page #1 with your Kickstarter project for those keywords, courtesy of Kickstarter’s hefty domain authority.
“Funding on Kickstarter is all-or-nothing in more ways than one. While 13% of projects finished having never received a single pledge 79% of projects that raised more than 20% of their goal were successfully funded.” – Kickstarter
This example is a Kickstarter campaign I planned and managed for Rob O’Reilly Guitars to raise funds to bring a new product, Expressive MIDI Guitar System, to market. We launched the project on 21st October —the same day Kickstarter Ireland opened to Irish project creators. The 35-day campaign reached the €15,000 funding target after 20 days, and was 153% funded when it ended on 25th November.
The campaign raised over €30,000 via Kickstarter and pre-orders through the company website.
As well as learning that crowdfunding is hard work and definitely not easy cash, here are a few other things I learned along the way:
Before You Start
Learn how Kickstarter works. Read the Creator’s Handbook and familiarise yourself with Kickstarter’s Rules. If you never used Kickstarter before, create an account and back a few projects. You need only pledge $1 to get progress updates, which will give you a sense of what it’s like to participate in the Kickstarter community. And Kickstarter is certainly a community. There is a strong sense of everyone being “in it together”, and this is a powerful dynamic that successful projects draw from, and something you will need to use to get funded on Kickstarter.
Research the market for your product, and know your target audience. Draw up a realistic marketing plan, not just for Kickstarter, but for building your brand in the long-term. How well you pitch your new product (or brand) on Kickstarter will affect its future commercial potential, especially with regards to pricing. So, consider your Kickstarter campaign as part of a larger business strategy. For example, if you set you product pricing low on Kickstarter, you may have difficulty selling your product at a higher price level afterwards (to cover higher distribution and associated costs) and make a decent margin. Give backers a reason why they deserve to get your product at lower cost – let them know how much they are saving – this will allow you establish the future retail price.
Determine the best digital media channels for your business and get active on them long before your launch. Your aim should be to create a digital media presence from which to launch a multi-channel marketing campaign. These should include building email lists, search engine optimisation, followers on Twitter, Facebook and other relevant social media platforms, as part of a wider digital marketing strategy. Do this at least six months before the launch.
You will also need a website, or at least a landing page, where you can create a call-to-action, and continue promoting your project after the Kickstarter campaign finishes. Nowadays, it’s usual to continue taking pre-orders for a limited time after the campaign ends, and having a website with secure payment facilities is a good investment.
Plan Your Campaign
Kickstarter campaigns are won or lost in the marketing & PR. It’s all about targeting and relevance. Identifying your ideal customer personas and targeting them. And having a great product is a bonus!
Prepare well in advance. Create interest on social media with a “soft launch” about a month before the Kickstarter launch. Also identify the target customer, and list all of the blogs, magazines, press, and social media platforms they frequent. The aim is to get as many of the right people viewing the Kickstarter page as possible in a short space of time from many different sources.
Just because a project is live on Kickstarter doesn’t mean backers are going to flock to it in droves. Yet, many project creators believe this to be true and launch without any marketing plan! Your Kickstarter page is a web page, just like any other web page. You have to tell people it exists and convince visitors to go and view it.
In fact, you can’t depend on Kickstarter for much organic traffic at a all. Once a project slips down the Kickstarter project list page (as more new projects are added) it becomes “invisible”. After day #2, organic Kickstarter traffic is practically zero, so it’s then your PR & marketing blitz must kick in to drive traffic to your page for the remainder of the campaign.
Early momentum is crucial. 80% of successful projects reach at least 20% funding, mostly within the first few days. Projects that get off to a slow start are pretty much doomed to fail.
Research the top online magazines, blogs, and content delivery sources that can give your project the greatest exposure, and make contact. Search these websites and publications to identify journalists that have written about a similar product in the past, and pitch your story to them.
Write press releases for general distribution to smaller magazines and blogs, but try to establish a personal connection with bloggers and social media influencers, whenever possible.
Don’t forget traditional media – craft a slightly different PR approach for TV, radio,and printed media newspapers, and plan ahead to meet their publication deadlines. Send out press releases to coincide with the launch – NOT before the project is live on Kickstarter!
Create Your Kickstarter Page:
Kickstarter have a team of specialists dedicated to reviewing projects and will watch your project video, read the description, and take a look at the rewards to ensure everything complies with the rules. After it is approved for “Launch Now” you have the option of sharing the project with Kickstarter staff for feedback. Ideally, arrange a Skype meeting and ask a staff member to go through your project with you. I highly recommend that you do this; I found them very helpful, even pointing out where the page content could be improved.
Send your temporary preview link to for feedback from people will give you a constructive, honest appraisal of your project page, before you go live.
Also, if Kickstarter staff are aware of your project, you have a better chance of being awarded a “staff pick” label, which will raise your visibility on kickstarter.com. And if they really like your project, they may even make you “Featured product of the day”, which gives you top billing on Kickstarter for a whole day! Expressive MIDI Guitar got both staff pick and featured project in the few days after launch, and resulted in steady traffic from Kickstarter for the first ten days.
Choose your location
Kickstarter is well known in the US, and less so in Europe and the rest of the world. Launching a project from Ireland may have disadvantages for those hoping to sell into the US. For example, Irish based Kickstarter projects are Euro (not USD), have higher shipping costs, and cannot use Amazon Payments – all of which could put off US based Kickstarter backers. If your focus is largely on Europe, this wont’t affect you too much, but also consider having translated versions of your Kickstarter page, linked from your website, in the major European languages. It’s not good to have to rely on Google Translate to convey the nuances of your Kickstarter pitch, especially with so much information on your project page. Don’t let it get lost in mistranslation!
Set the target right
Set the target at the minimum required to get the project off the ground. Don’t pitch to high, or you will struggle throughout the campaign – aim to get 100% funded earlier, and use the remaining time to increase the funding total with “stretch goals”. Kickstarter is all-or nothing, so if the project doesn’t reach the goal amount the project won’t get funded. If your project is successfully funded, Kickstarter deducts its 5% fee, plus payment processing fees of between 3% and 5% from your total funded amount. There are no fees if funding is unsuccessful.
Project Duration
A short project duration (less than 45 days) is generally recommended, although it really depends on the project objectives. 30 to 35 days is considered the optimal duration to build excitement and maintain a sense of urgency. Any longer and the project could lose momentum as backers lose interest, and you struggle to sustain your campaign promotion.
Rewards
Kickstarter backers expect something in return for pledging their support to get your idea off the ground. Your rewards should reflect this, and should give an incentive for them to pledge. Offer something of real value in your reward tiers, and don’t expect anyone to hand over money for token rewards. Asking €25 or more for a few stickers and a “digital high five” won’t cut it.
Always include a token €1 or €2 pledge for those who just want to follow the project. This will keep them in the loop, and who knows, they may convert to a higher pledge later on.
Use the initial buzz to drive the funding at launch by offering “early bird” incentives to reward backers who get on-board from the start. Rewards are determined by product type and funding objectives, so will vary widely fro project to project. Research and find out what reward structures worked (and what didn’t) for similar projects, and adapt them to your own.
As I said before, if you set you product pricing low on Kickstarter, you may have difficulty selling your product at a higher price level afterwards to cover costs and make a decent margin. Give backers a reason why they deserve to get your product at lower cost – let them know how much they are saving with each reward – this will help to establish future retail pricing.
Project Story
Your story is the most important element of any Kickstarter campaign.
Speak to the heart, not to the head. In other words, get them excited and eager to buy into your idea. Show how your product will make their lives better or solve a particular problem – before you list all the cool technical features. Kickstarter backers want to learn about you and how your idea came about, as much as they do about the product, so inspire them. Use video to convey your passion, and include a call-to-action telling potential backers how they can get involved.
Kickstarter started out as a platform championing the amateur creator trying to get traction on their ideas. So, nobody seemed to mind the DIY approach being a bit rough around the edges. However, with Kickstarter becoming more mainstream, (and hosting more high performing projects) I notice backers now tend to expect a higher standard of presentation.
Launch hard
Success follows success, and popular projects experience the Kickstarter “bandwagon effect”. Most Kickstarter projects, even successful ones, experience a slump midway through the campaign, so expect this, and have a plan to keep excitement up and increase visitors to the project page for the duration of the campaign.
Keep your backers informed through regular updates, at least twice a week, and answer enquiries and comments promptly and honestly. Your aim should be to generate excitement and engender trust. Your backers are making this happen, so let them know how important and valued they are.
Kickstarter analytics in the administrator back-end are pretty basic to say the least, so project statistics need to be extrapolated from various sources. Kickstarter fails badly in this respect – managing a multi-channel marketing campaign without access to meaningful statistics or tracking requires a lot of guesswork and leaps of faith.
Use Kicktraq.com to get an overview of daily pledge levels, trends and projections. Convert your project link to a custom bit.ly short link, e.g. http://bit.ly/expressiv [which was created for Expressiv MIDI Guitar System], and use it in press releases and there marketing material. bit.ly links are trackable and have useful analytics. You can even convert your temporary project preview link to a custom short link, which is handy for scheduling emails, press releases and social updates in advance. [The temporary link redirects to the official project link generated by Kickstarter when the project goes live.]
Most projects experience a slump in the middle. Here are a few things that you could try to inject energy back into a stalled campaign:
- Mobilise your backers to get their friends & followers on-board, or to increase their pledge to a higher reward. Or add a little incentive to get backers to increase their pledge.
Kickstarter backers want to you to succeed, so tell them how they can help get the project funded. Asking them to share the project on social media is great, but at this stage you need money! Don’t be too shy to ask in your project updates. - Use targeted Facebook ads – define your target market and serve your ad to them. Facebook ads are effective, but only when targeted at interested audiences. Facebook makes it easy to target demographics, location, and interest.
- Identify your audience’s influencers and “reach out” to them. A high profile blogger, industry expert, celeb, whose followers are your target audience. You have an inspiring story – inspire them to share it. Search for them on Twitter and Facebook using your relevant keywords. Again relevance is key here, narrow your search to influencers who are in direct contact with your target audience.
- Find out if there are similarly themed projects already funded on Kickstarter? e.g. relating to your industry or target audiences’ interests. Like-minded Kickstarter creators may be willing to tell their backers about your project, by sharing an update through their project page (which notifies their backers by email). Previous Kickstarter backers with similar interests are far more likely to back your project too.
People are great when you need help. But show them exactly how to help – be specific – so they can direct their energy in a way that will make a real difference. And don’t be afraid to ask.
And finally a Disclaimer.
This post is by no means a definitive guide, rather a pointer in the right direction based on my own experience with Kickstarter. The web is full of great resources that give a different point of view. Google them, and use your own judgement when planning your own project. Each project is unique, but projects share many common traits and workflows. So with a little research you won’t have to reinvent the wheel. Unless you really have reinvented the wheel. Then I’ll be first in line to back that project on Kickstarter.
Good luck!