I raised over £100k on Kickstarter. Here’s how it went - Part 2

I’ve just finished my seventh Kickstarter campaign and it was my most successful project yet. So how did I, as a solo Kickstarterer with a relatively small budget, raise over £100k?

Last week I shared an overview of the funding for that campaign and a breakdown of the sources of backers. Now I’ll look at the factors that I think made this Kickstarter a big success.

Generally you get better at something if you do it enough times, and crowdfunding is no exception. But I don’t think it’s as simple as that.

The graph below shows the funding totals of all my campaigns, and over time there is more or less an upward trend, but it’s not a particularly strong fit.

My Kickstarter campaigns (excluding a mini one which was part of Kickstarter’s Make 100 campaigns)

Incidentally, the numbers are relatively similar for the total number of backers per project, which in many ways is a better metric of success than money raised.

Practice makes perfect

It’s significant that my best Kickstarter has come after six previous ones. Some reasons for this are obvious and others less so.

If you're embarking on your first Kickstarter campaign that might not be encouraging, but here are some ways I’ve got better at Kickstarter over time, and how you can learn from them too.

Firstly, I just know how the Kickstarter platform works and can make each project better based on feedback from previous projects. It also takes me a lot less time to put together my photos, videos, project page, etc. That efficiency frees up time to spend on potentially more impactful things like marketing outreach.

I'm better at that marketing outreach too. The nature of that endeavour is that you inevitably get quite a low response rate on your pitches, but it's worth it because a few big ones can pay off. With my early campaigns I had enormous sprawling lists of people and places to pitch my project to.

Not pretty - one of my early marketing lists

I still have quite long lists, but my process has been streamlined over the years. Even better, these days I have some specific contacts that are more likely to allow my foot in the PR door.

An existing audience

When I launch a new product these days, I have a readymade list of previous backers and a mailing list from my website where I’ve been selling products post-Kickstarter.

This is the big one that everyone talks about. You’ll be told you need to build up a big mailing list before your campaign starts. There are lots of ways to build up such a list. After multiple Kickstarters I have the advantage of having thousands of previous backers of my projects who are engaged and trust me to deliver on my ideas.

Although interestingly, repeat backers weren’t actually a massive proportion of backers for this last project. They were however critical in the early hours and days of my campaign in helping me get a strong start.

If you’re running your first campaign it’s obviously not possible to shortcut your way to a list of previous backers to call upon, but you can still build up a mailing list through a website, social media, and even paid ads.

The right product

It’s amazing how many people neglect to talk enough about the actual product when it comes to Kickstarter. The focus is often on things like the mechanics of running a campaign, marketing strategy and optimising the Kickstarter project page.

Those are clearly important things if you want to do well, but they need to be built upon the foundation of a solid product offering.

A good Kickstarter product isn’t exactly the same as a good product. With Kickstarter you’re selling the idea of a future product. People need to want your product and be willing to pay for it, but also be happy to wait months for it.

My latest project was my fourth deck of playing cards I launched on Kickstarter and also V2.0 of a previous deck.

Original One Deck cards & the follow-up Mini One Deck

These two products have now been my most and second most funded campaigns. They are clearly the types of products that resonate well with a Kickstarter audience.

My two most successful campaign - One Deck V1.0 and V2.0

I obviously thought these were good products otherwise I wouldn’t have launched them, but I don’t think I’d have predicted they’d have done so much better than my other decks of cards. With hindsight though, I can see how they’re the kind of intriguing, easily explainable idea that work well on the platform. And they’re something people want, but don’t need immediately.

You can do all the work to come up with and validate a new product idea, but until the rubber hits the road you never quite know how it will be received. Perhaps one message here is the power of persistence - keep trying until you hit on something that sells.

Success without breaking the bank

When you search for advice about successful Kickstarter campaigns you'll usually find the stories of the million dollar projects. Almost universally, it's likely that those kind of campaigns cost $100k to run - a lot of that going to marketing services and paid advertising.

If you have the money then that’s great, but I feel that it distorts expectations around what it’s like to run a successful Kickstarter campaign.

I actually believe that ten years ago it might have been possible to raise seven-figure funding without a six-figure budget. But these days I think that could almost never happen. Kickstarter has matured a lot and has become a much more competitive place. In many ways that's sad, but it is what it is.

With big-budget campaigns, the funding also gets significantly diluted by fees to marketing agencies and aggressive advertising spend. A million-dollar Kickstarter campaign can easily become an expensive vanity project with not much left at the end for the creator.

For my campaigns I prefer to stay within my means, and ultimately build a sustainable business on the back of Kickstarter product launches. I also like to offer better prices to my Kickstarter backers and sacrifice some profit there to get me to a place where I can sell more profitably through regular ecommerce.

To be clear, I do spend money on paid advertising, but a relatively modest amount, and only when I'm getting an acceptable return on that ad spend. I'll probably dive deeper into that subject another time.

Successful advertising also ties back to having a good product. A key metric here is ROAS - return on ad spend. You can spend a tonne of money to get your Kickstarter project in front of people, but if they ultimately don’t want your product, that’ll be wasted. Does your product resonate with people? Will they click and will they back the project?

Obviously not everyone who sees an ad for your Kickstarter project will end up backing you, but you want it to be enough that makes the paid advertising worth your while.

Luck

I’ve definitely got a better sense of how Kickstarter works than when I ran my first campaign, and I’m better at knowing what levers to pull to give me the best chance of success. But there are still variables out of my control and plenty of luck involved.

There are things you can control when it comes to your project —  the timing of your Kickstarter launch for example, but some you can’t.

When you’re trying to get your story picked up by a journalist or blogger, you can’t control what else happens to hit their inbox that week. Your project might also be impacted by other projects launched on Kickstarter at the same time. While there’s not much you can do about these specific externalities, you can stack the odds in your favour even if you can’t guarantee success.

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If you’re working on your own project then you might be interested in reading my previous blog posts sharing my Kickstarter experience.

And if there’s anything else you’d like me to cover in this blog, or if you’d like specific feedback or help with your project, please get in touch.