Kickstarter - why you must start strong
I’m a few days into my seventh Kickstarter campaign. It’s still early days but I’m pleased with the progress so far.
As much as I was happy with my pre-launch preparation, I was still nervous about how it would all go. Even having run several successful campaigns before, every time is different and you can never quite be sure how things will play out.
24 hours into my latest KickstarterA strong start
Everyone says that you need a strong start to a campaign and that’s definitely true. This is where all the hard work you’ve done before a campaign pays off.
When this latest campaign launched, it went pretty smoothly and I reached my target within a few hours. It’s a great sight when you see the funding trajectory heading steeply up like that, but it takes a lot of preparation.
My funding progress after the fist few hoursSuccessful funding has three key parts:
Bring your own audience to ensure a strong start
Pick up Kickstarter backers
Grow via marketing
Bring your audience with you
A common mistake is to expect people to just find you on Kickstarter once your project is up and running. There are several thousand Kickstarter campaigns live at any given time and your project will easily be lost in the crowd.
Launch day is not the time to start telling people about your project. That’s too late.
When your campaign launches you want lots and lots of people to be waiting for it and excited to back you straight away. You’ll need to have an already-engaged audience lined up. Ideally they’ll be subscribed to a mailing list, or signed up as a ‘follower’ on your Kickstarter pre-launch page. Just a few clicks away from backing your new project.
My website mailing list and list of previous Kickstarter backers was quite strong, but for this project I only had a few hundred pre-launch followers. And even that was because I delayed my launch by a couple of weeks so there were a few more of them. Next time I might leave my campaign in the ‘pre-launch’ state for longer. It’s a relatively new feature from Kickstarter that campaigns in the ‘pre-launch’ state are now visible in search results on the platform. Previously a project was effectively invisible before it was live.
As well as updating your followers via mailing lists, etc, one specific thing you can do is to identify people who you think might back your project at some point - friends family, previous customers, etc, and do your best to make sure they back you as soon at your project launches. And I mean as soon as possible. Your aim should be within minutes of launch!
If you can encourage all these pre-campaign contacts to back your project early it will open up the next part and you’ll find a significant chunk of your backers organically within Kickstarter.
But if you fail at this first part, everything thereafter will be an uphill struggle.
Picking up backers from Kickstarter
If you’ve given yourself that strong start to your campaign, and you’re doing well on days one and two, people are more likely to find your project organically on Kickstarter. That early momentum will carry you a long way.
Kickstarter wants to show people projects that they’re likely to back. If a project is getting lots of backers early on, that’s a signal that yours is a worthy project.
If people are searching by project category, location, etc, they’re more likely to be served up your project if it’s doing well.
On the Kickstarter homepage for example, is a section called ‘Fresh Favourites’. My project was showing up there for the first few days of my campaign and that’s excellent.
Fresh Favourites on the Kickstarter homepageWhere did my early backers come from?
After the first 24 hours, just under half of my backers had come from within Kickstarter. That would’ve included some random people finding my campaign when browsing Kickstarter, but also those people who were following my pre-launch page and were aware of me already.
Project dashboard after 24 hoursHalf of backers came via “custom referrers”.
In the Kickstarter creator dashboard you can set up custom referral links to track how people found your project. You do this by generating unique URLs to share with specific groups of people.
For example, I used different custom referral links when I shared my launch via my website mailing list, via previous Kickstarter project updates, and in emails to journalists, etc. That way I can see which methods work best and try and optimise my strategy for next time.
The links look something like this:
Anyone who clicks on that link (note the “?ref=ccqefk” at the end of the URL) and then backs my project will show up on my dashboard as having found the project via this blog post.
During the first 24 hours my most lucrative custom referral link was from the update I posted to my previous One Deck Game Cards project. This brought in 10% of my funding on day one.
Onwards
I’ve been encouraged by my start, but the rate of funding will inevitability slow during the middle of the campaign.
After using up your pre-existing list of potential backers to give yourself a strong start, in order to keep momentum you’ll need to find new ones. These can either come from with Kickstarter itself, from paid ads, or from new sources of social or press coverage. You can of course also send reminders to that first group.
For this Kickstarter I’m offering “early bird” rewards to give backers a better price when backing in the first week of the project. That’s likely to mean the first week does better. It can also mean that there’s a spike as that week comes to an end and then a subsequent lull afterwards. Early bird strategy is probably worth a discussion in a future post.
After an expected relatively quiet middle of a campaign, pledges will hopefully pick up towards the end as people don’t want to miss out. Also, if anyone has ‘saved’ the project, they’ll get an email from Kickstarter 48 hours before the end of the campaign which usually means the last couple of days are good.
These factors mean that the daily funding progress for a Kickstarter campaign often resembles a U-shape.
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We’ll see how this all plays out over the next three weeks or so and I’ll share more thoughts and insights at the end.
And of course, if you haven’t seen the project itself yet, you should definitely click below!
