The Complete Kickstarter & Indiegogo Launch Guide 2024

Welcome to the first chapter of this course. This chapter is meant to give you an overview of crowdfunding in general, and get you acquainted with the terms, opportunities, and challenges that come with crowdfunding.

We’ll start by getting acquainted with different types of crowdfunding platforms, followed by a breakdown comparison of Kickstarter and Indiegogo, the two major product crowdfunding platforms on the market. After that, we’ll dive a little deeper into the core elements that make for successful crowdfunding campaigns.

The last few lessons of this chapter will be concerned with the inner mechanics of crowdfunding. We’ll discuss when is a good time to actually launch, go over what a typical crowdfunding timeline looks like, and finally discuss some of the common pitfalls and challenges many campaigns face.

When you complete this chapter, you will have a solid base from which to move on to the first actionable topics of starting your crowdfunding journey.

See you in the next lesson, and in the meantime, happy funding!

This is an introduction to crowdfunding in general that will give you an overview of the crowdfunding world, how it came to be, and the different options and opportunities you can find within it.

I’ll introduce some of the bigger and smaller players on the market and touch on the subject of crowdfunding versus crowdinvesting, as well as how the two can work together. I’ll also take a minute to address the question of launching your product on crowdfunding versus other platforms, such as your own website.

So with that, let’s dive into it.

In this lesson, we will focus on the key differences between Kickstarter and Indiegogo as crowdfunding platforms on which to launch your product.

By the end of this lesson, you will understand more about the pluses and minuses of launching on each platform, as well as the challenges and risks that each one presents.

We’ll also talk about less-discussed topics such as fee structures and funding goals, so that you can make an informed decision about which platform is right for you.

This lesson is an overview of the key ingredients needed in any successful crowdfunding campaign.

It’s by no means meant to give you all the answers you need - that’s what we have the entire course for - but it is meant to help you understand the core elements that can make or break your campaign.

In this lesson, we will speak about the perfect time to launch your campaign.

We’ll make sense of the different factors that can affect the success of your campaign depending on what time you plan to launch, and provide you with the research-backed information you need to make an informed decision about your launch time.

A crowdfunding campaign is an exciting and sometimes terrifying journey. And it’s a much longer journey than just the time your campaign is live. It’s everything you do leading up to your campaign and after it as well - all the planning, designing, brainstorming, researching, copywriting, filming, advertising… It’s a many-headed beast of a thing, and trying to grasp the magnitude of it before you take your first steps down the road can be a difficult task.

So in this lesson, I’ll walk you through all the steps and stages of a typical crowdfunding campaign and organize them on a timeline. At the end of this lesson, you should have a clear birdseye view of all the moving parts that comprise a crowdfunding campaign, as well as the confidence that comes with knowing what exactly lies ahead of you.

Keep in mind that the timeline can be tweaked and structured a bit differently depending on your product, goals, and needs, but you can still use this one as a guiding compass for what to expect.

We don’t hide the fact that crowdfunding is hard. In fact, we even chose to showcase that claim on the homepage of the Adrivium website. This is because we believe that any creator should have a clear idea of what they are up against in order for them to have good chances at success.

So in the final lesson for this introductory chapter, I’d like to list the most common challenges you can expect to encounter along your crowdfunding journey, and explain what you can do early on in order to make them much more manageable, and reduce any risks to you or your backers as much as possible.

Welcome to chapter two, in which we will cover everything to do with prototyping and producing your product.

Bringing your product to mass production is a process that takes many months, sometimes even years. Many of you will have already taken at least the first steps needed to ready yourself for mass production, and some of you have already done the whole process at least once in the past.

But regardless of which stage your product is at, this lesson is here to spell out the journey and help you find any blind spots you may have within your own process.

Many creators already have all the tools and knowledge they need for prototyping and production. But that’s a function of experience and budget, and it’s not always the case. In reality, a lot of creators struggle with how to actually prototype, where to find production partners and factories, and how to set everything up. So we created this lesson to help with that, and provide you with a view of the types of options out there so you can take your idea to the next level.

It’s time to speak about a question that concerns many creators seeking to launch their product on crowdfunding - where to get extra support, funding, and resources?

In this chapter we’re going to start diving into the actual meat and bones of your campaign. Throughout this chapter, you’ll learn how to do your research, collect valuable feedback, define your product and users, and create the message surrounding your product.

Following the steps and guidelines outlined in this chapter will provide you with the three most important foundations for your entire crowdfunding campaign, focusing on your product, user, and message. These foundations will accompany you and be your close friends and knowledge bases until your launch and well after it as well.

Researching, brainstorming, and writing great copy are the building blocks of any successful campaign, that’s true. But feedback is what validates your ideas or signals to you that maybe you should take a different course of action, or tweak something along your journey.

Feedback allows you to fine-tune your product, your marketing, and even the type of rewards you offer on your campaign - all things that will ultimately maximize your chances of success during and after your crowdfunding campaign.

This lesson is going to focus on researching your competition. If you’re new to this, it might be a bit daunting initially, so we’ll cover where and how to start and how to research on and off crowdfunding platforms. And most importantly, we’ll discuss how to get actionable insights from your research results.

What makes brainstorming so important in the first place, apart from getting you and your team together with a beer in your hand, is that it allows you to step out of your own head and combine the skills and creativity of your entire team. One team member could be more of a product person. Another could be more creative, and a third could have a way with words that you didn’t expect. But together, you can create insights and materials that are greater than the sum of their parts.

Even more importantly, these productive and informative brainstorming sessions will produce the three foundations of your campaign - product, users, and message - which will be the backbone of your entire crowdfunding project. You will find yourself returning again and again to the insights and materials you’ve collected in your brainstorming sessions, and using them as a base on which to build a well-executed, successful crowdfunding campaign.

This lesson is the first of three intended to give you the tools to create the three foundations of your campaign by defining your product, identifying your users, and creating the killer marketing content surrounding your campaign, or i n other words, the message. Each lesson represents a separate brainstorming session you should have with your team. Don’t try doing them all at once. Take at least a few days between each session so that there’s time and space for new thoughts to come up, coins to drop, and lightbulb moments to happen.

At the end of these three brainstorming sessions, you will have your foundations ready. We like to call them All About the Product, All About the User, and All About the Message. They are, essentially, the answers to these questions:

• What did you make?

• Who is it for?

• and Why should they care?

You’ve already defined what your product is, now it’s time to define who will use your product, and how they will use it. After following this lesson, you will have built the second foundation for your campaign, which will allow you to better understand your potential users and pinpoint the right target audience for your campaign.

In this lesson you will learn how to use the two foundations you’ve created for your product and users to create the third and final foundation for your campaign - your message. It’s about how you take all the knowledge you’ve gathered and distill it into bite-sized, easily understood snippets of information that will make your product and your campaign instantly relatable.

It’s the message you transmit to the world. It’s your sales pitch. It’s how you are going to draw people in, keep them around for a while, and convince them that your product is worthwhile.

So we’ll discuss how to create that message and how to make sure that it tells the right story in a pointed, convincing way.

In crowdfunding, content really is king. Your campaign video is one premium type of content you’ll be creating, but so is your campaign page, pictures and GIFs, and claims and copywriting. This chapter is all about content. Throughout, I’ll guide you through examples, and best practices for your video, photos, ads, landing page, and campaign page.

We’ll also have deep dive sessions to really go into some of the details of what makes good content great, and what you can do to adopt the insights we’ll find there.

Great content is always the result of a process. So make sure you start working on your content early on, collect lots of feedback, and keep an open mind about what works and what doesn’t.

With that in mind, let’s jump right in.

Should you shoot your own crowdfunding video or pay a production company to do it for you? The answer to this question depends on your experience in video creation, your budget, and your availability. So in this short lesson, I just want to give you some thoughts about the directions you can take your video before we get into the details of what makes a great crowdfunding video.

What did you make? Who is it for? Why should they care about it? These are the three questions that a great crowdfunding video should answer. These are also the three questions that you’ve already answered in your brainstorming sessions.

For your video, you need to compress the answers to these questions, along with months, in some cases years of hard work into just a few minutes of video, and make sure that it’s interesting, informative, and convincing, all at the same time.

Fortunately, successful crowdfunding videos have several common characteristics that can be identified and used as a base for your own video. So before we speak about the actual process of making your video, here are our guidelines for crowdfunding videos that work.

In this lesson, we’ll talk about common types of scripts for crowdfunding videos, what’s important to keep in mind, how to organise everything in a document, and why it’s important to think of logistics and budgeting while you’re doing it.

Welcome back. This lesson is all about photos. The photos you use in and around your campaign will help your backers understand your product, sympathise with it, and imagine themselves using it. It’s the closest they’ll come during your campaign to feeling like whatever you’re offering is something tangible that’s just around the corner from them. Good photos, used correctly, will bring you more pledges.

So in this lesson, we’ll talk about the types of pictures you should shoot and prepare before you launch, all the different applications they will be used for, and also how to organise your shooting days in advance so that you don’t miss anything.

This lesson will show you how a good landing page can really boost your crowdfunding strategy. We’ll start by understanding why building and promoting a landing page is important, as well as what you can use it for before and during your campaign. Then I’ll present eight guidelines for killer landing pages.

At this point, you have everything you need to build your killer pre-campaign landing page. You know how you want it to look, and you’re ready to build it according to the eight must-have guidelines for killer landing pages. But finding the right service to use can be a confusing task. All the websites offering landing page creation seem to claim that they have the most user-friendly interface and the best features. So where to build your landing page? Which service to use? What are the differences between them in features and pricing?

Fortunately, we did the heavy lifting for you and reviewed some of the most common options out there. In this lesson we’ll discuss them, along with their features and pricing, so that you can make an informed decision as to what landing page service is right for you.

It’s finally time for you to build your campaign page, so in this lesson we’ll go over our guidelines for an appealing campaign page, and give you a breakdown of all the elements you should have on your page. We’ll also touch on the subject of getting your campaign approved.

Welcome to one of the most important chapters of this course, hands down. I’m saying this because your pre-launch strategy will, to a great extent, decide how successful your launch will be, which in turn will decide to a great extent how successful your entire campaign will be.

So again, this chapter will include some of the most important lessons in the entire course. In it, you will learn all about building a community around your campaign, using social media to your advantage, and promoting your all-important landing page organically.

We’ll also speak about how you can use email as a powerful tool for your campaign, as well as what to do to get quality press, blogs, and journalists to write about you.

I’m excited to share this information with you, because for me and for the teams I’ve worked with in the past, we could always see a direct link between the strength and quality of our pre-launch communication and the effectiveness of the launch itself.

So with that in mind, the next lesson will be all about how to go about building a community around your project.

Building a community before you launch is one of the best ways to make sure that you have a strong launch. And having a strong launch is one of the best ways to make sure that your campaign will be successful.

In this lesson you’ll learn how to build a community around your campaign before you launch. We’ll speak about the types of people who make up your community, as well as how and where to start drawing people in and creating your community in the first place.

In this lesson we’ll discuss how to create and populate your social media calendar with valuable, relevant content for your pre-launch social media strategy. A social media calendar is what you will use in order to make sure that you are posting on a regular basis in all the right channels. The time leading up to your campaign is hectic. You’ll be juggling tons of tasks and thoughts, and a social media calendar will simply lift the burden of remembering what, where, and how often to post on social media.

Social media is a great way to get your message across to a larger audience and get them interested in your product, but email is the number one tool for converting them into backers. In this lesson, I’ll show you the best ways to use email marketing before the launch of your campaign. If you’re interested in using the email templates for pre-launch that have worked best for us, you’re welcome to download them from the downloads section of this lesson.

In the previous lesson, we saw how email can act as a powerful tool for your pre-campaign strategy by keeping in touch with your leads, directing them to additional communication channels, and engaging them in conversation and feedback requests. Now, that’s great, but where to get leads in the first place, and how to ensure that those leads are quality leads - leads that will have better chances at converting when you launch?

In the next lesson I’ll show you how to do that with paid ads, but in this lesson you will see how to get leads organically, without spending anything. The number of leads you’ll get this way will depend on the amount of legwork you can put in to the task, and will most likely be less than what you can get through paid advertising, but the quality of the leads will be much higher, as they will basically be people you’ve been in direct personal contact with rather than people who’ve clicked on your ad.

I’m sure we’ve all seen it. Dozens of media logos on campaigns that have just launched. How? Why? What can you do to get that as well? Is it worth the effort? Is it even necessary for a successful campaign?

In this lesson, we’ll speak about where and how to reach out to journalists, blog writers, and influencers, and how to get them interested in your campaign.

this chapter will go over everything you should double check before you launch, exactly what you should do at the moment of launch, and of course, what you can and should be doing throughout the time your campaign is live in order to maximise its effectiveness.

First, we’ll briefly discuss the subtle art of writing a good launch email with an effective subject line and a great call to action. Then we’ll go over a pre-launch checklist together so that you can make sure that all your ducks are in a row when you feel ready to go. After that, we’ll systematically go through all the actions you should do at the moment of your launch.

After we deal with the stressful launch stage, we’ll set some lessons aside to discuss what you should be doing throughout your campaign in order to stay sane, make your backers feel good with the right communication, and bring in more pledges organically. This will include updates, cross promotions, social media work, and backer communication.

The last lessons in this chapter will deal with the more technical aspects of your campaign duration, namely paid advertising for your campaign, understanding your analytics on Google and on Kickstarter and Indiegogo, and for Kickstarter specifically, how to calculate your return on investment and run Facebook retargeting ads even though you don’t have a Facebook Pixel installed on your campaign page. In this context, we’ll also dive briefly into a discussion about the different services surrounding Kickstarter and Indiegogo campaigns - what you can expect to get from them, and how you can choose the services that are right for you.

Let’s be honest: shipping is by far the least sexy, and arguably the most complicated aspect of your crowdfunding campaign. It involves figuring out the mechanics of packaging, supply chains, and international shipping laws, and most importantly, understanding how they all affect your costs. It’s not surprising that one of the most common reasons campaigns fail to deliver after being successfully funded is unplanned shipping costs that simply destroy their cashflow.

The good news is that you can prevent this from happening to you by planning your shipping and calculating your costs in advance, and this is what this chapter is all about. It’s also why it's one of the first chapters in this course, even though shipping is one of the last things you’ll do on your crowdfunding journey.

In a nutshell, International Commercial Terms, or Incoterms, govern the responsibilities of buyers and sellers. In your case, the buyer is you, and the seller is your factory. These terms are important to understand because they help you understand the steps in the freight shipping process. They provide answers to the questions - When will the delivery be completed? What are the conditions for transportation? and who takes on the risks and insurance costs for each step of the shipping journey?