How to come up with your minimum funding goal:

Set the minimum raise as small as possible, while still being sensible:

·Backers can be scared off by a large minimum raise goal

·Exceeding your minimum early will drive extra momentum

·Funding the project many times over will look great and drive more people to see you page

… but, make sure you can deliver your project, even if you just creep over your goal

Set pledge levels that customers want

Put the prototype into peoples hands

·Ask them how much they would pay for it

·And what variations they would like for different pledge levels

Build people up from a low base

·Set the vanilla product at a low cost

·Put value-adding features to the product as affordable increments to the base price (Make it shiny, add colour, deliver some early - do what makes sense for you, your manufacturing capabilities and your product)

Choosing the campaign duration

Keep it short and sweet

· Keeping up the hype and communicating ‘scarcity’ is easier for a short campaign

Longer campaigns will extend the period where you get fewest orders

· Extending the campaign will drive additional orders

· but consider whether it’s worth it for the extra energy you will need to put in

$ or £ - Understand the impact

If you are outside the US, consider trying to put your campaign in $

· People understand $ better

· Amazon payments allows people to pay without getting out their credit card

· But you need to have a US team member

· And it will add more complexity around tax and money transfer

· Choose carefully…

How to get feedback for your campaign, that adds value

Share your project with potential backers

· Helps to get your messaging right – people will tell you what they don't understand

· Consider your product from the perspective of different groups of people that may be interested in the campaign

· Get feedback from potential backers on pricing

· Get people engaged with the campaign – means they will back the project when you launch

Pricing reward levels

Consider your retail price for the main product

· Then give a healthy discount for your backers

Don’t forget about regulators and taxes!

·Understand the regulation requirements work before launching

·Understand who will be taxing you

·Think through VAT and transferring money between currencies

·This all needs to be worked out before launch

How much time & money should you invest upfront?

You can launch a Kickstarter project with very little upfront investment

·Invest your time to prepare the project

·Be creative in getting others involved

·Manufacturing partners and videographers can be brought on to share the profits to avoid upfront costs

·Spend the money you need on finishing your product and shooting the video

·You can go from concept to project very quickly if you focus (Ben did it in 2 months)

Early momentum - Why it matters

Build early momentum is crucial

·Dramatic acceleration on day 1 is important to drive buzz and gets you onto popular pages which drives traffic throughout the campaign

Some easy tactics to drive Day 1 momentum

·Emailing friends is the first and easiest marketing activity you can do

·Reduce the price of Early Bird pledges and give extra presents to friends that pledge on the first day

·Consider pricing Early Bird pledges at cost or even free!

·Use Boomerang to email your contact list on the first day: http://www.boomeranggmail.com/

Research similar projects that succeeded

Research similar campaigns that achieved their goal

· Use the Bit.ly link trick to find where similar projects got shared

· Build out your blog list based on which blogs covered similar projects which lead to shares

How to do blogger reachout

Reaching out to blogs

· Condense your pitch into a short email and distribute it to your team

· Create additional photos and copy for journalists that get in touch

· Create a long list of all the publications where you would like to see your project covered

· Hustle to find contact details for people that you don't know – put them all in a spreadsheet

· Reach out to bloggers you know and other big publications as a priority

· Reach out to the smaller blogs once the campaign is moving

· Plan exclusives – offer one publication the chance to cover the article one day in advance of the rest

Finding email addresses can be tricky - Here is a great set of techniques to find blogger email addresses:

· http://life-longlearner.com/find-email-addresses/

Use social media effectively

Create social media surround sound

· Decide who you want to be your first set of backers

· Line up 20-30 friends in that group to ‘retweet’, ‘like’, ‘upvote’ all of your posts on day 1

· Reach target backers through social media with the same message 2-4 times in quick succession to really grab their attention and get them sharing

Tip: Harvest SEO juice

Benefit from the SEO that bloggers will bring you by linking to your site

· Set up a url on your site that links directly to your Kickstarter page e.g. www.your_site.com/kickstarter

· Ask journalists to link to this page rather than your Kickstarter page

· After the campaign you can redirect this page as you like (e.g. to a site selling your product) and benefit from the traffic that the articles will continue to drive

Find inspiration: Which campaigns inspired you?

Spend time on Kickstarter checking out campaigns and videos that you love. Analyse why you like them and how you can recreate their magic.

·Matt: Inspired by the hardware project Makey-Makey

·Andrew: Inspired by the higher vision of the 10 Year Hoodie

·Paul: Inspired by the simplicity and effectiveness of the TGT Wallet

·Adam: Inspired by capturing the reaction of the public that Remy achieved

Find inspiration outside of Kickstarter too

·Ben: took his inspiration from the Kickstarter-like Polaroid adverts

How to setup your Kickstarter page

Craft your product page like it’s a product of its own

·Communicate your message in pictures

·Communicate to the different types of people that might be looking at your page

·GIFs can demonstrate what your product does in a really simple way: How to make a gif

·Add addition content based on the questions and feedback you get from backers

·Explain what the funding will be used for

·Show off the pledges levels in picture format on the page

Manage your campaign using milestones

Break your campaign into milestones

·Achieve 20% of your funding target with close friends and your wider network (80% of campaigns that reach this milestone succeed)

·Achieve your full funding goal by reaching out to a the niche community and news outlets focused on your segment

·Go way beyond your goal by targeting other groups that may be interested and wider mainstream press

Tip: Pick the right day of the week to launch

Launch on a Tuesday and plan to complete your campaign on a Friday

·Kickstarter gets less pledges of the weekend

·As you first and last days should be your strongest, make sure they fall during the working week

·Monday, everyone will probably be a bit too busy to help you by backing your campaign immediately. Tuesday seems to work fine.

What to do on launch day

Launch day… “Be on it”

·Get your friends and key supporters primed for the minute you launch to upvote your posts, and spread the word

·Create a stock email for interested press

·Answer questions immediately

·Monitor comments, questions and feedback – a fast response will show a good signal to other people coming to the page

Should you take orders outside of Kickstarter?

CONTROVERSIAL – Make your own decision on this one

·If people want to buy your product in bulk you could take up to 30% more pre-orders by allowing backers to pay for pre-orders over Paypal (separate from Kickstarter)

·But this will add additional complexity to your project:

oYou will need to link people to orders across 2 separate databases

oYou will dilute the momentum on your Kickstarter page

You can make your life easier by clever pricing of your pledges

·Make sure that no multiple of pledges can add up to the price of another pledge – this way you can work out what people want if they increase their pledge to cover the value of two or more rewards

Keeping your campaign fresh

Keep momentum throughout your campaign

·Schedule multiple casual updates targeted at people who are asking questions about your campaign

·Keep your backers informed through Kickstarter updates

·Listen to what other pledges backers want and try to add additional pledges to upsell existing backers

Getting rewards to backers

Plan how you will deliver your rewards

·Double your estimations of time to delivery – its always better exceed backer expectations than to be late

·Consider tracked post – the extra cost will save a lot of hassle – up to 5% of untracked parcels go missing

·Budget a significant amount of time to reply to email and manage issue resolution

Communicating with backers

Communicate actively with backers

·Assign someone to manage all the communication with backers

·Be honest – don't be afraid to give bad news

·Communicate frequently, but don't let it take over your life – every couple of weeks seems to be the norm

Surveying backers the right way

Survey backers the right way

·Survey your backers for addresses as late as possible

·You can consider products like BackerKit which provide more detailed surveys and the opportunity for backers to upgrade their pledge

·Other tools that will help you survey your backers and take orders after the campaign:

oTryCelery

oShopstarter

oShopify

What drove momentum into your campaign? Day-by-day breakdown

Your project evolution

·Expect to see a big spike on day 1

·Getting featured on the various popular pages on Kickstarter will drive significant pledges for your campaign

·Mega blogs, mainstream press or syndication of stories across the web will produce spikes during your campaign

·You can try changing categories to entice people who only browse one Kickstarter category

·You will experience a ‘Valley of Death’ – don't lose heart

·Expect to see a natural spike at the end of the campaign