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Leather Dice Bags raised over $7,000 on Kickstarter.
Listen to your Backers. Respond in a timely manner, with real information. If it would bother you as a Backer, don’t do it. Still not sure? Ask your Backers. Don’t say something unless you really mean it. Nothing bothers me more than when a project creator goes back on something they’ve said. If you aren’t sure, tell your Backers that. Better to be honest and upfront than disappointing later on.
You can see exactly what order your Backers appear in; you could offer reward fulfillment in a first come, first serve basis. I didn’t realize that before I started. – See the full interview here.
The Carpenter Collection Has Raised over $39,000 and is still going.
The number 1 message I have to share is this: You will not relax during your campaign – because when you do, it means less traffic.
When I’m out at a bar seeing a friend, or buying groceries, or relaxing to a movie – I can’t sit still long because the only thing running through my head is “right now – by not publicizing your project – you are lessening your funding potential”
I have been glued to my computer and phone for the past 2 weeks and expect to do the same for the rest of the campaign. There are always more blogs, writers, boards, etc. to pursue for press – all of that on top of working on the actual projects rewards themself.
Heres one thing thats awesome. All of our manufacturing, supply chain, packager, etc. are now taking us 100% seriously. Not to say they didn’t before, but previously things went a bit slower as all i would have was a “theoretical potential” to present to them. – This campaign is still raising money!
Electron Microscopy Art raised more than £2,000 on Kickstarter.
That it is very hard work without a strong community behind you! I am not doing too badly now, but it is getting harder as time goes on. I had quite a few backers from the recently launched section on Kickstarter but that has dried up and I am now utilizing all my social media networks (Google+, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, DeviantArt and some forums I am involved with). I have a few more areas I can explore but it is a lot of work to get each and every backer. I timed it so that this project fell over a holiday I had, so I can focus on it, but it would be difficult if I didn’t have so much time during the day to promote it.
I would say about half of my backers are people I know so far, half I don’t. While I am trying to remain positive, I am not sure this is going to be successful, but I will try my hardest to make it so. You will spend a lot of time on the project, both in building the actual page and video and much more in the work that follows the launch. Work out the best time of year as well. I considered a few angles but on reflection there are a few that I should have taken into account and worked around them. I will know for next time, this will not be the only project I do via this method.
Check out Electron Microsphy’s Kickstarter campaign and their website.
Planet Defiant raised more than $32,000 on Kickstarter.
We aren’t a big box company, we’re two guys who work 9 to 5 and are trying to make our dream come true. We did our best to build a community. We had the website built, we had all of our social media pages made and we told everyone we knew. But, even then we live in a small county of less than 100,000 people (Note: I said county not city. ) the city we live in has less than 15,000 people. So if you think that we know about 1% of the people, that’s about 1,000 person out reach.
Then we messaged everyone under the sun about ad sponsorships, interviews, plugs, or whatever else we could get. Out of the hundreds of people we sent messages out to, two places posted about us and a couple Facebook pages dropped our name. After that we decided we NEEDED ad space. We have spent close to $800.
It seems like our effort is going well. For being a company that doesn’t have a much of a following (at all) and a completely unknown project we are managing to stay around a 7% conversion rate and have raised almost $15,000 in less than four days! I think that’s pretty good.
However it is more than a full time job. Between the two of us it is pretty hard to cover everything going on especially after an eight hour workday. We are essentially pulling 18 to 20 hour days just to keep up with good updates, planned videos, advertising and communication, and replying to comments/messages.
Anyway, my biggest advice would be find the biggest social websites surrounding your market, for us there is Kicktraq (which is huge for boardgames, even though you’d think it would be good for all Kickstarter projects), BoardGameGeek.com, ReaperMinis, and Tabletop Gaming News, not to mention a slew of other forums to post on. Even if your project doesn’t get picked up by the people that look at it, their footprint increases your traffic volume which bumps you up on the most popular list. In two days we made $8,5000, but once we broke the top ten most popular on Kickstarter’s Tabletop section, we blew up to $13,000 by the end of our third day.
Check out Planet Defiant’s Kickstarter campaign and their website.
Bleedback – The End is Nigh raised $4,000+ on Kickstarter.
One thing we learned during the campaign is to put together relevant industry contacts in a spreadsheet before the Kickstarter campaign, not after. We lost a bit of time searching for bloggers to send out our press release within the second week of our campaign. Again, have a marketing strategy before your Kickstarter campaign with relevant contacts already researched and available and press releases ready to go.
When we wanted to send out our press release, we researched bloggers/news organizations and put them all in an organized spreadsheet. You have to do a bit of an investigation to find their e-mails. If you get stuck with a contact form there is no harm in posting your message in there. If you are lucky enough to find their phone number, it is always helpful to do a follow up call after sending off your press release.
We found that a successful method to get bloggers to notice you is by building a connection with them through social media, before you have launched your campaign. It is important to go through your Twitter followers to see who is following you. We direct messaged all the bloggers/blog twitter accounts following us, and almost everyone we contacted responded positively, leading to publicity.
Check out the full interview here.
