Note: SellanApp is no longer in business. See this tweet.
There’s no doubt that when garnering support for a game, album, or design project, Kickstarter can be a powerful tool to connect with potential backers and inject life into your idea. However, despite the successes seen in categories like publishing, hardware, and comics, the majority of software projects seem to have lagged behind, often times only attracting a few pledges if any.
For this reason, more and more developers are turning to platforms like SellanApp to fund their industry-changing apps. Nicholas Rogers, Accounting and Finance student at the University of East Anglia, England, recently raised $2,065 in 28 days on the new and growing crowdfunding platform, SellanApp.
I had the chance to speak with Nicholas and gain some insight into his thoughts on this platform and how he went about hustling his way to 2k in less than a month. Check out some awesome crowdfunding tips for apps and software below.
Where does your passion for money management come from or what introduced you to this problem
I am an Accounting and Finance student and found it was difficult to ration my grant and student loan funds throughout the semester. In-turn, I developed an excel spreadsheet on my phone so that I could input every time I withdrew money from my bank account so that I could keep on track. This was slow and it was often difficult to zoom in to the correct date and input withdrawals. I thought that an app would be perfectly suited to this purpose and when I found out that many of my friends at University suffered from the same problem, I set out to create Study Money
SellanApp vs. Kickstarter
We decided to use SellanApp as opposed to Kickstarter or Indiegogo because it seemed to work for app ideas. We had not seen any app ideas on the traditional crowdfunding platforms from individuals and as a result thought a platform designed for this purpose was the perfect place for our campaign. Another reason was that SellanApp handles all the revenue sharing to pledgers and admin side of the app once the app is developed, which would give us more time to market the app and focus on updates that users want.
Marketing a Crowdfunding Campaign
We tried numerous methods of marketing including contacting various app review sites, facebook, twitter and word of mouth. Facebook did not prove effective to our campaign. We received 99 clicks throughout the whole campaign and this converted to practically no pledges. Facebook does not seem the place to attract investors, but instead gain downloads once the app is created. We found that re-tweets were very successful in bringing in pledges. Once SellanApp tweeted about us we received over $1,000 in less than 24 hours!
Useful Resources
I found this article in Gamasutra useful for inspiration when there were few pledges in the middle of the campaign.
Other articles to check out:
How to raise money on Kickstarter
How to successfully relaunch your failed Kickstarter campaign
Seth Godin: Reflection on Today’s Kickstarter
25 Killer Kickstarter Reward Ideas
Lessons Learned
Doing it again, I would try to gain some potential pledgers and generate some enthusiasm about the app before I had started the campaign. Unfortunately, I did not tell many people outside my immediate family that I was running a crowdfunding campaign, when my family and friends found out about the campaign they wanted to pledge but could not as the campaign had finished. This was a disappointment as there was a lot of support there that I did not reach out to.
Another thought was that I wish I had paid more attention to the idea of the ‘bath tub curve’ when my app idea was in funding. The ‘bath tub curve’ if you do not know is the pledge trend that crowdfunding campaigns generally have, I would say that I received around 90% of my pledges in the first day and final 5 days. I felt myself getting anxious that we were not going to reach enough pledges to make our app idea happen, however this anxiety did help push me to promote the app more.
