I first discovered Natalie Sisson and her blog, The Suitcase Entrepreneur, when I came across her article, 7 Do-It-Yourself Tricks to Run a Successful Kickstarter Campaign and How To Go Full Tilt To Raise Your First $10,000
Natalie had recently raised £6,021 on Kickstarter for her book, The Suitcase Entrepreneur: Creating Freedom in Business and Adventure in Life. In response to a flood of questions as to how she managed to attract nearly 200 backers in 30 days, Natalie crafted this blog article and a book on the topic, How to Successfully Crowd Fund Your Dream Idea on Kickstarter. Below, I’ve included an overview of the book and my thoughts on the product.
Overview
The book is aimed at introducing beginners to the concept of crowdfunding, along with providing tips and tricks as to how to run a successful Kickstarter or Indiegogo campaign.
Natalie starts by highlighting some of the major crowdfunding platforms out there and how they differ from each other. She then goes on to analyze five successful Kickstarter campaigns, distilling why she believes the campaigns were successful and the lessons to be learned from the creators. For 3 of these Kickstarter campaigns and one Indiegogo campaign analysis, Natalie included the audio and transcript of the interviews she conducted with the creators. She also briefly highlighted two Kickstarter campaigns that failed, along with a few reasons as to why they didn’t gain as much traction as some of the more successful campaigns.
Finally, the remaining tips for creators looking to launch a Kickstarter project are distilled from Natalie’s own experience running her campaign and a checklist she developed to help guide newcomers through the process of crowdfunding a project.
The book ends with a discussion between Natlie and Katie Rock, the founder of Activyst who raised 67K on Indiegogo for female athletic bags, about the emerging crowdfunding industry.
My Thoughts
When I first began reading the book, I was a little wary about the advice the author was imparting to newcomers in the crowdfunding space. I found a few assertions about particular platforms that weren’t entirely true or did not capture the entire picture, which could negatively influence decision making for creators (these elements were corrected in the latest version of the book).
However, as I continued reading I found the interviews that were conducted of successful campaign creators to be especially helpful on the subjects of how to go about marketing your campaign, crafting reward tiers, attracting PR, and using communication strategies. In addition, the transcript format and the bullet points outlining the lessons learned makes it easy to go back and reference the interviews at a later date.
I do wish that the author spent more time on the section explaining why particular Kickstarter campaigns failed and how you too can avoid this fate. Of course, this can be difficult, as many creators may prefer to not dwell or reflect on their failures in an interview, particularly if they are public.
I think that the strongest section of the book and the most helpful is when Natalie Sisson describers her own experiences with Kickstarter. Instead of going the traditional publishing route, Sission turned to Kickstarter for her book project.
“I knew Kickstarter was a powerful platform for creating buzz, exposure and rallying not only my existing community, but a new audience of people interested in creating freedom in business and adventure in life.”
Her insights include the preparation timeline for her campaign, the breakdown of the traffic sources, and which marketing actions contributed to specific spikes in backer growth.
One of my favorite takeaways from the book is the emphasis it places on the need to hustle to achieve. This is a message I continually repeat throughout posts on the KickstarterForum and on this blog. You can’t expect your campaign to fund itself. As Natalie says, “Become your own PR agent.”
Overall, I think the interviews of successful Kickstarter campaign creators and Natalie’s story of raising £6,021 on Kickstarter from nearly 200 backers are the strongest and most helpful portions of this book. If you are new to raising money online and are thinking of launching a Kickstarter campaign, but don’t know where to start, I definitely think Natalie’s “How to Successfully Crowd Fund Your Dream Idea on Kickstarter” will be a good initial $18.00 investment. There may be cheaper options out there, but I would personally set aside $50-100 to master the topic of crowdfunding before diving in (in addition to reading free resources). I’ve certainly spent more than this on business books before launching new ventures.
Natalie’s articles, 7 Do-It-Yourself Tricks to Run a Successful Kickstarter Campaign and How To Go Full Tilt To Raise Your First $10,000 and How To Create A Kick Ass Crowdfunding Campaign And Make Your Dreams Come True will give you a flavor of her writing style.
If you are farther along in the process of crafting a Kickstarter campaign and have already researched heavily, this may not be a perfect fit for you, but it still has a lot of useful information.
