Do you want to use Kickstarter to start a small business?
You’ve seen the success of highly popular Kickstarter and crowdfunding campaigns and you wanna get in the action.
I don’t blame you. In fact, there are so many projects that have raised millions of dollars on Kickstarter. Many of them have come on my podcast and shared their stories with my listeners.
There is a proven path for starting a new small business with Kickstarter. And today, I want to share it with you. Just follow these easy steps and you’ll have:
- The money to get started
- A loyal fanbase of early-adopter customers
- Journalists and bloggers wanting to write about you
- A great success story to get even more future funding
If you haven’t yet, you can join my Facebook group, where we discuss how to get started with a Kickstarter campaign, or you can join my online forum here.
#1: Is Your Product Right for Kickstarter?
Almost any business CAN use Kickstarter. However, it’s certainly a better fit for some rather than others.
The Kickstarter community LOVES certain types of projects and others find it hard to get traction and funding, even when they have an expert on their side.
In my experience, the best business concepts that fit well with crowdfunding tend to:
- Have a physical prototype or product
- Solve a real problem for their customers
- Bring novelty in design, technology, or founding story
- Fit into the design, technology, fashion, board game/games, food, or photography category.
Don’t me wrong – you can totally get funding for a new film, theater project, independent book, or your next album.
But, it’s my job to share the real deal with you. The truth is that if you have a physical product that has broad or niche appeal from a functionality or design standpoint, then you’re gonna have a lot easier time raising money.
These are the types of projects that are difficult to fund on Kickstarter:
- Service-based businesses
- Idea-stage companies
- Apps and software (look into equity crowdfunding instead)
- Adult industry products (Indiegogo is a better fit)
Thankfully, there are other ways to get funding for those types of startups that aren’t a good fit for Kickstarter. In fact, I have some great content on that here.
#2: Get Your Prototypes Ready!
Like I said before – you gotta have a prototype if you want to get funding on Kickstarter. It’s an absolute must.
No renderings. No half-baked sketches. I’m talking about a real prototype that you can show off with a pitch video and that you can send to bloggers for in-depth reviews.
I have a great guide here walking you through how to create your first prototypes. It doesn’t have to be expensive or costly. Just follow those steps.
There are a few reasons that I recommend all entrepreneurs and aspiring business owners create a prototype, including:
- Easy to show and communicate the vision to others
- Get an instant look and feel of the product (for further tweaking)
- Narrow in on the materials you’ll need to make the finished product
- Encounter possible roadblocks early on
When you create a prototype, you go from being a wantrapreneur who has this crazy idea that he or she is never gonna act on to someone who’s actually serious about starting their own business.
After you get this prototype together, you’ll then want to begin to think about what it’s gonna cost to fulfill the rewards you promise your backers on kickstarter.
- How much is the minimum order quantity?
- Where will you source your parts from?
- What materials are best for your design?
These are all important questions that you’ll start to get the answers to when you finally go from napkin to prototype. Don’t wait to get it together!
#3: Build Up A Crowd – Generate Leads
I’m gonna share a little secret with you…
The real reason why projects are funded so quickly is because they’re learning from people like me before they go into their campaign.
They apply the pre-launch principles I discuss in my books and courses, and then they are funded instantly on Kickstarter. No joke.
Rather than putting your project on Kickstarter hoping to get funding, you want to engineer success. You want to bake in the funding a bit.
You can do that by building a crowd before you go live with your crowdfunding campaign. This crowd will enable you attract strangers to your fundraiser.
As a business owner, you might not be used to this whole marketing pre-launch hype, but it’s 100% necessary for getting the results you want with crowdfunding.
Here are a few easy ways to begin building up a crowd:
- Collect emails in a pre-launch email list
- Start a social media presence and build up your following
- Contact your local journalists to get media exposure
- Set aside a launch budget for consultants, promotions, and advertising
This is all done to “generate leads” and “spread awareness” so that you’ll get some support within the first few days of your fundraiser.
#4: Bring on Coaches, Experts, and Teammates
Your business is only as good as the talent that you surround yourself with. Great things are always pulled off by teams of skilled people.
Every business owner has different core skills. But – every business must succeed at both raising capital and attracting talent. Otherwise, it’s gonna fail.
Going into a crowdfunding campaign, the best thing that you can do is bring on someone who knows what they’re doing. That could take many forms including:
- An expert coach (like me) who can help you along the way
- An agency that can help with Facebook ads, PR, or video creation
- A campaign manager that can run the entire thing for you
- Key influencers that can help you spread the word
If you have created a launch budget and you have resources at your disposal, you can look more into the crowdfunding agencies that are out there.
For those that have an extremely tight budget, you’re going to have to get creative when filming your video, putting together a marketing strategy, and conducting outreach.
#5: Profit From Your Momentum (And Keep It Up)
There’s this thing that I call the “Kickstarter slump of death” where fundraisers tend to stall in the middle of their duration being live.
That means that if you have a 30 day fundraiser, you’ll probably see momentum start to slow around the 10 day mark. You’ll have to figure out ways to continue to maintain it and profit from it.
It’s a huge problem.
Plan for it in advance.
This is why I recommend doing things like:
- Writing press releases and doing media outreach
- Running Facebook advertising campaigns
- Creating stretch goals and add-ons
- Scheduling news announcements and updates
- Maintaining active social media page
Activities like those above will help to draw more attention to your crowdfunding project and ensure that new backers keep discovering you.
You’ll also find that as you build momentum, it will reach a critical mass. You’ll have backers and customers wanting to buy your product, even if after your campaign is completed. It’s pretty freakin’ cool.
That’s when you can begin to transition people to other post-kickstarter platforms like Indiegogo InDemand and eCommerce to capture all that activity.
Benefits of Kickstarter – Should You Launch?
Now, that might seem like a lot of work just get get funding online. But, it’s not just about the funding. It’s about so much more.
I’ve had more than 200 entrepreneurs come on my podcast and share exactly how they were able to raise six and seven figures with crowdfunding. They detail their entire story.
All of them have said that it wasn’t the funding but rather the items below that impressed them with crowdfunding:
- Powerful ability to gather a crowd of enthusiasts
- Profitable new customer group leads to generate long-term sales
- Ridiculous media attention and brand awareness
- In-depth REAL feedback on their product and prototype
Now a days, it’s not that hard to sell something online. You just set up a Shopify store or create an Amazon listing and start selling. Everyone can sell stuff online.
The hard thing is getting noticed among all that noise. How do you stand out? How do you make people care about you? How do you create raving fans?
Kickstarter has a build-in mechanism which will not just deliver funding, but also give you the contact info of all of your supporters and fans.
Rather than looking at this project as a way to get funding, look at as what it is – the springboard to starting your small business and making a splash in the media landscape.
Do you hear me?
Awesome. Hope you enjoyed this article and if you’d like more content like this, you should:
- Subscribe to the CrowdCrux Weekly Newsletter which delivers insights straight to your inbox every week.
- Check out the Crowdfunding Demystified Podcast where I talk with successful entrepreneurs who have used crowdfunding to launch their dream business.
- Subscribe to my Youtube Channel where I deliver killer insights on a wide range of crowdfunding topics.
And if you’re ready to launch, don’t hesitate to book a coaching call with me! I’m ready to bring your campaign to life.
