I’ve been getting this question a lot recently. When should you “give up” on your Kickstarter campaign? Statistics show that Kickstarter projects in aggregate only have a 40% rate.
Keep in mind that this success percentage is not the same among all categories on the crowdfunding platform. Some categories experience a higher rate, and others a lower rate than the average, as I’ve shown below.
As you can see, technology projects fail to reach their fundraising goal more often than projects in the music category (24.61% success rate vs 53.66% success rate).
If you’re struggling to decide whether or not to call it quits on your crowdfunding campaign, I think there are three major points you should consider.
1. Should you quit your campaign mid-funding and re-launch?
Usually, a creator will begin thinking about this if they have had little to no traction since launching and might be thinking “wow I wish I prepared more,” or “I’m surprised no one has come to the project.”
First, go through these decision criteria:
– Did you line up 20-30% of your pledge goal in the form of family/friends/professional connections and get them to pledge? Failing to get your social network to pledge initially to the campaign is a common crowdfunding mistake. You don’t want strangers coming to your page and seeing that you’ve failed to attract backers.
– Have you gotten feedback on all elements of your project from 5-10 people (ideally in your target market)? This is crucial! Your job is to get people talking! What do they think and feel about your project page. Do they like your rewards? Is your video compelling?
– Have you measured the effect of your marketing/pr/promotional activities? If you haven’t been actively marketing your campaign to the appropriate communities, this is a major red flag. There are very few campaigns that will take off on their own and sustain momentum solely from the community browsing projects on the Kickstarter platform.
If you’ve failed to take into account these three decision criteria, I would cancel your project or at least come to the realization that it’s unlikely to be successful. That’s not to say you can’t retool, relaunch, and be successful!
2. Should you re-launch after a failed campaign?
We touched on this question a bit in a previous post. Let’s say you launched a campaign, gathered some traction, but were unable to meet your fundraising goal before time ran out. I’ll also assume that you took into account the 3 “common mistakes” I pointed out in part 1.
Before deciding whether or not to relaunch, consider some of the questions below.
– Did you receive backing from the Kickstarter community? If you managed to attract strangers to your project from the Kickstarter community, that is a very encouraging sign that you will be able to make a bigger splash the second time around if you put more energy into moving that funding meter as quickly as possible.
– Can you lower your fundraising goal? Although most creators want to raise “as much as possible,” having a lower funding goal will make it easier to succeed and become a trending campaign in the Kickstarter algorithm. You can also always use stretch goals and add-ons to further incentivize your target audience to become supporters.
Confused? See: What are stretch goals? What are add-ons?
– Did you use early bird reward tiers? If so, were they all claimed? This can give you an indication of demand for your product and whether you need to get more eyeballs on the project or which types of rewards backers liked most. If you didn’t take advantage of limited quantity rewards, you can do so the next time to incentivize your existing backers to become a part of the new project early-on.
– Simple conversion tracking. You can do some simple calculations to help decide whether or not you’ll be able to drive enough traffic to your page to raise your funding goal the second time around. Let’s say you have a $10,000 funding goal. If you brought 1,000 strangers to the page over the course of 30 days, 200 watched the video and 20 pledged for a total of $1,000, you would need to put in 7x your marketing efforts to reach your goal (assuming 30% is coming from your social network).
3. Should you abandon the idea/project all together?
This is the hardest decision to make. I really hate the word “abandon” because it makes it seem like the idea, vision, and energy put into developing the initial prototype was a waste.
Rather than abandoning any project, I would be careful to consider what assumptions that you made were incorrect. Perhaps you developed a product that did not meet a market need. If you still enjoyed doing it, there could be another need that that customer segment experiences that you could solve in the future.
For my projects, my decision whether or not to kill them is two-fold:
1. Am I seeing product/market fit on some scale? Product/market fit refers to experience where your customers love your product, or some part of it, and would be less-well-off or unhappy if it did not exist. If you don’t have this, it’s back to the drawing board. You need to alter some aspect of the product to service a real need your customers have.
This doesn’t mean that your backers or customers are telling you they love it. It means they are showing they love it in the form of pledges and support.
2. Is the effort required worth it in the long run? Whether or not the outcome is “worth it” depends on your goals. You only have a limited 24 hours in the day. The majority of that is spent traveling, eating, and sleeping. At the very most you might have 80-100 hours per week to make things happen! Realistically, you are working on your project as a side-project and can commit closer to 20-30 hours per week to it.
Is the time that you are investing in the project going to pay dividends in the long run in terms of happiness, fulfillment, or financial gain? Only you can answer that! If you think it will, but there is the risk it might not work, I’d go for it and keep on grinding. You only live once.
