They were able to get the project covered by local media, but it wasn’t quite as effective as they thought. We also talked about how they made their project more interesting by shooting on location for 24 hours, and the importance of showing credibility.
In the summer of 2012 AJ Leon and his band of professional troublemakers helped the NGO Water Aid raise 2.2M£ to bring clean drinking water to remote villages in Malawi. This goes way beyond what most Kickstarter’s face when trying to raise funds for their creative projects. Thats exactly why I invited AJ on to talk about his experiences.
AJ talked about all the work they did before the campaign to make sure it would be successful out of the gate. He talked about doing things that are BLOD and how to deal with the down periods of your campaign. Over all AJ had some great insights that we can use on our own crowd-funding project.
P.S. AJ recently release a manifest called The Life and Times of a Remarkable Misfit which he talks about in the program. It is excellent and has been downloaded over 30,000 times. Grab your copy here.
You’ve read this guide, you’ve researched other projects, you’ve found an audience, and you’ve created a compelling pitch, but your project didn’t make it. You did everything you could to drum up support, but it still wasn’t enough. That’s okay. Maybe your idea wasn’t ready. Maybe you didn’t explain yourself clearly enough. You aren’t necessarily going to get it right the first time. Before I came to Kickstarter I launched many other projects, most of which failed. It was learning from those failures that ultimately helped me be successful.
One of the best aspects about Kickstarter is that you risk very little when launching a project. So even if it fails, it’s not really that bad. You will probably be disappointed, but at least you didn’t spend a lot of time and money creating something, only to find it’s not what people want. You will have learned about yourself and have a better idea how to launch a project. All of that experience will be valuable the next time around.
Courage.
Courage to do something meaningful. Courage to silence that voice in your head that makes you doubt yourself. Courage to launch your project into the world.
Overcoming our fears is never easy, but its part of the process. In a world filled with so much uncertainty, we need people who will stand up and make a difference. You may think your project isn’t that important, but you never know who you will inspire. Many of the people I talked with, said how the success of other projects got them to launch their own. So go out there and make something happen.
We are waiting for you.
pssst…you can read all of this offline by downloading the e-book.
We often hear stories of someone posting a creative project online. Then hundreds or thousands of people come rushing to them and it takes off. It seems so simple. Come up with a brilliant idea and the Internet will take over to make our dreams come true.
Somewhere deep down inside we know there is more to it than that. There must be some explanation as to why their idea took off. We’re just not sure what it is. We launch our own project, hoping the masses will show up, but they never do. We are left feeling disappointed and full of doubt. Why not me? Was my idea not good enough?
The truth is that there is a lot of work that goes into a project before it will take off. Simply posting an idea online is rarely enough to get meaningful traction. That’s the lesson I learned, the hard way.
In the fall of 2010 I posted my first Kickstarter project. It was for a documentary film that I wanted to make with a friend of mine. After our project got approved we naively rushed through setting up the project page and launched it. Confident in the fact that we had the best looking video on the site with a meaningful topic, we sat back and waited.
After a month we had only raised 10% of our goal. Slightly disheartened and running out of time, we rolled up our sleeves and began contacting everyone we knew. In three weeks we were able to raise an additional $5000. However, there was only one week to go, and we had over 50% of our funding goal left.
Faced with the reality that our project probably would not make it, I started to question myself and my idea. Then something amazing happened. Realizing the deadline was fast approaching, my friends started posting it, writing emails and sharing it with their friends. In the last six days we raised $9000 and got the project successfully funded!
If this sounds like another example of a viral Internet phenomena, I assure it’s not. My project never got picked up by any major media or high profile blogs. In fact, the ONLY reason that my campaign succeeded is because I have amazing friends and family who rallied to support me. Even with all their support, we limped to the finish line. I feel pretty lucky that we made it at all. But I’m ok with being lucky.
In the months after the Kickstarter campaign ended, I was able to reflect on my campaign. I thought about everything I could have done differently that could have made it even better. I started to looked at what other people did to fund their projects. I began to realize that it was not my idea that had been the problem, but my approach. I had made a lot of assumptions about how the idea would be spread and how Kickstarter worked. From those insights this guide was born.
In the world of Kickstarter there is a lot that happens behind the scenes to make a project successful. Just because an idea is great or worth doing doesn’t mean it’s going to get funded. Rather than trying to guess at what those factors are, this manifesto will look at what it takes to make a project successful.
In case you don’t have time to read this in entirety, this is what it says in a nutshell:
Great Kickstarter projects are successful because they connect and resonate with a specific audience. They use compelling storytelling combined with interesting or wacky ideas to attract backers. They are authentic while effectively communicating goals, passion, credibility and purpose. The more time spent thinking about these elements before the project is launched the easier the campaign becomes.
If you want to do a Kickstarter project because you think the Internet will find and love your project, stop right now. The Internet does not care about you. However, if you can reach out to the right people, in the right way, before time runs out, you just might get lucky.
Read it, study it, memorize it and then IGNORE IT.
This e-book is a not a step by step manual on how to get your project funded. I don’t think there is any formula that can guarantee success. Instead, it is a collection of thoughts and ideas to help you create the best Kickstarter campaign possible. If the ideas in this book don’t fit your project or don’t resonate with you, then try something else.
At the end, of the day remember one thing: There is no map.
I’m an average person who started a project and was fortunate enough to reach my goal. I have a blog but it’s small. I don’t have a popular podcast or web show. My project never got promoted by TechCrunch or any major blogs. I’m not a world famous product designer making cool iPod watches.
I have used Kickstarter to launch two successful but very different projects. I will be referring to both throughout this book. The first one ran in the fall of 2010 and was called Identifying Nelson/Buscando a Roberto. The purpose of the campaign was to help raise some money so my co-producer and I could start working on a documentary film. The second project related to this book and was called A Kickstarter’s Guide to Kickstarter. That campaign took place during August of 2011, and was to help get the this e-book graphically designed and distributed.
pssst…you can read all of this offline by downloading the e-book.
You launch your Kickstarter project, email family, post it to Facebook, share it on Twitter, and then what? When running a campaign you quickly release that there aren’t as many ways to market your project as you thought. That’s exactly what happened to Susan Tinkham and Kyle Turgeon when they launched a campaign for their short film Figments of a Father.
Instead of sending out more email blasts they decided to get creative and reach out to there local community to help promote this project. Susan shared with me how they created signs, fylers, when door to door, and generally “made a fool of themselves” all in the name of promoting their project.
The success of a Kickstarter campaign relies on the project being shared. Everything about the site from the share buttons to the all or nothing deadline are working hard to get the project to spread. But how does that process happen? Why do some projects get spread far and wide and other do not? Obviously there are many factors to a project’s success. Quality of the project, video, and pitch are all important. However, a great project that isn’t shared doesn’t get funded.
Over the years I’ve been really interested in how ideas spread. I wanted to understand the process because I realized that no matter how great my idea was, if I couldn’t spread it, it would go no where. One of the things that fascinates me about Kickstarter is that it turbo charges the process. When done right it can give your project wings may beyond what you normally could do. But being able to do that process over and over is a tough to learn. That is one of the reasons I conducted interviews with other Kickstarters, to learn what works.
What I’ve learned from my interviews is that your launch strategy is just as important, as your project page. Launching a project and hoping the internet will find it is not enough. In this post I’m going to explore the topic of how ideas spread online and try to define some things we can do when launching a Kickstarter project.
My first time actually seeing an idea spread online was with the campaign for Identifying Nelson/Buscando A Roberto. We ran the campaign for 60 days (back when you could run it that long) but for the first 7 weeks nothing happened. During that entire time we only managed to raise 27% of our $15,000 goal. Things weren’t looking very good for us. Then Friday night, a week before the campaign ended, we got a backer that pushed over the 30% Kickstarter tipping point.
Then something interesting started to happen. High school friends shared it on Facebook. At first it was one or two but with each post more people started sharing and backing the project. Then camp friends started posting about it. Later in the week it was college friends. The idea was spreading!
After a while I started to notice a pattern. For each Facebook share we got another backer. That backer wasn’t always the person who shared it either. This meant there was a direct relationship between my backers and the numbers of people exposed to the project. I quickly checked my visitor count for the page and realized that for every 100 views of the project page we were getting 10 backers.
The whole process was interesting because each of my friend groups did not know each other. There was no way for my camp friends to see posts from my high school friends. This told me the idea was spread in each group of friends separately. The other fascinating thing was I was no longer doing any of the heavy lifting. That week I really didn’t send out any emails asking for support. I didn’t have to, it was happening on its own.
What I was experiencing was an idea going “viral.” But instead of being shared by random people on the internet it was being shared by my friends. People who knew me, and who I had been close to me at one point. Seth Godin would call this a “Tribe.” I realized the project was not going viral with the internet at large, it was going viral in my tribe. It was going tribal!
Now I am not trying to create another buzz word here but I think it’s an interesting way to think about ideas spreading. We often assume that when an idea takes off its because masses of people come flocking to the idea all at once. Turns out thats not how it happens.
One of the reasons that this experience was so profound was because I had been studying how ideas spread for so long. When our Kickstarter project finally took off I got to see everything I had been reading about happen for real. It was that experience that really drove me to try and figure out how one could repeat the process over and over again.
In Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey A. Moore talks about how new businesses must target a niche to get traction. Once they have established themselves with an initial group of customers, they must work quickly to find other niches. This is because there is a “chasm” between early adopters and the mainstream. The only way to cross is to get a small number of customers from different niches. Once the business has a solid base of customers and is viewed as established, it can be embraced by the mainstream.
In The Tipping Point, Malcum, Gladwell agues a similar point. He says that for ever idea that takes off there is a critical moment when the project starts to take off on it’s own. This is the “Tipping Point” where the idea tips and starts to take off on it’s own. Enough people know about the idea and are talking about it that the idea has enough momentum to carry on its own.
Both books provide insights into what makes a project take off.
This describes the process of Kickstarter very well. Before a project will start to spread on it’s own there has to be a certain amount of social proof. So getting those early backers is vital to the success and momentum of the project. This is why the 30% tipping point is so important. Once the tipping point has been reached the project deadline acts as a force to motivate and energize the base. Share this project or it will disappear.
When you set out to launch your idea you should really think about the different groups you are going to hit. Crossing the chasm can be brutally hard. Ours took 7 long weeks to cross. You have to be patient and really think about how you are going to address it. Who will jump in right away no matter what? Who is going to want social proof before backing it? For example, I wouldn’t pitch a blog or newspaper with random strangers until there is solid social proof around your project. You really only get one chance to pitch your idea so you don’t waste it.
In Unleashing The Ideavirus, Seth Godin argues that ideas are like virus. They “infect” the population as they spread from person to person. Once you have been infected you can’t help but share it. However, not everyone is susceptible to the idea virus so starting the idea in the right place is important.
Seth Godin’s formula for creating an idea virus goes something like this:
Is your head spinning yet? Don’t feel bad, creating an idea virus on purpose is hard. I got this book in 2005 and I am still working on understanding the formula. I really don’t want to overcomplicate things, so I’ll only talk about the three most important parts of the formula, that relate to a Kickstarter campaign.
Understanding the concept that an idea is transferred via a medium is something I still struggle with. But I think the simplest example of this is the project video. When someone watches your project video they are interacting with your idea virus. Like sitting next to someone with a cold, the contagiousness of the disease has a roll to play in whether or not you get infected. Your job is to make that interaction as compelling as possible.
The story you tell in your project video is going to draw people in and “infect” them with the idea virus. You are going to have to work really hard to make sure it’s a good one. I think one mistake a lot of people make is not telling a compelling enough story. Simply putting up a video that says “I want to do this” is not enough to get people excited. You have to layout what are the stakes if the project fails, and why it is so meaningful to you.
The hive is a group of people that can relate to, and will back your project. In A Kickstarter’s Guide to Kickstarter I called this audience. Figuring out who your potential hive is, before you launch is very important. If your project does not meet the expectations of that group and it will have a hard time spreading through it. You are going to want to list several potential groups. Sometimes the hive that backs a Kickstarter project is not the one the creator imagined at the start.
Make a list of all the different hives, or audiences, that your project might relate to. Then try to figure out how close you are to each group, and how you can reach out to each group. The best groups to reach out to are the ones that you have a personal connection to. People often start by looking for audiences that they think might back their project but have no connection to. Selling to strangers is tough, so start with the people you know and move outward from there. Maybe they can connect you to the groups that you seek.
Sneezers, or influencers (as are called in today’s web culture) are people who in touch with a hive and can spread your idea virus far and wide. If you can get them on your side, they can be a big asset to help spreading your message. But don’t wait until the last minute to get in touch with them. If you start contacting sneezers the day your project launches, then you are just using them for their audience. Respect their time and attention, and get to know them before you need their help. Finally, before you ask for their help, think long and hard about what’s in it for them, that has nothing to do with you.
One of the biggest challenges to launching an idea virus is knowing if your message will resonate with the hive/audience you are trying to reach. I recommend that you send your project people you trust (preferably within the hive you are trying to reach) and get their feedback. This was one of my biggest mistakes with my StreetXSW project. Had I gotten feedback earlier in the process, I might have have realize that my project had some big flaws. Instead I worked on my project alone and when I launched, I had built something no one wanted.
One of the best features Kickstarter has recently created is the preview link. This allows you to build your project and then send it to people before it goes live. Often time you are too close to the project to spot the big mistakes. You also want to judge their reaction to what you are sending. I look for phases of excitement and high approval.
“Wow, this is great!”
“I can’t wait to get this!”
If you aren’t getting this kind of reaction out of people, it might be a sign of problems to come. Keep working on your pitch until you start to get these types of reactions. It will make the whole campaigning process SO much easier.
I don’t worry about people hating my work, or liking my work. I worry about then not LOVING my work. If they don’t love it they won’t pass it along and my idea goes no where. If you don’t get a lot of this excited feedback them either you should hold off to reevaluate or understand that it will be an uphill battle to get backers.
The final piece to understanding how to launch an idea came by reading Zarrella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness, by Dan Zarrella. In his book Dan lays out a framework for understand why things are shared online. There are three parts to the framework, exposure, attention and motivation.
Dan explains his framework like this:
In summary, for people to share something they need to be exposed to it (or the creator) before hand, it needs to catch their attention, and there needs to be a call to action. This means surprising people with a Kickstarter project is probably the worst thing you can do. Instead, try to build support for your project as you develop. Feedback and buying is key, especially from the sneezers and hives you are trying to reach. View your Kickstarter launch as the end of a venting process, not the beginning of the project.
When we ran the campaign for Identifying Nelson/Buscando A Roberto I had no idea how important it was to make people aware of your project before it launches. Had we known it might’ve changed our entire strategy. By dumb luck, we ran the campaign for 60 days (back when you could do that) which I gave us enough time to make people aware of the project before the last week. What we should have done was run a 60 day campaign, but only made the project live for 30 days. The first 30 days should’ve been spent contacting our biggest supporters, and closest friends to let them know that our project was about to launch. That would have brought a lot more momentum into the campaign, and made it a lot easier to hit our goal.
Another interesting take away from Dan’s book is that ideas are not as viral as we think they are.
Those interested in actual science use a more precise term, borrowed from epidemiology: “reproduction rate.” The reproduction rate, or R0 (pronounced “R-naught”), is the number of new infections that a case of a disease will cause in a single generation, averaged over the entire life of the epidemic. If I have a cold and I give that cold to two people, and each of them gives it to two more, the R0 of that cold is two.
With many biological pathogens, R0 is greater than one, meaning that the pathogen spreads to every susceptible person in a population over time. However, every example of idea viruses I’ve studied, from retweets to email messages, has an R0 well below one. Some pieces of content out there, particularly those that spread through small groups, have a higher R0 for short periods of time. Typically, when those ideas jump into larger populations, the average reproduction rate declines and the ideas die.
Zarrella, Dan (2011-08-23). Zarrella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness: The Science, Design, and Engineering of Contagious Ideas (p. 14). AmazonEncore. Kindle Edition.
Zarrella is saying that the ideas aren’t as viral as we think they are. When something gets posted on Facebook or Twitter only a small percentage of people actually pass it on. This means seeding our idea with a large number of people is important. The challenge is that most of us cannot reach a very large number of people. Most of us probably can probably reach a couple hundred people via email or Facebook. Once we have contacted them, then what? This is why sneezers, and resonating with a larger audiences is so important. you have to figure out how to get your idea into larger groups, your friends and family can only do so much.
We tend to think that once we hit the green launch button, our work is done. Over the past few months I’ve learned from other Kickstarters, to videos on the web, that this is not the case. It turns out that the way you launch is just important than what you launch. I admire the way other project creators have found creative ways to pitch and promote their projects. This is definitely something that I have not been great at and need to improve. Here are a couple examples, from my case studies, of ways Kickstarters were able to reach audiences be on the friends and family.
During their campaign the Custom SLR team spent a lot of time reaching out to the writing staff of various blogs and websites that they thought were part of their target audience.
First they gathered a list of web sites within their niche. For each blog they looked at what had already been written on similar topics and who wrote it. Then they reached out with a template email that was customized to each blog. They approached smaller blogs first knowing that they only got one chance to pitch their project on each blog. This gave them a chance to refine their pitch before approaching the bigger blogs.
Eventually they were picked up by the blog Engadget. After that the project had enough momentum to not only reach their goal but go well over.
Dan Provost, co-creator of the Glif, had a small connection with the prominent blogger John Gruber, whose blog has over 400,000 readers. Dan sent Gruber an email about the project and he thought it was cool enough to post about it on his site. From there the project was picked up by many other blogs. John had linked to a couple of Dan’s posts in the past so Dan was not a complete stranger when the email was sent.
Having a relationship with an influential person, no matter how tenuous, especially if s/he is also in your market niche can be a powerful tool. They can help you get the right kind of traffic to your project. As Dan said: “Your project is not going to explode if it hits the New York Times. It’s going to explode if you hit the audience perfectly.”
Linsky.me is a very cool web app you may have never heard of. I met it’s creator Adam Loving earlier this year at SXSW. His site provides a interesting and fun way to help spread an idea. The site works like this:
The Linksy software makes this entire process easy to manage. In my eyes the real benefit is making the project launch exciting for the people who support you the most. Your advocates, or biggest fans are the ones were going to go out of their way to help you succeed. Giving them a platform and tools to help spread your message can make all the difference in the world. Oh, and make sure you thank them when you’re done.
PS If you are interested in using Linksy.me for your project you can sign up here.
The topic of spreading ideas online is an important and complex one. More complex than I can possibly covered in one post. Below are some resources that I’ve used to help understand this topic. if you are interested in launching projects repeatedly over time these can be valuable resources.
We often hear stories of someone posting a creative project online. Then hundreds or thousands of people come rushing to them and it takes off. It seems so simple. Come up with a brilliant idea and the Internet will take over to make our dreams come true.
Somewhere deep down inside we know there is more to it than that. There must be some explanation as to why their idea took off. We’re just not sure what it is. We launch our own project, hoping the masses will show up, but they never do. We are left feeling disappointed and full of doubt. Why not me? Was my idea not good enough?
The truth is that there is a lot of work that goes into a project before it will take off. Simply posting an idea online is rarely enough to get meaningful traction.
In the fall of 2010 I posted my first Kickstarter project for a documentary film that I wanted to make with a friend of mine. Our project finished just two days before the launch of the TikTok Multi-Touch Watch. TikTok went on to raise $942,578 set a new record for amount raised via crowd funding. It was the first time people started to realize the true potential of Kickstarter.
TikTok held the record for over a year until the Elevation Dock and Double Fine Adventure broke the $1,000,000 funding mark. After that it seemed like every week I was hearing about projects raising hundreds of thousands of dollars. By the time the Pebble: E-Paper Watch had set a new record at $10,000,000, I had run three different projects of varying size and results. Throughout my three projects I had yet to experience anything like what I was reading about. In fact my campaigns had been much different.
During the campaign for Identifying Nelson/Buscando A Roberto we raised $15,212 from 170 people, the majority of which were family and friends. Not exactly a crowd but it was my first project. After that, I ran a campaign to create A Kickstarter’s Guide to Kickstarter. This ended up being 150% over funded and raised $1,303 from 104 backers. Definitely a great success but still this mythical “crowd” had not shown its face. Granted, the guide was a small project so that could be one reason why the masses didn’t flock to it. Then in February I ran a campaign for StreetXSW: Capturing The Moments You Missed. It was an attempt to create a project that would go beyond my family and friends and attract a larger crowd. Despite all my hard work the campaign flopped and I end up canceling the project a week in.
I started to wonder why none of my projects caught on like the ones I was reading about. Were my ideas not good enough? The projects in the news were pretty damn cool but I didn’t feel like my mine were unworthy of more attention. After all, my documentary film was about how I had been separated from my birth family during El Salvador’s civil war and then was reunited with them when I was 16.
The story involves revolutionaries, kidnappings, government cover ups, loss, regret, and redemption. It’s one of those larger than life true stories that you can’t make up. If anything had the legs to go big wasn’t this it? Now, I am in no way suggesting that I deserve or that our film deserves that kind of attention. I’m just trying to say, that even an incredible story like mine doesn’t necessarily catch on with the crowd.
I probably would have felt like a complete failure had something not happened, which started to shift my perception of crowd funding.
On June 19th, 2011 Kickstarter posted 10,000 Successful Projects, which highlighted how far the service had come in two years. Along with the post was this video which featured a screen shot of all 10,000 successful projects.
I went looking for my project. It was a bit tough because the pictures went by so fast but I realized that the projects were being displayed by amount raised. Great! I thought, I’ll just click a head until get into the ball park and then I can slow it down. I clicked about half way through the video to where I thought my project should be but the projects at that point had only raised a couple thousand dollars. I thought it was a little weird but I kept clicking.
To my amazement I was 2/3 of the way though and still no where near the amount of money I had raised. It wasn’t until I got to 5 minutes and 9 seconds, out of the 5:33s video, that I started to get close. I finally found our project at the 5:11s and thats when it hit me. Identifying Nelson was one of the most funded projects on the site! Doing some quick back of the napkin calculations I estimated that we were in the top 10% of projects funded. I’m sure this is no longer true but at the time it was a big shock. That was when my perception of crowd funding started to change.
Over the past couple months, some new information about Kickstarter has come out that has furthered my belief that our perception of Kickstarter as we read about it is much different from the reality of what most people experience.
Recently, Kickstarter released a new statistics page that gives us some insights into what is happening behind the scenes. One of the most interesting statistics was that only 2,200 out of the 28,600 projects launched have raised more than $20,000. Of those only 251 have raised over $100,000. That means roughly 92% of all projects launched on Kickstarter have raised under $20,000!
Again I was surprised by how few projects ended up raising large amounts of money. I’ve done enough research to know that is easier to get funding for smaller goals but I didn’t expect the number of “high end” projects to be so low. If you’ve been following crowdsourced funding in the news you may get the perception that there are a lot of large projects bringing in well over $100,000. Turns out that’s not the case at all.
I think part of the misperception lies in the name. The words crowd-funding or crowd-sourced funding represent the idea of a project raising tens of thousands of dollars from thousands of backers. Partly because the definition of the word “crowd” means a large group of people. However, if our perceptions of the amount of money being raised is off, could we be wrong about the number of people backing a project as well?
On a side note: What is this mythical crowd anyway? Is it made up of people living in some corner of cyber space with credit cards at the ready, waiting for someone to launch a project? As great as that sounds I doubt thats the case.
One way of figuring how many people make up the crowd is by looking at the average pledge amount on Kickstarter. According to Kickstarter the average pledge amount is $70. This means that a project with the goal of $10,000 should be funded by roughly 142 people. Right away this is interesting, because the number of backers is a lot lower than we might expect. Using the $70 average pledge as a benchmark we can estimate that 92% of all projects on Kickstarter are funded by less than 300 people. Not exactly a crowd…
I have a theory that the average Kickstarter project is primarily funded by a small number of 1st degree connections, not a large group of anonymous strangers. This is something I experienced in Identifying Nelson. Less than $1000 of our $15,000 came from 2nd degree connections. People who had never personally met John or or myself before. My theory has to do with something called Dunbar’s number. You might be familiar with it but if your aren’t here is a refresher.
Robin Dunbar is a British anthropologist that suggested humans have a limit to the number of social relationships they can maintain. While there was no exact number that was proposed by Dunbar, it said to be between 100 and 230 people, with the most common number being 150 people. Does that number look familiar? It’s roughly the same amount of people that it takes fund a project of $10,000. If humans are limited to roughly 150 social connections, I’m willing to bet those connections are somewhat meaning. I’m also willing to bet that the people who make up those meaningful connections would be willing to pitch in $70 to help a friend. It happens all the time with charity walks and bake sales, why should Kickstarter be any different?
I recently came across an article entitled, The Untold Story Behind Kickstarter Stats, that seams to support my theory. In this post Jamie from appsblogger.com teamed up with Prof. Ethan Malik of The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania to dig deeper into Kickstarter statistics. Prof. Malik found that the number of Facebook friends you had mattered:
For that $10K project, holding everything else constant, if you had 10 Facebook friends, you would only have a 9% chance of succeeding. If you had 100 Facebook friends, your chance jumps to 20%. And if you have 1,000 Facebook friends? Your chance of succeeding is now 40%.
Facebook allows us to extend the reach of our campaign to people who care about us but might not be in our, day to days lives. Not all of those friends will chip into our campaign but some will share it and pass it along to friends who will back it. The larger the group of people you have to draw from the easier it is to find the group of people that care enough to help you out.
In A Kickstarter’s Guide to Kickstarter I argue that projects are funded by a specific audience or group of people. Most of us do not have “fans” but we do have family and friends. I think your family and friends acts as a kind of build-in audience. The mistake we make is thinking that our project has to the strength to go beyond our family and friends. In my experience creating something that resonates with a people beyond family and friends is a lot harder than you think.
Part of the challenge is that it just takes a long time to understand what gets people excited and how to communicate your ideas in a meaningful way. If you look at the most successful projects on Kickstarter they are done by established artists, entrepreneurs or skilled individuals with proven track records.
I think what we are presented with here is the reality of Kickstarter and perhaps crowd funding in general. Kickstarter works well for projects under $20,000 and only a few top-tier projects, get more than that. Sounds like the 80 to 20 rule to me. But does this hurt the crowd-funding and sites like Kickstarter? I would argue not at all. If anything, it means project creators need to adjust their exceptions and understand what they are up against.
Don’t try to hit a home run right away. Launch small and launch often. Over time you will figure out what works and what doesn’t. Be realistic in your expectations. If you’re project takes off great, but it should be a reward for working hard, not your strategy. (Hey even Amanda Palmer did it that way.)
Sure I would love for one of my projects to take off, but I’m not expecting it anytime soon. I’m not sure thats the point either. Kickstarter provides a safe and reliable way to test ideas and learn what it takes to create something that resonates with people beyond family and friends. It also provides a platform for skilled project creators to reach a large number of people. It’s pretty clear that on Kickstarter there is room for both. The challenge is being honest with ourselves about where we fall on that scale.
Let me be clear, without Kickstarter there is NO way I could have raised $15,000 to start our film. Maybe I’m not giving myself enough credit, but I just don’t think asking friends to send money via paypal would have had the same impact. There is just something about a project on Kickstarter that people respond to.
It gave me an opportunity to launch an idea and learn with very little risk. What bothers me is when people present Kickstarter as an easy source of capital or a lottery where your project just might get picked. I think that completely glosses over all the work that goes into a project and sells people false hope. Projects that take off represent solid ideas, skilled creators and hard work. Anyone who says otherwise is lucky or lying. Now, stop reading and go make something happen!
According to Kickstarter only 40% of projects are successful. That doesn’t really surprise me. Creating a project that really resonates with people is actually very difficult, as I learned the hard way.
I’ve been fortunate enough to have run two successful Kickstarter campaigns. But this post isn’t about those projects. This post is about what I learned from one of my most recent and biggest failures. My hope is that you can learn from my experiences and avoid the painful mistakes that I made. Failing isn’t fun, neither is reliving that failure, but I think it’s important to talk about it so we can learn from our mistakes and figure out what works.
Back in February I launched my third Kickstarter campaign called StreetXSW: Capturing the moments you missed for a photo book I wanted to make. The project looked at how people are being distracted by their mobile phones and are missing out on life happening around them. I wanted to go to the SXSW music film and interactive conference in Austin, Texas and shoot the entire festival in the street photography genre. Street photography is a type of photojournalism that focuses on people and special moments that happen in the street. Since street photography focuses on interesting moments that happen around us, it was a perfect way to highlight the moments we missed while on our mobile phones.
A year earlier, while attending the SXSW festival, I had experienced how distracting mobile phones can be for myself. I had been walking through the streets when I snapped a photo of a petty cab driver that I thought was interesting. A few days later I went back to the photo and was shocked to realize that I barely remembered the moment. I had been so busy tweeting, and checking Facebook, and looking for the next big thing, that I had completely missed this amazing moment. It hit me over the head like a ton of bricks, my desire to be connected (online) was making me disconnected from the world around me. It was a powerful realization for myself, and one that I wanted to share with other people. It was the type of project that I thought might be great for Kickstarter.
Having done two other Kickstarter projects I was well aware of the process. In fact, one of my projects was to write a book about how to use Kickstarter to fund a creative endeavor. I knew a photo book might be a tricky idea to kickstart but having written the book about the site, I felt I had a leg up. From my research I knew that idea and story were very important components to any project. I knew my project wasn’t that unique of an idea, so I focused on telling a compelling story.
I spent from November until the end of March working on the project page and the video. I wrote and rewrote the script countless times. I shot the video at least three different times. I knew how important a great story would be to my project, so I poured everything I had into making the best video possible.
One of my goals for the project was to create something that would go past it’s minimum funding amount. I think what people don’t realize about Kickstarter is that most projects do not get overfunded. The last figure I saw, only 8.5% of projects get over 200% funded. I wanted to make something that was both meaningful, beautiful and could go the distance.
Early in the morning at 6am on February 1st I launched the project and then…nothing happened. From my research and previous experiences I had a sense something was off. Usually there is some early traction. Either people backing the project or sharing it online. This time there was nothing.
I spent the rest of the day preparing emails and updates to send out across my networks. I wrote a long and detailed message about how excited I was for this project and encouraged everyone to be a part of it by sharing it or backing it. Still nothing…
There were a few backers here and there but none for my main reward of the photo book. It even got picked by the Kickstarter staff as a featured photography project. Still that did not help. After a day or so I knew the project was not going to make it. It wasn’t getting enough traction and I started to get negative feedback about some of the rewards. I could have made some adjustments to the rewards or the project description but I felt like this would not fix the underlying problems.
So, with a heavy heart, I canceled the campaign. I wrote another set of updates to all the people I had contacted only a week earlier and let them know project was off. I said that I was sorry for bugging them and I hoped that they didn’t think negatively of me for the emails.
I was devastated. I had put so much time and effort into the project. I had made an amazing video that people really loved but all of that wasn’t enough. I felt silly. After all, I had “written the book” when it came to Kickstarter. Shouldn’t I of all people know how it was supposed to work? Not only had my campaign failed but at 4% funding I wasn’t even close to what I set out to do.
After a couple weeks of sulking I started to realize my project wasn’t a complete failure. I had gotten some elements of the project right, but there were others I had overlooked. There were also some aspects of my project that were more important than I had originally thought. Eventually my failure helped me see that there is a lot that goes into a Kickstarter project and even though I had a couple successes, there was still a lot to be learned.
I’m not a big fan of bullet points but here you go. No summaries though. If you want know what I learned you’ll just have to keep reading. 🙂
Generally speaking project creators on Kickstarter are trying to do one of two things: Get funding for an idea they would like to do, or get funding to help complete a project they have been working on. It turns out that knowing what kind of project you are working on is very important because the two types of campaigns operate in different ways.
When you are gathering support for an idea that you would like to do, Kickstarter acts as a fund-raising platform. People are helping you launch your idea but often care less about receiving the final product. They are there to support you as a creator and to make your idea a reality. For the most part these projects are funded by a few backers, which are mostly friends and family, and rarely get overfunded by large amount.
When you are fund-raising for a project that is almost finished, Kickstarter acts as a powerful pre-sale platform. In this scenario people are often backing the project to buy the final product. There is a much greater chance that it will be overfunded and might have hundreds or even thousands of backers.
The first big lesson I learned was this: Unless you have a working prototype of your final product then your campaign will be viewed as a fundraiser, not a pre-sale.
When I started StreetXSW I wanted to create a project that acted like a pre-sale and might get overfunded. Partly to prove to myself that I understood Kickstarter and partly to challenge myself. In order to have a better chance of being overfunded, I knew that I had to create a campaign that acted like a pre-sale. I studied many of the projects that I classified as being pre-sales and and set my project up like theirs. There was just one problem, I didn’t have a working prototype.
This might have seemed like a red flag, but going into the project I knew exactly what I wanted to make. I thought if I accurately described the project and the product, people would respond to it like a pre-sale. Turns out I was wrong.
Right away I started getting negative feedback about the price of my product. I was confident in the fact that my pricing was not off, and what I figured out was that they were responding to the lack of a prototype. In other words, I had nothing to show them. Had I already had the book made and almost ready to go, then I think people would have seriously considered my offer. But the lack of a prototype was a deal breaker.
What does this mean for you? If you’re thinking about launching on Kickstarter be honest with yourself about where your project is. If you don’t have a working prototype of your final product then your campaign will most likely act as a fundraiser. Fundraisers are not likely to get overfunded and it is much harder to get higher goals. So, set your goal lower ($10,000 or less) and embrace the fact that people are here to support you. Tell a great story and get people excited about your idea.
A couple of clarifications. When I say product that could mean anything from a record, to film, to an actual commercial product. The word product refers to whatever it is that you are creating. Also, the words working prototype are very important. Unless you can show me an almost completed movie, a product that’s ready to buy, or illustrations for the book you want to publish, then you do not have a working prototype. Sorry, CAD drawings don’t count.
Bonus Tip: In both fundraisers and pre-sales people aren’t always buying the final product. Often, they want the experience of helping to bring a bright idea to life. If you want to make your campaign even better, embrace the fact that you are also selling an experience. Lean into that, and provide ways for people to be part of the creative process. We get caught up thinking that people are backing our projects just to get the final product. That’s not necessarily true, especially with fundraisers, where the final product could be months or years away from being delivered. We already have enough stuff, what we want is an experience that we will remember.
Another interesting thing I realized is that there are different stages of an idea. With Kickstarter you can launch your idea at any time, regardless of what stage you are at. However, there are some stages that are better for launching projects than others. I broke the process of developing an idea into four stages. There are probably more, and it’s probably way more complicated, but breaking it down like this makes it a lot easier to talk about.
Conceptual – This is when you first get an idea. You’ve done very little research and you just think something is neat or fun. The problem with this stage is that ideas are easy. Everyone has ideas and what really matters is execution. Can you deliver on what you say?
People like launching here because it’s safe. You haven’t really invested anything so there’s nothing to lose. But if you haven’t invested in your idea, why should other people?
Research – You’ve done some research, you know what you want to build, but you haven’t started yet. You are turning to kick starter to help start your project and get your idea off the ground. There might be more expenses down the road, but with your funding goal you’ll be off to a great start.
This is actually a pretty good time to launch your project. I launched my first project Identifying Nelson/Buscando A Roberto at this very stage. We didn’t have any equipment and we needed the funds to get the cameras rolling. The catch is, your project will probably act like a fundraiser. Lower goals are better because it’s unlikely thousands of people will comply with your idea. It’s not that it’s a bad idea it’s just not developed enough.
Development – The next stage is when you are developing a prototype of your idea. This is not a great stage to launch because your campaign is confusing. Is it a fundraiser or a pre-sale? Well it can’t be a pre-sale because your product doesn’t exist, and it you’ve already spent money developing it, so people wonder why do you need their help? This is a very difficult place to launch but more on that in a bit.
Prototype – You’ve spent a lot of time developing your idea and you have a working prototype. This is probably the best time to launch. People can see what the final product might look like and they know what you are getting. Most of the biggest and well-known Kickstarter projects are pre-sales where the creators have a working prototype that is featured in the video. However, this stage is one of the most difficult stages to get to.
When people launch on Kickstarter with dreams of being vastly overfunded this is the stage that tempts them. What if my great idea gets picked and the internet comes flocking! What they miss is the fact that it may take months or even years to get to this final stage. It also requires a significant personal investment to bring a project this far along.
Reflecting on my failure I realized that I had launched my project during the development stage. I did not yet have a working prototype of my photo book, and therefore potential backers had no idea if it would be any good. Why didn’t I just create the photo book before launching?
This was the tricky part, when I launched StreetXSW I had not actually gone to SXSW yet. So, I did not have the pictures to create the photo book. I set my funding goal so that it would help offset some of the expenses I had already put into the project, and help pay for the creation of the book. This seems like a logical place to launch the project. I had already invested in the project so people could tell that I was serious, but I needed a little help finishing the project. While this made sense in my head it confused potential backers and inflated my funding goal.
I got comments such as: “If you’re already shooting with this very expensive camera, why do you need our help?” or “The price you are asking for this photo book seems very high.
To me, these comments highlighted the fact that people could not see my final product. Even though I really did need their help at this point in time, without a working prototype they were just not willing to become a backer on the project.
If launching during the developing phase is confusing, when is a good time to launch? After re-examining many projects I’ve come to the conclusion that the best times to launch are during the research stage or prototype stage. During the prototype stage you can see the final product and you know what you’re getting. During the research stage it is very clear that you need financial help to start your project but the final product is still an unknown.
This raises the question: Why don’t more people back projects with unknown outcomes? As Seth Godin points out we like to pick winners. We want to know that the thing we have backed, both financially and emotionally, is going to happen. When there is a working prototype of the final product it’s easy to see that it will eventually happen. It feels less risky to part with your money to support an idea that’s well on its way to happening. It’s much more emotionally challenging to back a project that may or may not happen. This is why people are so hesitant to back fundraising campaigns in large numbers.
Bonus Tip: One of the reasons that getting to the “30% tipping point” is so important is because it changes the perception of the projects success. Once a campaign has crossed this line, it feels much more likely that it will succeed. Making your project seem like a sure thing from the beginning, will help get you over this hump. One way to do this, is to offer a limited reward designed specifically to get you to 30%.
For example, if you’re funding goal is $5000, then the tipping point would be $1500. So why not offer in extra special reward at $60 and limited to 25 backers? This limited-edition reward will help you get to 30% and make your project look like it’s well on its way.
In A Kickstarter’s Guide to Kickstarter I argued that there are two primary factors to a project’s success, idea or story. Either the project represents a unique idea OR it tells a compelling story. Since I knew my project was not a unique idea, I focused on telling a compelling story with the video. Based on the feedback I received, I think this is something that I did well. However after the project failed I realized that idea and story aren’t the only two factors.
After thinking about it for a while, I realized that there were four major factors that determine the project’s success. They are audience, engagement, offer, an explanation. Idea and story fall under the engagement category. I’ve created a framework around these four factors which I call The Kickstarter Hierarchy of Successfulness. You can read more about the framework and get an introduction to each of the four factors in this blog post. For now, this is what you need to know:
Simply posting your project on Kickstarter is not enough. Having a great video is not enough. Working really really hard is not enough. Kickstarter is complicated and there are multiple factors that determine a projects success. I hope you’re not freaked out or discouraged. There is some good news.
Even though Kickstarter is complicated, there are specific tactics that you can use to address each one of these factors and boost the chances of your project being a success. My interviews with other Kickstarters revealed that their projects were not super special or picked by random. There were specific things that each project creator did during their campaign which helped their project get funded. I can’t go into all the details now because this post is long enough as it is. But many of these tactics I will be discussing in detail in future postings and in the next version of A Kickstarter’s Guide to Kickstarter.
How important is this stuff? Well it really depends on what you’re trying to do. If you’re just launching the small creative project because you just want to do something fun, well then most of the stuff you don’t need to worry about. However, if you are trying to use Kickstarter to launch a serious creative endeavor, and you wanted to go beyond just your friends and family, then understanding how Kickstarter works becomes increasingly important.
Something that I wrote about in A Kickstarter Guide was doing a prelaunch for soft launch. The idea is to show people before you launch the project what you have in mind. This does two things.
One it gives you valuable feedback about how your project is set up. Sending it to people within the audience you are trying to reach before it launches can help you identify any problems or concerns people might have with your campaign.
Two it exposes people to your project before you launch. After StreetSXW failed, I was reading Zarrella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness. The book was about how ideas spread online and it shed some light on how Kickstarter project are shared. Zarrella’s research showed that a person will only spread an idea if he or she was aware of the idea or it’s creator before being asked to share. In other words, people need to be aware of your project before it launches. This is what makes the soft launch so important.
Over the course of my three Kickstarter projects I am yet to do a successful soft launch. I came across the idea while doing research for A Kickstarter Guide To Kickstarter. At the time it seamed like a neat idea but it wasn’t until I read Zarrella’s book that I realized it vital to a campaign’s success.
I did not do a soft launch with SeetSXW and had not shown it to anyone in my core audience. Had I done so I might have noticed some of the flaws before launching so publicly. This also meant they were less likely to share it with their networks and spread the message.
So for my next project, A Kickstarter’s Guide: Version 2, I will be sure to talk about and share it with people well before it launches. (Hint hint like I am doing right now.)
This experience was interesting for me because I talked about having a prototype in A Kickstarter’s Guide. I also talked about a soft launch and the importance of finding an audience. Basically everything that went wrong in my campaign I had written about in A Kickstarter’s Guide to Kickstarter. Maybe I should’ve read my own book!
I think what happened was I underestimated how important many of these factors are and I got sucked into the details of launching my campaign. The difficult thing about launching anything publicly is that you get caught up in all the details and trying to make everything perfect. You are so busy crossing your T’s and dotting your I’s that sometimes you miss the bigger issues. Hey it happens to all of us.
The good news is that I learned a lot about what it really takes to make it Kickstarter project successful. Perhaps even more than I learned on my first campaign. I’m looking forward to sharing my insights with all of you and helping people avoid the many mistakes that I made.
In closing I want to leave you with my summary of A Kickstarter’s Guide to Kickstarter which pretty much says it all.
Great Kickstarter projects are successful because they connect and resonate with a specific audience. They use compelling storytelling combined with interesting or wacky ideas to attract backers. They are authentic while effectively communicating goals, passion, credibility and purpose. The more time spent thinking about these elements BEFORE the project is launched the easier the campaign becomes.
If you want to do a Kickstarter project because you think the Internet will find and love your project, stop right now. The Internet does not care about you. However, if you can reach out to the right people, in the right way, before time runs out, you just might get lucky.
Over the past couple months I’ve been working on something I call “The Kickstarter Hierarchy of Successfulness.” It is a framework that helps explain the most important factors to a Kickstarter project success. It is based on a lot of the research I have been doing over the past year as well as my own personal experience.
The name is a hat tip to Zarrella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness, whose book is an excellent resource and explains how ideas spread online.
This is just an overview and over the next couple weeks I’ll be taking a deeper dive into each of these. For now, here are four main factors that determine a projects success listed in order of increasing importance.
4. Explanation – The project must be simple enough that someone else can share it. Projects that have multiple parts are hard to explain and therefore spread slowly.
3. Offer – A project offers product or experience. Backers are either getting a finished product or are receiving an experience. Unless you have a working prototype in hand then you are offering an experience. Typically project offering almost finished products which are being pre-sold perform better than projects just offering an experience.
2. Engagement – The project must engage potential backers with an idea or story. A project either represents a unique, perhaps eve quirky idea or is telling a compelling story that is meaningful to a particular audience. Projects that represent a unique idea get a lot more attention because they are easier and more interesting to talk about.
1. Audience – The project must have a specific audience. Project creators either have an audience before launching or are working to build an audience during the campaign. Project creators who have a built in audience before coming to Kickstarter will have a much easier time funding there project.
The framework dictates that the most successful projects will be those that have a built-in audience, represent a compelling idea, are in the final stages of development and are easy to explain. As my friend Cedric Victor has said “but that’s kind of difficult isn’t it?” The answer is, yes. It’s very hard to do. An example of one such project is the Pebble E-Paper Watch.
What if your project is not like this? That’s Okay. The Pebble is the exception, not the rule, and there are a number of things you can do to push the odds of achieving success in your favor. This will be the topic of future posts. More to come!
These are the two fundamental building blocks of any Kickstarter project. A great project embodies a remarkable idea or tells a compelling story. The very best projects use both idea and story to build an audience and attract backers.
Unlike the other concepts in this book, these two principles affect all aspects of your endeavor. They can be embedded in everything, from what you are producing, to the way that you run your campaign. Using them well is extremely hard, but the payoff can be incredibly high.
Ideas are powerful. They are like viruses, spreading form person to person. When your project embodies a remarkable idea, it too will spread and this can serve as your marketing.
There are some projects on Kickstarter that have been funded because they represent an idea so contagious that people can’t help but talk about them. Building a stature of Robocop in downtown Detroit is one such idea. These type of projects are rare, but you can use this principle to make your project more interesting.
When Dan Provost & Tom Gerhardt ran their second Kickstarter project, they tried something different with their pricing. During their first project The Glif, they set the price of their product at $25. For their second project, a wide grip stylus for tablets, they did not set a price. They said the item would retail for $25, but people were able to pledge whatever they wanted. The catch was that there were only 3000 slots to raise $50,000. If everyone pledged $1, then no one would get the reward. By using a creative pricing model, they captured an idea that got people talking.
Everyone is making a film, album, art project, comic book, novel, etc., so you should want to create a project that represents an idea worth talking about.
Story is the other building block you have to play with. Telling your story in a compelling manner can make an ordinary project shine. Storytelling isn’t just the narrative of how your project came into existence. It is about entertaining people and connecting with them on an emotional level. It’s more than your video, although that may be the primary medium. It is the way you convey the story that reveals the essence of your project.
Zach Williams and The Bellow used storytelling as a critical element in their project to record an album. Recording an album is not a new, creative, or even that interesting of an idea, but the way they talked about it was. In the video Zach talks about how eight strangers from the South found each other in New York City and formed the band. He talks about what the music means to them and why it is so important. Through their video you understand that, for them, this is about much more than just recording an album.
As you build your project, think about the elements that will make your story more compelling, and how you want to express them. There might even be things you can do that will enhance the story when the project launches. Give it some real thought, because a great story can turn an ordinary idea into something magical.
pssst…you can read all of this offline by downloading the e-book.
