How To Not Suck At Running A Kickstarter Campaign

I’ve never run a Kickstarter campaign, nor have I been involved with one in any capacity. Despite that, I’m intimately familiar with the process: I’ve backed 45 campaigns (A paltry number to some) since June of 2011, the majority of which have been physical products. In that time, I’ve also followed closely the successes (and failures) of a number of high-profile campaigns.

It’s frequently reinforced (by Kickstarter themselves, as well as others) that “Kickstarter Is Not A Store”. While I don’t 100% agree with this statement, the implication is that backers are more like investors than customers. In either case, there are a lot of areas where people just plain suck at running campaigns. I’m not talking about the quality of the videos, or the “pitch”, or how they setup the reward tiers. I’m talking about something I like to call Post-Campaign Gut.

Bachelor #1…

Kickstarter campaigns are a lot like internet dating. You’ll spend hours trying to take the perfect photo for your profile. The one that makes you look fun and exciting, but in a casual, “this is how I look all the time”-kind of way. This is the equivalent of your campaign video. Then comes the profile itself (“About this project”). Lots of adjectives: “Fun”, “Exciting”, “Unique”, etc. You put together a few paragraphs about yourself, your product, your experience, why people should want to back you, what makes you different from all the other projects and end it with a smiley face for good measure. It looks perfect.

Next comes the Reward Tiers: What are you looking for in a backer? Let’s be honest: You’re a gold-digger, and you just want our money. What are we going to get out of it from you? “Pre-release access!”, “Better than anything on the market!”, “I didn’t know you could shave with lasers!”. All formulated in a way that’s (hopefully) honest, but also appealing. You’re now done with your “dating” profile and are ready to post it to the web.

Successfully Fund Campaign => ? => Profit

You’ve done well. Your campaign is live and now you’ve got people interested. In fact, you’ve done really well and are now in a “relationship” with someone (quite a few someones). You can afford to let yourself relax a bit. Sure, you’ve got to deliver on your promises, but now you’ve got the money and don’t need to impress quite as much anymore. Post-Campaign Gut.

I understand it. Everyone does it; Relationships, jobs, political campaigns. But we’re a nervous bunch, some of us have had our hearts broken before and we all NEED you to communicate better. Good communication is key to a good relationship. Here’s how you can do that after the campaign is over:

1. Stick to a schedule.

We’ve invested our money in your dream. We need to hear from you on a regular, reliable basis. It doesn’t matter if it’s once a day, once a week or once a month. Just pick a schedule and stick to it. Often campaigns will start out doing this, but as production drags on, delays happen, changes need to be made, and delivery dates are missed. This is a scary place to be in, especially for those who may have invested hundreds, or even thousands of dollars (with no real recourse should things go poorly).

Commit to a schedule, and put it on your calendar.

2. Communicate, even when there’s nothing to communicate.

It’s not uncommon to see this in campaign comments and/or updates:

“We would’ve updated you guys, but there wasn’t really anything to update.”

“We didn’t send any updates last month because there was nothing to update.”

Unless you’ve committed to updating daily (please don’t), there’s ALWAYS going to be something to update. I don’t care if you literally have to send an update that says “Nothing has changed. See you at the next update!”, just send it.

We, your backers, are just as excited as you to see your dream succeed. Most of us want to hear the stuff you probably think is lame. Emailed the print shop? Include that in your scheduled update. The shipping company took a week to get back to you? Throw that in there, too! These things, however mundane they might seem to you, actually help us to feel more connected with the project.

We will be so much happier and you’ll see a lot less of the “It’s been X days/weeks since the last update, what’s happening?”-posts in the comments.

3. Update the delivery date, BEFORE it passes.

We know. You tripled your delivery estimate and yet here we are with five days to go and you’re not close to done yet. Very few projects seem to meet their delivery goals, despite the best efforts of their makers. We’re not mad, but we will be if you don’t send us an update BEFORE the delivery date passes.

Depending on the type of project, you might know as many as a few months (send it now), or as little as a few days before the deadline that you won’t be able to complete the project on time. The important thing is that you send an update WHEN you know. The larger the amount of time from when it became obvious (and we’ll know because you’re sending good updates) to when you officially told us, the more pissed we’re going to be.

Tell us what contributed to the delays (bugs/typos/vendors/staff changes), what you’ve done/are doing to mitigate them, and give a reasonable updated delivery date. Be honest, albeit cautious. We’re in this ride together and want you to succeed, but good, honest communication will make the news of delays a far easier pill to swallow.

4. Send updates via Kickstarter.

I’ve seen many a project that will setup their official website and/or forum and then stop sending updates via Kickstarter. Here’s the reality: We backed you via Kickstarter and you need to update us via Kickstarter. You can post it to your website/forum as well, but even if we assume every email you send has a 75% open rate (some numbers I saw showed 65% for Kickstarter, both well above the ~22% average that MailChimp reports), that still leaves 25% of your backers who didn’t see your update stating that you’ll no longer be updating via Kickstarter. 25%. And they’re going to be vocal when they remember that they backed your project and haven’t heard from you in 3-months.

Do us both a favor and update on Kickstarter, as well as anywhere else you’d like.

5. Ask for feedback.

You have a fairly rare opportunity in the product-development world: A large group of people who, after paying YOU, are able and willing to provide feedback. It doesn’t get much better than that. Think about it: We liked your idea enough to give you our money in exchange for the promise of rewards. If there are opportunities for us to provide input, let us do it.

It will make us feel more involved, will save you money on Q/A, and help improve the quality of the product. All for free!

Communicate, communicate, communicate.

Beyond the prospect of losing money, the lack of steady communication is probably the most frustrating thing about being a Kickstarter backer. Most campaigns just don’t communicate well, post-funding. You sent out emails twice a day during the campaign, but that was to generate interest, thereby ensuring success.

But we, the backers, are still here and want to know what’s going on. If Kickstarter truly isn’t a store, then we are more like investors. And investors want to know what’s happening with their investment.