3 Ingredients for a Successful Crowdfunding Campaign Launch

As I begin to unpack some of the big questions, best-practices, and miscellaneous elements involved in crowdfunding, I thought it would be helpful to start with the question I get most often:

“What are the key elements for creating a successful crowdfunding launch?”

You may expect the answer to be a long list of to-do items, metrics to hit, or steps to follow, but it really boils down to three core ingredients: (1) product, (2) page, and (3) community. If you master these three seemingly simple but critical elements, your campaign will be successful. Period.

Before I begin to elaborate on these ingredients, it’s important first to define what “success” means as every campaigner has a different answer. Without first defining what success means to you or what your internal goals are, how can you possibly create a plan to surpass them? Here are some examples of how different campaigners have defined success:

1. I want to raise $1M+ and become the most funded x company in crowdfunding history.
2. I need to raise $25k to fund tooling and my first run of production; I’d be thrilled even if I get a penny more than my goal.
3. I’m shooting to sell 500 units, which gets my production costs to where they need to be.
4. I’m looking to launch in a big way with a ton of exposure through media outlets and impressions.

Notice how the first three examples have measurable results while the last one is pretty fluffy? Even campaigns that want to “launch big” or “get a ton of media attention” should still consider a minimum threshold of funds raised or units ordered that is acceptable — try to think of what this number is in advance.

Now that you have your (specific) goal in mind, let’s discuss these ingredients…

(1) Product - Without a great product that people want at a price point that makes sense, neither of the other ingredients matter (your campaign will flop). The best products for crowdfunding are ones that aren’t yet available and are vastly different (better, faster, prettier, lasts longer, first-ever, cheaper, etc.) than what’s on the market. You need to have a differentiating factor to lean on.

Before launch, it’s important to test whether you have product-market fit and whether people are interested in purchasing this product at your given price point. There are lots of ways to validate product-market fit and price point, but one of the bests is to set up a pre-launch page optimized for email collection. Tell folks you’re going to give them x% off at launch and will notify them when you do. Measure your conversion rate and adjust accordingly. You can also send out surveys, run digital ads, price against your competition, attend industry conferences, or try to sell the product on the streets… Anything you can do to determine if this thing is going to work. You’re going to be spending a ton of time, energy and resources launching this campaign and you should de-risk it as much as possible in order to know it will succeed.

(2) Page -After you’ve validated your product and price point, the next ingredient for success is how you display this product to the world. I’m specifically referring to the images, video, and copy included on your campaign and pre-launch page. You can have a revolutionary product but if you don’t display it in the right way, it won’t get the love it deserves.

First impressions are everything. As much as you’d like to hope backers will watch every one of your videos, read all your text, and spend the afternoon on your page, they will generally only spend a couple minutes scrolling through to determine if it’s something that interests them.

There are lots of resources out there to help guide your artistic hand so instead of going into detail about what types of images work best (the answer is always lifestyle photography and gifs), the perfect length for a video (around two mins and get to the point quickly), or whether you should invest in professional photography (yes, absolutely yes), I’ll just say if you want to raise $100k+ through crowdfunding, your page better look damn good.

(3) Community - The single biggest mistake we see campaigners make is underestimating the necessity of building an active community in advance of their launch. All too often we see amazing products with beautiful pages completely flop. It’s a sad sight. Nobody likes to see that.

You’ve heard this cliche before… “if you build it, they will come.” While this may have worked in the old days of crowdfunding, it’s no longer true. In order to have a successful launch, your first customers will almost always be from the community you’ve cultivated in advance. These are the customers that don’t need to see a ton of social validation on your page to make a purchase decision; they’re ready to click “back” the second your campaign goes live. You should have a big enough community (specifically an email list, although social media followers are great too) to get to 30% of your overall internal goal (your definition of success) within the first few days of the campaign. After this initial and critical boost, when a stranger lands on the page, they’ll see a page that has momentum, a ton of backers, and excitement around it — making them much more willing to back.

There are, of course, many other ingredients that will help your campaign be successful but getting these three right will make the biggest impact. I may also dive deeper into each of these core ingredients in later posts. In the meantime, if you have feedback, things to add, or questions you’d like answered in a future post, please feel free to leave a comment below.