The Secret To Running A Successful Kickstarter Campaign

Crowdfunding is all the rage, but it takes careful planning and execution to achieve your funding goals

It seems that everyone these days is running, or thinking about running a Kickstarter or Indiegogo campaign. Instead of trying to get a loan from the bank or pitching investors, people are turning to crowdfunding as a no strings attached way to raise money. In fact, $34 billion was crowdfunded in 2018 globally and it is estimated to grow to over $300 billion by 2025. In comparison, the Venture Capitalist industry invested $84 billion in 2017.

Many people don’t realize how much work and planning goes into a campaign. My business partner, Kelly, and I were also naïve to this when we decided to run a campaign. One of our mentors asked us, “Have you figured out how many people you will need in your database ahead of time in order to ensure you meet your goal?” Our answer, was “no” and we had a, “holy crap” moment and went back to our office to ponder whether this was the right method.

In the end, we decided that Kickstarter was the right approach for Kirrin Finch, because although it is positioned as a funding platform, its real strength comes as a marketing tool. As a completely unknown company, it was a great way to introduce our brand to the world. Kickstarter CEO agrees; in discussing the widely successful Pebble Watch campaign, he said “The Pebble Time project will show that the real power and utility of our platform is not in money, it’s in community and distribution.”

Let’s get into the nitty-gritty of what you need to know before launching a crowdfunding campaign.

1. Get as many e-mails as possible for potential backers before you launch the campaign.

The most popular pledge on Kickstarter is $25, and the average pledge for fashion is ~$60 so we assumed we needed somewhere between 500–1000 backers in order to raise $30,000. By the time we launched, we had compiled an e-mail list of approximately 1000 people. We leveraged the heck out of our existing personal network, so many of these included friends and family, but we also spent about four months building a list of new…