How Simple Can A Kickstarter Campaign Be?
30 Days of Selling
It may be better to first read about the math toy I designed.
In the best sense possible, wonda’s Kickstarter campaign was an experiment on different fronts. I wanted to see the reaction to it, if people would appreciate the math toy and note the interest it generated.
I also wanted to try Kickstarter out as a mechanism for raising production funds, something I could revisit as some point in the future. And then I wanted to test Urethane Casting as a cheap method of production and see how well it fit low volume (manual) production.
There was a reason for this. The last time I designed an educational product it was difficult trying to get people to purchase the product at the price point that made it profitable. Also, the method of production for that product (a map puzzle of Nigerian States) was 3D printing. In the end, I released the design files on Thingiverse. But that was three years ago.
Price
Fixing a price for the toy was difficult, I had an estimate of the manufacturing unit cost (without factoring time, on purpose) but I couldn’t tell what people could afford to spend on it. So I went back to the moms I had tested the product with, the general consensus was $20.
Still, I had to decide if I went with cost-based pricing or demand-based pricing. For this, I sought out Spencer Wright on a slightly windy day in Brooklyn over coffee. Spencer publishes the best manufacturing/logistics newsletter that I read, but had also launched two Kickstarter campaigns in the past. He advised me to go for passion and not think of a profit, to place the price at something parents can pay for but at a limited number that made it doable.
So, I set the price at $20 for 100 people (for the basic toy configuration) and set the campaign goal at $2000. 100 people was the validation I wanted that the toy was useful, and $20 x 100 = $2000.
Length
I chose 30 days for the campaign because it sounded like enough time to get $2000 and a 60 day campaign would have been too much work.
Planning
The video was shot by a colleague of mine at work during lunch. I found that videos are really good for promotion on social media as people tend to interact with them a lot more than pictures.
I did not know that it would take three days for Kickstarter to verify my ID and approve the campaign, I would have planned for that better.
As most people who know me professionally live in Nigeria and I currently do not, it was important to factor in the time difference. The campaign launched at 8am EST, what would be 1pm in Nigeria, so that people in both timezones could interact with it the same day.
Setting rewards for the campaign was relatively easy because of the toy’s design. As it could be configured in different ways, I used this as a way to improve the rewards in different tiers. In hindsight, I should have added some paired rewards.
Promotions
I struggled with this one, but that taught me a lot.
First, I opened a survey and shared it on Twitter and Facebook inviting people interested in seeing the progress of the toy to join the mailing list. Then I followed this up with a blog post discussing the toy and sharing the first pictures of it. 35 people joined the mailing list.
The good thing about a blog post for promotions is that many online forums, from Facebook groups to Reddit channels, do not allow sales (and some explicitly say Kickstarter campaigns) on their pages. A blog post resonates well with this group because they can also see your thought process.
From reading about campaigns I had learnt that the first couple of days should be about personal campaigning, and sharing the campaign with your immediate network of friends and colleagues to reach the biggest audience you can personally muster. I did this and reached out to media publications two days after my campaign had launched, only my alma mater [W Booth School at McMaster University] wrote about me on their website.
I also planned to reach out to Meetup groups with an education focus and share on Facebook groups, none of the groups exactly took to it. But I received lengthy feedback from a veteran homeschooler who reviewed my toy and gave me notes on future versions.
That was my promotions plan, scanty I know.
Outcome
Well, the toy got funded with 10 days to go.
75% of the people who backed the campaign are people I’ve met before or showed the toy in person. People back what they know, quite simply. However, they represent 63% of the funds raised.
People who didn’t know me backed higher reward tiers but it’s not likely they would have backed the campaign if people who knew me hadn’t already pledged. That’s essentially my biggest take away from this campaign: have enough people in your network to completely fund your campaign. The people who love the idea will add to this and raise your funds.
One week into my campaign, I met Noah Feehan who was working with the Kickstarter Design & Outreach team while he was giving office hours at New Lab. He took a look at my campaign and recommended a couple of things: to add more text instead of the pictures I had used as all text on the site is searchable; to look for journalists who cover similar toys and tell them about the campaign, see if they would write about it.
He also gave me good news: the graph of my dashboard (above) was apparently better than normal, most campaigns are flat after the first couple of days but mine had continued growing although at a slow, steady pace. I think the reason this happened was because I had a staged promotions plan so new people kept hearing about the toy as days went by.
Lessons
So, I already wrote a lengthy thread on Twitter on my lessons.
That’s the biggest one, for an indie designer like myself friends are everything.
Now all I have to do is produce the toys and ship rewards to backers.
