This past week I started doing research for our crowd-funding campaign. It is the first step of the four part process I’ve developed for building a crowd-funding campaign. In this step I’m trying to find projects that are similar to ours in order to get a sense of what worked in the past.

When researching projects it can be tempting to copy there structure and assume this will make your project successful. I’ve learned a lot happens behind the scenes which isn’t obvious by looking at the project page. For example, maybe the creator has a friend who got their project a lot of press. Or perhaps they had a family member who donated a large amount. The point is there is no way of knowing exactly what contributed to that project’s success.

The other problem with simply copying successful projects is that you might be copying the wrong parts. For example you might find a few projects that offer a physical DVD for $25. You could conclude that this is a good reward but run into problems when trying to produce it yourself. Research should give you a place to start, not define your campaign.

Finding projects

To start looking for projects I go to the advanced discover page on Kickstarter. This page lets me filter projects by category, location, and a whole lot of other search terms. For each project I can see a thumbnail, a description, the percent funded, and the amount funded.

It’s important to look at a variety of projects so that you can see the different ways a project gets funded. I looked for projects that matched one of the following criteria.

Projects that raised roughly $40,000. — These projects are important because they raised close to the amount we are hoping to raise. I want to get a sense of how many backers they had. My estimate is around 500, but I want to make sure this is accurate.

Projects that were overfunded — Specifically I’m trying to find projects that were overfunded by 200% to 300%. Being overfunded by that much says to me that the project was backed by people beyond the creator’s friends and family. It also means that people are passionate about the project and want to support it beyond just the sated goal.

Projects that raised over 100,000. — These are projects that have done exceptionally well. We probably will not raise anything close to that much, but I like to look at what the very best projects have done. Maybe there are a few ideas or concepts I can use.

What I’m looking for

When I arrive at a project I look at their stated goal, how much they raised, and how many backers they have. These numbers tell me a lot about how the project was funded. For example the average pledge on Kickstarter is $75, so if a project raised over $40K from 170 people, there is a good chance they had a couple of very big backers. Basically I’m trying to figure out WHO backed the project. Was it mostly friends and family, or was it strangers and fans?

I also like to look at there bit.ly stats. Below every video there is a button to embed the project on an external website. When you click on this it gives you an embed code and the project short link. Adding a + to the end of that URL will give you statics about how many people visited that page during the campaign. These are not entirely accurate because not everyone uses this short link. However, for some projects it can give you an idea how many views it took to get the amount they raised.

Here are the bit.ly stats for my first campaign: http://kck.st/dlC3wK+

Another great tool when investigating projects is Kicktraq. This site provides you all kinds of interesting information about how a project was funded. You can see a day by day breakdown of pledges and amount raised. You can see funding progress over time, and articles written about the project. You only get information about projects that were created after Kicktraq was launched. Most of the projects I looked had all of the Kicktraq information aviable.

Finally I review thier project page. I look at the video, the rewards and some of the copy. I try to get a sense of how the project was marketed and why people would want to back it. Trying to guess why people backed a project is a bit speculative but you never know what insight you might have.

What I found

Since this post is getting a little long I’ll save my insights for next week. I’m still looking at, and digesting all of this information anyway.