6 Tips for Surviving Your First Kickstarter Campaign

The creators of the It’s Different Every Day Calendar share advice on setting goals, sending GIFs, and making new friends.

Launching your first Kickstarter project is no small feat—just ask any creator. Between the prep work, project launch, backer updates, and reward fulfillment, there’s a lot that goes into creating something new for the public to enjoy.

We asked Boaz Frankel and Brooke Barker, the creators of the It’s Different Every Day Calendar, to share the tips and tricks that helped them through their first campaign, from coming up with a realistic goal to keeping the momentum going long past the halfway point. (Here’s a hint: GIFs. Lots of GIFs.)

You’re making a Kickstarter campaign? We have so much in common! Here are some things we learned while making the 2016 It’s Different Every Day Calendar that we hope will help you.

— Brooke & Boaz

Making a daily calendar requires a lot of math.

First, we called every printer in town and tracked down the only one that could print a daily calendar, bind it with that sticky stuff on one side, and mount it on a convenient plastic stand. Her name was Carrie. (Hi, Carrie!)

Then we calculated the absolute smallest number of calendars that would be reasonable to print, and we started researching shipping to see how much it would cost to send our calendars to foreign countries.

Math kept us on our toes every step of the way — some of our initial estimates were way off!

Public radio shows can charge $50 for a tote bag, but outside of radio pledge drives, tote bags usually cost a lot less. Kickstarter is a lot of things, but it’s not Prairie Home Companion. We tried to keep this in mind while pricing our rewards.

Since we were creating a calendar, we went to a bunch of stores both on- and offline and compared the cost of a diverse array of calendars. If we were going to charge much more than those prices, we knew we’d need a compelling reason why. We had to return to our math a few times to figure out how to lower our prices.

Once we’d figured out our funding goal, we asked a couple of our most honest friends what they thought, to make sure we weren’t crazy. They said the goal sounded good, but that we were crazy for other reasons, which is fair.

Your Kickstarter video is incredibly important, but wearing pants in your video isn’t important at all. We don’t have air conditioning in our apartment and we made our video in the middle of the summer, so we filmed ourselves from the waist up and made sure that our top halves were all business.

Our video introduced us as two normal, clothes-wearing people and explained what our calendar would look like and how it would help brighten people’s year.

As soon as our project went live, we emailed friends and family so they could start spreading the word. But the campaign still had another thirty days to go, and we wanted to keep telling everyone about our Kickstarter campaign. It was all we wanted to talk about.

We didn’t want to bore our friends and seem like robots, so we made different comics, videos, GIFs, and stories (like the ones above) so that every reminder was a little different and shareable in its own way.

Having a Kickstarter backer is like having someone pick you for their kickball team. (We think. No one’s ever picked us for a kickball team, but we imagine it would feel like that.)

We showed our backers how grateful we were by sending them updates as the campaign went on. We’re here to make friends! We also supported other cool projects, and responded to emails and comments as quickly as we could.

When our campaign ended, we were finally able to exhale and celebrate. We decided to celebrate by getting engaged that night, but that part is totally optional and not everyone does it—though our backers seemed to like it.

Even though our campaign was successful, we made a lot of mistakes along the way. We took stock of what we had learned and made an effort to fix a lot of those mistakes the next year.

Find out where you can purchase the 2017 It’s Different Every Day Calendar here.

Ready to start your own Kickstarter project? Get started here.