5 Skill Sets You’ll Need to Succeed on Kickstarter
A wide range of expertise is required to bring a product to life on a platform like Kickstarter. Whether you aim to raise a few thousand dollars to produce a bottle opener made from a ball bearing or several hundreds of thousands for an innovative wireless microphone, the types of skills you’ll need will remain consistent.
What differs between these scenarios is the depth of expertise and investment of time and resources required to achieve these different results. Factors such as scale, product, audience, market, and launch strategy will determine the depth of expertise, length of time, and the number of resources you will need to bring to bear.
This piece will explore the five core areas of expertise required to launch products via crowdfunding.
- Storytelling
- Community
- Marketing
- Media Outreach
- Project Management
Though we’ve identified these areas as separate domains, you’ll notice that they are highly interdependent.
Our focus here is limited to the skill sets required to plan, develop, run, and fulfill the campaign itself. We won’t delve into the skills necessary to design, manufacture, and manage your product’s logistics.
So let’s dig in…
Storytelling
To succeed on Kickstarter, you need to be able to weave together a compelling narrative that brings your product to life. This is essential.
Your story needs to be so compelling that people are willing to give you money before seeing your product in person and with little to no social proof. It needs to convince them to pledge money many months before your product’s ship date; and accept the risk that it might be delayed and, in the worst-case scenario, could never even ship.
In other words, it needs to be one hell of a story.
You will use multiple different mediums to bring your story to life; videos, animated gifs, photos, copy, to name a few. These assets will be used across a wide variety of touchpoints, both on and off Kickstarter. The most prominent ones being your campaign page, project video, project updates, pre-launch landing page, online ads, and newsletters.
The Makey Makey project video is a canonical example of a Kickstarter project video and a powerful storytelling piece.
It captures the product’s spirit authentically and compellingly while clearly bringing its functionality to life. It was filmed, edited, and stars the creators, and has a homebrew vibe that aligns strongly with the creator's values and the nature of the product itself — an invention kit for DIY interfaces.
Storytelling is a creative endeavor
To craft a compelling narrative, you need to distill your product’s essence, develop story angles that will play a supporting role, then weave them together to bring your product to life in an inspired way.
The creator of The Present — Day Moon Year, Scott Thrift, does a fantastic job of distilling the essential qualities of his products — time-giving gifts that “guide our thinking and behavior into greater harmony with nature.” The copy, graphics, and videos are masterfully woven together to bring to life how his timepieces deliver on this promise.
Tapping into the rational and emotional
Compelling project stories weave together emotional and rational narratives. The emotional threads get people excited about a product’s vision and promise, while the rational threads enable them to assess the relationship between value and costs being offered.
The project video for Jeff Sheldon’s most recent project, Analog, does a masterful job at weaving together these two angles. It is one of my favorite recent project videos. It is effective, beautifully crafted, and breaks the mold just enough to stand out. It also powerfully connects with its audience on an emotional and rational level.
Here is how:
Jeff establishes an emotional connection with his audience at the outset by bringing to life a common struggle with productivity-focused technology through his personal journey. He then presents the product as a simple and effective solution that can work alongside the digital productivity systems his audience already uses, appealing to their rational side.
This video breaks one of the most widely accepted best practices, to show your product in the first 15 to 30 seconds. Jeff compensates for that by crafting a perfectly pitched story for his target audience. Breaking out of the mold successfully is difficult but can have a memorable impact when done right.
Skills needed for storytelling
Here are some of the essential skills that will help you produce compelling content:
- Copywriting: needed to develop a compelling story arc, craft concise and persuasive copy for your project page, and a solid script for your video.
- Art direction: required to create a visual language that ties together a campaign, from the video to photos, graphics, and header treatments.
- Photography: essential for capturing the various types of shots needed to bring your product to life and tell your project’s broader story.
- Videography: crucial for making a compelling video that will function as the single most significant creative asset on your project page.
Here are a few other resources that are worth checking out if you want to dive deeper into the topic of Storytelling: Five questions that need to be answered on your project page; How to tap into the wisdom of past projects; and a free preview of Kickstarter Masterclass featuring a lesson on Storytelling.
Community
The ability to develop and nurture relationships with people who care about what you are making, or the niche in which your product inhabits, is powerful. It will help you get funded, but more importantly, it will enable you to build value beyond what can be measured in dollars, pounds, or yens.
We’ve identified three different types of communities relevant to your Kickstarter effort: affinity communities, product & brand communities, and backer communities.
Let’s dive into each one, and explore the skills required to tap into them.
Affinity Communities
Groups of people who care about the type of product you are developing. For example, if you are launching a motion control kit for taking photos and making videos, you should consider engaging with communities of enthusiasts or pro photographers and videographers.
Tapping into these communities can be a powerful way to build a Product Community in the lead-up to your launch. This is especially true if you are making a product for a passionate niche audience, like the Atreus mechanical keyboard from Keyboardio.
Jesse Vincent, the co-founder of Keyboardio, has been making mechanical keyboards for close to a decade. Long before launching his first keyboard on Kickstarter, he actively shared his work on his blog and keyboard enthusiast communities Geekhack and Deskthority.
Engaging with an affinity community requires an authentic passion for what you are making, a willingness to contribute your knowledge and perspective, and a commitment to showing up consistently on social media, forums, events, and wherever else the community congregates.
Product & Brand Communities
Groups of people who you’ve brought together because they are interested in your product or brand. This is often what people refer to when they talk about “building community” for a Kickstarter launch. It’s really just a shorthand way to refer to email lists, social media followings, and online groups that creators build in the lead-up to a launch.
These communities are essential for launching your product on Kickstarter. Their value extends far beyond your launch, but we’ll stay focused on their importance to your crowdfunding campaign here today.
The first step to building a product or brand community is finding people who share a common interest in your product or are already interested in your work. This can be done by engaging with others through affinity communities, connecting with press or influencers, tapping into your personal and professional network, or leveraging online advertising.
The team from the Looking Glass Factory posted on Twitter an open letter to Sony in response to the latter’s entry into the holographic display market. This tactic enabled them to ride the wave of publicity created by Sony’s big announcement to promote the Looking Glass Portrait's upcoming launch.
Building a product community is not just about adding subscribers or followers to a list. The real value of these communities comes from the opportunity that the lists afford. They enable you to engage with groups of people who are interested in your work. Our article on strategies to engage email subscribers dives deeper into this topic and explores a few different techniques for engaging with your subscribers.
Backer Communities
Backer Communities are the groups of people who have pledged money to a project. They follow along the post-Kickstarter campaign journey to bring a product to life. Many of these individuals will be the first owners of your product. In the best-case scenario, they will become your advocates or loyal customers.
Your campaign will unfold over a long period, many months, possibly even years. This journey provides an excellent opportunity to nurture a community of people who care about your product and perhaps even your team, company, and mission.
Engaging with your backers over an extended period takes a lot of work. It requires that you provide frequent updates about your progress and that you respond to comments and direct messages in a timely and respectful manner, even when you feel a backer is unreasonably critical.
Like any long-term relationship, you’ll likely encounter good times — when everything is going according to plan, and your backers are happy — and bad times — when you are hitting up against roadblocks, the timeline is at risk, and some of your backers are impatient. How you handle difficult situations can earn you more loyalty than if you never had to handle them at all.
The most prolific product creators on Kickstarter understand that keeping backers happy is an essential foundation for future successes.
A prime example is a team from Calamityware, which has launched over 50 projects. They place great importance on their backer’s experience. It all starts by adequately setting backer’s expectations while the project is live, then keeping them informed, and responding to questions promptly throughout the rest of the journey. That’s one of the reasons why their backers, including yours truly, keep on coming back for more.
Marketing
Marketing is a broad discipline that encompasses activities associated with promoting the sale or purchase of products, goods, or services. It’s such an enormous discipline that you could actually classify all of the skills that I discuss in this article under the umbrella of marketing.
For our purposes, I’m using the term in a more narrow sense to refer to three types of activities: marketing research, strategy and planning, and campaign execution.
Marketing Research
Research is an essential activity that enables you to identify your product’s core audience, develop a keen understanding of their needs, and build a reliable map of the market that your product will enter. This work will enable you to identify where to find your audience, what stories will most likely resonate with them, and how much they will probably be willing to pay for your product.
This research is less daunting than it sounds.
One of the benefits of being an independent business or creative is that you are likely very close to, or even a member of, your product’s audience. That doesn’t mean that you don’t need to do any research — it’s still important to talk to people outside of your team or personal network of family, friends, and peers. Outsiders will bring a different frame of reference when they interact with your product. They are also more likely to give you candid feedback without sparing any punches.
CW&T is an excellent example of the proximity between many independent creators and their audience. Products such as Herring Blade and Key Wrangler grew out of the duo’s personal interests and needs. These products were shaped by their individual preferences, tested in day-to-day use at home and in their studio, and shared with their network of peers. They didn’t need to carry out formal research because they represent, and are embedded in, their audience.
Marketing Strategy
The most critical elements of your marketing strategy are pricing strategy and sales funnel design. Your product’s price needs to be attractive enough to entice people to pledge, profitable enough to sustain your business, and aligned with your team’s and company’s values. Your sales funnel needs to be able to bring the right people into the fold, nurture their interest, stoke desire, and ultimately drive pledges.
Your pricing strategy needs to be driven by your product’s perceived value (top-down), as much as the production costs (bottom-up). The projected Cost of Goods Sold (CoGS) for your product will determine your price floor — the lowest possible price that you should offer. Your product’s perceived value will determine the price ceiling — the highest possible cost that the market will bear.
As long as your price ceiling is higher than your price floor, you’ll have a chance to sell your product at a profit. However, things get pretty tricky if this relationship is inverted.
What is CoGS, and how can you use that to figure out your price floor? Check out this article from Shopify that explores in some depth pricing requirements for retail and wholesale. It explains in some detail how to calculate your wholesale and retail cost floor from your production costs.
The term sales funnels refer to a few related concepts. Wikipedia has a pretty good definition for the most common and broadest application of this term: “a consumer-focused marketing model that illustrates the theoretical customer journey toward the purchase of a good or service.”
We’ll define a sales funnel as a pre-scripted journey created to move prospective customers towards purchasing a product (or a pledge to a project) for our purposes here. To build the sales funnels for your product, you’ll need to map out how you’re going to reach your audience to create awareness, generate interest, build desire, and ultimately drive action.
The entire customer journey can take place over months or minutes.
If you are launching an innovative device that has a premium price, you will likely need to nurture your prospective customers’ interest over a couple of weeks or months. On the other hand, if you are launching a nicely designed and affordable keyring, some prospective backers might be ready to take the leap within a few minutes of hearing about your product.
Regardless of what type of product you are working on, you should start building your audience months before your launch using a sales funnel that leverages email or social media. This is where sales funnels intersect with the community-building work that we previously covered.
Campaign Execution
This is what most people think about when it comes to marketing in a crowdfunding context. They specifically think about the online advertising campaigns and other digital promotional activities that run while a project is live. It’s not surprising because this work is evident since it takes place while a project is live.
Most successful creators start executing their marketing efforts many months before their campaign goes live. At the very least, they attend events to show off their product and run online ads to build their list.
As you can see, we are delving into the topic of building an email list here — a topic that we explored in the Product Community section earlier. That’s because email marketing is a discipline that lies at the intersection of community building and marketing.
If you plan to use online advertising during your live campaign, it is advisable to start before your launch. That will help you validate that online advertising can actually work for your project. It can also help you fine-tune your audience and messaging so that you can optimize your efforts before you go live.
Media Relations
Press and influencers can exponentially increase awareness, generate buzz, and lend credibility to your company. Positive coverage provides social proof, which can be featured prominently on your project page, and creates a halo that lasts much longer than your campaign’s funding period.
Crave’s Duet Pro campaign provides an excellent example of how press coverage can be used to provide social proof on a project page. They used the articles to support specific aspects of their campaign’s narrative by featuring quotes from each publication.
The independent nature of the press makes it uniquely powerful and equally unpredictable. It is hard to attain coverage, so most creators don’t get any traction. Even when they succeed, the cover often takes a different angle than they hoped. And when coverage is positive, the increased awareness it generates may not convert to pledges.
Even so, the potential upside and long-term value of press coverage make it worth some investment for most creators. Here is a brief overview of the steps involved.
Start by developing story angles that highlight relevant aspects of your story for different segments of your audience. Next, do some research to identify publications and journalists that are relevant to those groups. Size matters here. You need to go beyond identifying the 10 or 15 top publications — shoot for 50 to 100 contacts.
Craft succinct pitches that are tailored to each publication. You can use a template as a foundation, but make sure to personalize each one, especially for the top publications on your list. Make sure to feature a press kit in your pitch. It should include a press release with a longer description of your product and a folder with a few creative assets.
Finally, follow-up tenaciously but respectfully. Don’t be discouraged if you don’t get any replies — that’s quite common.
For a deeper dive into this topic, check out the free preview for the Kickstarter Masterclass. It includes a lesson on press outreach.
Project Management
This is a skill set that many creators don’t consider when assessing the work required to launch a campaign. That is a big mistake — the more ambitious your project, the more you will suffer if you leave this out.
Your product launch will involve the coordination of multiple stakeholders and numerous deliverables. You’ll need to manage parallel workstreams that have overlapping dependencies and that need to align at critical points in your journey.
The development of a functional prototype is a critical dependency for your video shoot. Product development and video production may work independently for the most part, but they need to align just in time for the video shoot to begin. This scenario is an illustrative example of the many dependencies that you’ll need to manage.
Someone will need to project manage your efforts, from the planning phase all the way through the fulfillment of rewards. This person must possess reliable time management and financial management skills, the ability to map and align critical path dependencies, and strong interpersonal skills.
It takes a lot
It can get overwhelming when you start to grasp the full scope of activities required to launch a product. Bringing a product to life is difficult. Platforms like Kickstarter make it easier, but it’s still nowhere near easy.
That’s why passion and grit are such important characteristics of creators and teams who succeed at Kickstarter. The latter provides the fuel to keep going, while the former provides resilience to overcome the many challenges.
It’s good to know that from the outset the skills and work required to launch a product. I know that it takes most creators a lot longer than they expected to prepare for a successful launch.
The majority of creators who take our course push back their launch date as soon as they understand the full scope of their undertaking.
That’s ok because the best time to launch is when you are ready.
If you have any questions, tips, or feedback, leave it here in a comment, or email me at julio@launchstudio.com.
Sign-up for the free preview of the Kickstarter Masterclass. You’ll get access to a few of our students’ favorite lessons and other tips and resources for launching products using Kickstarter.
