How we screwed up our Kickstarter campaign
And how we’re working to fix it midstream
tl;dr Community is our currency. We should’ve been more explicit about that.
It’s no secret. PIE has long been enamored of Kickstarter. In the early days of PIE — as Portland was simultaneously establishing an incredible presence on the Kickstarter platform — we used to get the chance to collaborate with Kickstarter and Portland creators, when the platform was still young and small enough to do that. So we always fancied the opportunity to build a Kickstarter project of our own.
It only took eight years. It happens.
But over those eight years, we participated as backers, we watched campaigns succeed and fail, we chatted with Kickstarter creators, and we read terabytes of posts on “how to run a successful Kickstarter campaign.”
We still screwed up.
But buck up there, gentle reader. And turn that frown upside down. We said “screwed up” not “failed.”
There’s a bright side. In fact, there are any number of bright sides. The primary one being that we’ve lucky to have a bunch of awesome people who helped us hit our Kickstarter goal. And that? Well that’s just awesome.
A second bright side is that we are able to work on correcting these issues, midstream. While the campaign is still going. Iterating and refining as we go. And we’ll keep tweaking and revising until the final bell at 4:00PM Pacific Time on April 1, 2016.
Another bright side is the learning. We have already learned — and are continuing to learn — a ton from this project. Every day we’re learning. And we’re putting that learning to work. Right now. Like any good iterative experiment should. What’s more, we’re sharing those missteps with you in the hopes that you can avoid the errors we made. So you can learn too. And so you can go out and make new mistakes.
You see, we’re always talking about all of the errors we’ve made with PIE. And how we’ve learned from them. So this — this screw up — seemed like a perfect “teaching opportunity.” And a way to be completely transparent about the campaign.
Because when you’re proposing a project that you’ll be creating out in the open it makes sense to actually be open about the entire journey — not just the good, happy parts.
With that in mind, we want to share with you some of the ways that Kickstarter worked awesomely — even if it wasn’t in the way we had hoped. How we screwed up on our messaging. And how we’re taking measures to attempt to correct those errors, midstream.
Context
First and foremost, it’s important to understand that the PIE Cookbook Kickstarter campaign is an attempt to build community around the concept of an open source guide to creating and running an accelerator.
It is an odd Kickstarter experiment in a few respects, but primarily:
- Community development is far more critical to us than capital.
- We’re delivering the product whether the campaign gets funded or not.
The (awesomely) good
We are consistently amazed by the collaboration and generosity of the startup community. Both locally — here in Portland, Oregon — and with our friends in startup communities around the world. And we have been absolutely floored and humbled by the wide variety of folks who have validated and supported the PIE Cookbook concept by contributing their hard-earned dollars to our campaign. Especially for startups, that’s an incredibly hard ask. We get that. We appreciate that. And we thank you for believing in the concept and putting your faith in us. Thank you. Thank you thank you thank you. Honestly, we can never thank you enough. Seriously and sincerely, thank you.
The reason we’re able to enjoy this support from our peers is the Kickstarter platform. And Kickstarter has performed phenomenally well — at doing what Kickstarter was designed to do. It’s been far beyond our greatest expectations.
But the challenge is that we are trying to use Kickstarter in a different way. A way in which it should be completely capable of being used. It’s just a way of using Kickstarter that is a bit outside of its normal use case.
And that’s the crux of the issue. That’s where we screwed up. Here’s why…
1) People come to Kickstarter with their wallets open.
It’s a platform for funding projects. So it makes sense that people would come to that platform expecting to contribute cash. We do the same thing. All of the time.
That’s not terribly surprising.
But what was surprising was how heavily that presumption weighs on backer behavior. It’s not just that they come to the platform expecting to contribute cash, it’s that they walk on to the lot expecting to buy.
Our mistake was that we, in our hubris, assumed we could easily derail this behavior. With some coy quips and a few carefully crafted phrases. It would be obvious. We would shift peoples’ mindset from “buying” to “joining.”
You can’t.
Our goal isn’t money. Our goal is people. And community. And our assumption, going in, was that we had crafted promotional material that would lead to a majority of people contributing at lower levels — and few, if any, contributing at higher levels. Ideally, we thought, we would hit the Kickstarter goal with 314 (Pi. Get it? *bum dum bum tiss*) backers at a buck a piece.
In reality, exactly the opposite happened.
Our community — even the community we had briefed on the project ahead of time — seems to still felt an obligation to contribute at higher dollar amounts. Because it’s the dynamic of the platform. Conversely, people who had no desire to contribute at higher levels have avoided contributing entirely. Again, because of where we’ve chosen to run this campaign.
Learning: People come to Kickstarter presuming that cash is king. And that the inability to contribute significant amounts of cash precludes their ability to participate. In these days of million dollar campaigns, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to dissuade folks from thinking that money is all that matters. They’re conditioned to give money to projects — and the more money the better. Act accordingly.
2) People barely watch the video. If at all.
Everything we heard and studied about Kickstarter agreed on one thing: the video is a critical component.
We don’t argue that video is critical. But we discovered something important about engagement with that video. You see, while a lot of people were hitting play, relatively few people (less than 30% at the time of this writing) were watching the video all of the way through — even though it’s only two-and-a-half minutes long.
Learning: The video lends a certain credibility to the Kickstarter campaign. And it’s necessary table stakes. But know that you’re going to lose people seconds into the video. Not minutes. Seconds. So you better hook them. Hard and quick.
3) Even worse, we buried the lede in the video.
We thought two-and-a-half minutes was just about right. We had time to blather on about what we wanted to convey without being terribly longwinded. And we hit all of the high points.
The problem, we discovered, was the order.
Our goal was to build community around this project. But we don’t even begin talking about that critical component — the community aspect — until two minutes in. Nearly 80% of the way through the video.
And when you couple that misstep with fact that people don’t watch the video all of the way through…what does that mean? That’s right. Two thirds of the people who even take the time to begin watching the video aren’t even getting to the whole reason we’re doing this in the first place.
Learning: Don’t expect the audience to suffer through stuff that you find interesting to get to the stuff they find interesting. Like a news story, lead with the most important part of the story in the video. Then go back and build out the story.
4) Our content does a poor job of painting the bigger picture.
You read and reread and reread your content time and time again. You have other people look at it. But you’re all — honestly — too close to the project. And because of that, we can’t break that vantage. So we assumed that we were hitting the main points clearly and firmly.
We were wrong. We didn’t.
While we touch on the concept from time to time, we never clearly come out and say “Community > Capital.” Or “Community is our currency.” Or “Donating at $1 is exactly what we want you to do.” Or “This is to give you our tech startup accelerator model so that you can figure out something new and innovative to do with it — like apply it to a new industry, a new stage of company, or a new type of cohort.”
Learning: Like the video, just come out and say it. Be blunt. Tap dance later. Tell ’em. Tell ’em again. Tell ’em what you told ’em.
How we’re correcting course
The good news is — at least for us — that all hope is not lost. We’ve picked a couple of ways to try to correct our mistakes:
- Stretch goals. While these have become almost expected for campaigns, they all seem to focus on the thing you would expect them to: raising even more money. Because community is more critical than capital, we’re using our stretch goals to drive that message home. Instead of setting a stretch goal around a dollar amount, we’re setting stretch goals around the numbers of backers — and the startup communities from which they hail.
- Community tools. We’ve found the community tools that Kickstarter has baked into campaign management to be a great way of interacting with our growing audience and working to correct the errors we made. What’s more, our ability to provide regular updates has offered up a platform for continuing to communicate to backers — and would-be backers — about what we’re truly trying to accomplish. And where we’re screwing up. (You’re soaking in it.)
The whole silver lining on these mistakes is that they’re forcing us to communicate more regularly. And to be open. And when it comes right down to it, that’s helping us build the community we want to build.
And community is more important than capital.
Sound interesting? Want to watch us make more mistakes?
We’d love to have you join the PIE Cookbook community.
Rick Turoczy (@turoczy) has been working in high-tech startups in the Portland area for more than 20 years. As founder and editor of Silicon Florist, he has blogged about the Portland startup scene for nearly a decade — even though numerous people have begged him to stop. That side project led Rick to cofound PIE (the Portland Incubator Experiment), a startup accelerator formed in partnership with global advertising firm Wieden+Kennedy. Those efforts led to the founding of Oregon Story Board, a project that is using learnings from the PIE experiment to accelerate companies in the services industry.
All because of a blog. Weird.
Co-author Renny Gleeson (@rgleeson) cofounded PIE to drive innovation at the intersection of startups and brands at Wieden+Kennedy, the world’s largest independent creative agency.
Image courtesy Cory Doctorow. Used under Creative Commons.
