How Next Keyboard Became the Most Funded App on Kickstarter

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Tiny Hearts studio

10 min readNov 5, 2015

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It’s been years since crowdfunding took the world by storm. Since then, we’ve seen a few campaigns thrive and many others flounder. We wanted to share our lessons on how you can use Kickstarter to your advantage and some warnings, when you’re crowdfunding software. Kickstarter helped us raise over $65,000 for our latest app, Next Keyboard, making it the most funded app at the time. It also enabled us to build a strong pre-launch community and gain press exposure on sites like CNBC and Mashable.

Before we get into the nitty gritty (lots of strategic and tactical information), I want to explain why we did it in the first place.

When we got started with crowdfunding, we thought it would be a great marketing tool. We figured it’d help us rally a community of users and get the attention of the press. We also knew Kickstarter could help us raise some additional funds to ship Next keyboard.

We exceeded our expectations, but the path was anything but smooth.

Here’s how we did it.

Why Crowdfund an App?

By late October 2014, my team and I realized that creating a good third-party keyboard was much more difficult than we’d initially expected. Because third-party keyboards were such a new feature, Apple didn’t yet have documentation, APIs, or much other resources that they could share with developers. This meant we had to create everything from scratch. As you can imagine, as a small team, this was pretty challenging.

It was a month since we’d missed the September deadline we had set for ourselves, which meant we didn’t make the iOS 8 launch. We had to build momentum somehow.

After missing the September deadline, we’d resolved to release for Christmas. Even as that deadline loomed, we had to skip it again. We had a solid prototype but our keyboard simply wasn’t ready for primetime.

Since we couldn’t get on the App Store for Christmas, we decided to do a crowdfunding campaign. We were building the product and getting the community really involved, so Kickstarter was a cool way to amplify that. For us, it was a no-brainer and something we wanted to experiment with for some time.

The Disadvantages of Crowdfunding an App

Did you hear about that app that raised millions on Kickstarter? No? How about the one that raised hundreds of thousands?

You see where I’m going with this.

When we were putting together our Kickstarter campaign and actually in the midst of launching it, we learned firsthand that crowdfunding a piece of software is an uphill battle. People are generally more excited about receiving physical products. It’s understandable, but it was a challenge for us to wrestle with.

Apps inherently don’t seem to be worth as much as hardware (It’s also hard to make an app look as cool as the COOLEST cooler.)

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How Did We Prepare?

Becoming the most funded app was more than a matter of bragging rights. We knew it would really help our launch when we eventually released the Next keyboard to the public. Even though none of us had created a Kickstarter campaign before, our curiosity to explore crowdfunding drowned out the uncertainty. We learn by doing.

Research, Research, Research

We did a ton of research. We started by going through Kickstarter documentation. You can also look at courses on Skillshare and Udemy to understand the basics. We also studied the best of the best (looking at folks like the Coolest Cooler and the 10-Year Hoodie).

We spoke with some people who had created their own incredibly successful campaigns (like Vanhawks Valour, Markhor, and 1 Second Everyday). We also learned a lot from people who wrote about their experiences (like the makers of Dark Sky did at Mashable, this guest post by Mike Del Ponte on Tim Ferriss’s blog, and a quick comment exchange with the folks at Studio Neat). This was all extremely helpful, because it offered real-world experience and insights beyond the basics.

How to Pre-Launch

Pre-launch momentum is the most important phase of a Kickstarter campaign, so it was a good thing we had unintentionally already started doing it. Before even considering a Kickstarter campaign, we launched a teaser video and started collecting emails. We’d shared the teaser site and features with the communities at Reddit, Product Hunt, and Designer News. Through these efforts, we’d already gathered 5,000 emails before the campaign started. Around 800 people signed up to learn about the beta, and the other 4,200 wanted to hear from us when we launched.

Optimizing Reward Tiers

When I asked about which reward levels might be the most popular, Clay Hebert helped us out significantly (he later used us as a case study on his blog). His key point was that people expect things to be cheaper than MSRP. Our challenge would be to show that our software created enough value for people to produce a decent average backer amount.

One of Clay’s most important pieces of advice was to pay attention to the $20 package — which was typically the most popular one. We focused on making that package extremely appealing. We’d also have to learn how to promote during quiet lulls, and prepare strategies and tactics to get around these inevitable valleys.

One strength of crowdfunding a digital product, as opposed to physical hardware, is immediate gratification. People who were backing the $20 package (and all packages above that) would receive an early prototype of the Next keyboard. People love getting things early, so we had a hunch that the beta would be the most interesting package available to backers. This would have worked out really well for us, as we’d have a group of dedicated users to beta test the app.

Unfortunately, we’d realized after publishing that charging users for beta access was against TestFlight guidelines. For this reason, we definitely don’t recommend including a beta with your crowdfunding packages.

We also had to think of what might be appealing to people who could spend more — since a few backers of higher-priced tiers could equal (or outfund) all our $20 orders. It actually helps to line up the large purchases in advance, because it gives you a strong start. (Basically, you should do direct sales before you launch.) We put together an informal list of people — the four of us came up with 10–20 people (friends, family, etc.) — that we could directly ask to back us.

The Promo Video

Although we could repurpose some content, the videos for a Kickstarter campaign and the App Store are pretty different. For Kickstarter, most successful fundraisers promote their product and get people excited about it. They explain the problem. They tell potential backers about themselves, about how much money they need, what they plan to do with it, who they are, and their story. The key is to build trust.

If you watch our video, you’ll notice that we did it a little differently. We took the comedic route (it’s a bit riskier but we fortunately were able to do it). We touched on the key points, but we took a different approach than the standard founder/entrepreneur talking.

Instead, we imagined what a conversation would be like with our phones. It was a fun concept — and we figured it would be more entertaining, shareable, getting it away from the “boring” topic of software. Instead, we would touch on our connections with these devices. The video wasn’t as monotonous as it might have been if it were just someone describing a product.

Our Kickstarter video received 154,984 plays overall. People liked our video. Our risk paid off. A great Kickstarter campaign always starts with a great video.

Messaging and Graphics

Our messaging for Kickstarter went through a lot of different edits (by a bunch of different people). It was challenging to come up with something short, to the point, and also spoke to our story. It was a different type of story than what we were used to telling — essentially an origin story, shared with an intimate group of people who are investing in you as much as your product.

The headline and one-line description are crucial to your campaign’s success. It needs to be descriptive and exciting at the same time. It also needs to be clear, concise, and hook the reader. The purpose of these two messages, and the preview image, is to get people to click on the video.

We used GIFs to show off our product (which I would recommend for other Kickstarter campaigns). We also built credibility and shared information about us, the team behind it, so we could show backers how far we’d gotten and what we needed the money for. Don’t be afraid to tell people about the risks up front, and sell them on the future.

Visuals were really important. We got the reader way more involved by sharing rewards charts, stretch goal charts, backer update images, and many other types of visuals. (We learned this from Sense.) We did a photoshoot for our emoji mugs and shirts/calendar. Speaking of which, we added the emoji mug and apparel as a way to get people excited about a physical product that’d be more tangible than an app. (This directly paid off in PR, which I’ll show you in the next section.)

One note about images: On the App Store, it’s all about screenshots. On Kickstarter, lifestyle shots are much more relevant. We wanted our audience to feel as excited as they would be about hardware, not software.

It’s All About The Tiny Details

Most importantly, plan how many days your campaign will be live for (typically 30 days), and how high your target is. Set the target for something that you know you can achieve quickly. Otherwise, if your project is incomplete and stagnant, people won’t donate.

Donating is so much more than just a show of financial support. It’s a social gesture, and requires social proof. As our friends told us, nobody cares about the target we set. They care that we hit our target quickly.

So What Happened Next?

We did all this in a matter of a few weeks. Do not give yourself this tight of a timeline. We thought about doing the campaign in early November, and launched the campaign in mid December (December 12). We pulled it off, but it was really stressful, and we could have done better if we gave ourselves more time. If you’re serious about your Kickstarter campaign, give yourself at least a couple of months to plan for it.

When all this was said and done, we held our breaths and pushed the Publish button that would determine the fate of Next keyboard.

Gulp.

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Here’s part 2 of How Next Keyboard Became the Most Funded App on Kickstarter