How Next Keyboard Became the Most Funded App on Kickstarter (Part 2)
Launching the Campaign
We hit our target of $10,000 right away. Woot! Go Next Keyboard!
To be specific, we hit it two days after launch. This was a very strategic decision. We chose a target we could hit quickly because it helps set the momentum for the rest of the campaign. People trust that you’ll likely hit the target, and are more willing to contribute.
This was the result of all our pre-work. All the promotion was for this reason, and it worked. We were relieved, but also excited by the possibilities. Here’s some of the pre-work we did:
i. PR and Poop 💩
We take public relations seriously. PR was originally a large part of the launch strategy. Unfortunately, we hadn’t anticipated PR for this campaign to be so challenging. Despite their excitement about software that’s being crowdfunded, journalists and bloggers want to be able to see and try the apps. Ideally, their readers would also download and try the apps.
We couldn’t offer either option. We quickly learned from friends at TechCrunch and Lifehacker (thanks Alan!) that crowdfunded apps aren’t a good fit for those sites.
Thankfully, the poop emoji cup saved our PR campaign. Around a week before we launched the campaign, we sent the emoji mugs to various bloggers and friends who we follow. For example, we sent one to Christina Warren at Mashable who was on the Apple beat. We got a nice post on Mashable, although it wasn’t from the journalist we sent the mug to. (We assume the mug helped get the word out around the Mashable office.) It could have been a happy coincidence, but we assume the cup helped get the word out around the Mashable office.
The weekend we launched, Mashable wrote about Next keyboard. On Monday, a CNBC reporter emailed me and wrote about it on that same day. Beautiful Pixels and iDownloadBlog were really kind to us and so was PSFK. Through the campaign, we kept pitching people in different verticals (e.g., Apple crowd, Kickstarter audiences, design audiences). We looked for contacts to see who we might have mutual relationships with. As a result, a few journalists and bloggers requested (and were granted) access to the beta.
ii. Cultivate Community
We promoted Next keyboard again on Reddit, Product Hunt, and Designer News, right as we launched on Kickstarter. We emailed our 5,000 email subscribers that had signed up for news about Next (which we talk more about in part 1). We also emailed our list of Busy Building Things readers. All this contributed to how we hit our target so quickly.
We continued building this momentum by cross-promoting Next keyboard with other Kickstarter campaign creators. Some people reached out to us first, but we also reached out to other popular campaigns (ones related to the mobile space). We figured it couldn’t hurt, so we the Kickstarter community turned out to be extremely supportive, so this initiative worked out well for us. We got 412 clicks from the cross promotion.
iii. Get Kickstarter’s Attention to Become a Staff Pick
On the App Store, getting featured is really important and it’s not something you can directly control. We figured it’d be the same for Kickstarter. Right out of the gate, the editors at Kickstarter made us a staff pick because we figured we made something that they would use. This initial momentum helped us become the most popular app (and actually the most funded app for a while) and most popular Kickstarter campaigns over the holidays.
iv. Plan Out Your Updates
When you’re planning your Kickstarter campaign, you should have all your updates planned out. We didn’t do a good job of it. Since we planned under a huge time crunch, we’d inadvertently neglected planning out updates.
We still shared our updates as the campaign went on, but if we had more time we’d have planned them out more or created them in advance.
v. Respond to Your Community on All Channels
Some people interested in backing you will have questions. Make the most of their curiosity.
In order to show our appreciation for people’s interest, we made sure to reply to every Kickstarter message, email and Tweet promptly. We easily went through over 10,000 messages. Make sure you have extra hands on deck to help with support. Especially, during the beginning and end of your campaign. Our community got used to us being responsive. They knew that we were available, and that we would answer questions in regular human language (i.e., no corp-speak). This helped us turn backers into friends and champions.
vi. Adapt to Reward Popularity and Stretch Goals
Early on in the campaign, we noticed that the beta package ($20) really resonated with backers, so we de-emphasized the physical rewards and emphasized digital, early-adopter rewards. (As we mentioned in Part 1 — we didn’t know this at the time, but having users pay for beta access goes against TestFlight’s policy though, so we do not advocate taking this advice literally.)
To provide more digital rewards, we created a tier where backers could access a private community forum for feedback or feature suggestions. The backers loved it, but this also turned out to be really useful for us. We created an exclusive place for our users to talk about our product, and give feedback (which they paid for).
Our stretch goal was a Kickstarter theme, a promise that we’d make Next Keyboard for iPads, and additional emojis (and other icons).
All in all, it was a great launch. We became the most funded app for a short while.
Designers from companies like Twitter, Uber, and Paypal got the beta. Some folks from Apple asked to get on it. It was extremely important to us because our product had earned the attention of people and companies we really respect. It was really validating and inspiring.
But even more importantly, there was an extremely diverse crowd of passionate iPhone users — grandmothers from Texas, teenagers from Europe, a chef from Indonesia, amongst many others — who shared great feedback on how to improve the Next keyboard.
We knew we were onto something.
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What Happened?
When our campaign ended, we had raised over 600% of our original $10,000 goal. The total amount was around $65,000, which we raised from around 6,500+ backers. This built a tremendous amount of excitement and momentum for our team. Backers shared lots of useful feedback and we continued to open up the beta to more people. It was encouraging to see people give feedback.
One thing we noticed: We might have been too loud-mouthed, because we saw features that were unique to us appear in other apps. That’s okay, because it’s not one feature that makes or breaks an app. It’s the entire experience.
A couple of months after the campaign, we were supposed to launch Next to the public. Unfortunately, we still underestimated the amount of time and resources that it would take to build Next. It’s usually not a good idea to share software release dates because it’s complicated, but for Kickstarter this is mandatory.
i. Buffer Your Plans
I highly advise that when you’re doing something on Kickstarter, you must give yourself a lot of cushion. A LOT of breathing room. This goes double if you’re doing hardware.
When we broke the news to our backers and suggested some revised dates, we gave ourselves a safer cushion. We gave backers choices: They could vote to get Next keyboard a little earlier minus a complex feature, or to get Next Keyboard a little later with that feature.
If you do encounter a delay, don’t get too down on yourself about it. Delays happen a lot with Kickstarter campaigns.
Some of your backers will be understanding, but others will be more harsh. You can’t expect everyone to know or empathize with the realities of creating a product. Similar to how a doctor projects a delivery date for a baby, software release dates aren’t precise the majority of the time. When you’re crowdfunding, you’re forced to break this golden rule of building apps: Don’t give people a ship date.
ii. Invest in Your Campaign
Of the $65,000 we’d raised, we spent almost $6,000 on video production. We spent another $8,000 making and fulfilling the Kickstarter rewards. We invested almost $2,000 in design, photos, and copywriting. After doing the math, it turns out we’d raised closer to somewhere around $49,000. In reality that doesn’t cover half the salary of a senior developer. Thankfully we had money in the bank from our other apps, and product development consulting work our studio does to give us a good runway. For us it wasn’t just about the money. The funding is great but the crowd part of the equation was more important.
To put things into perspective, one of our competitors raised $20 million+.
iii. Invest in Your Community
Once you’ve raised your funds, you have to set some time and energy aside to keep your thousands of investors happy. For us, it caused a ton of extra work. We really wanted to reply promptly to feedback emails, but we were (and still are) bombarded by hundreds of messages.
It can be a bit paralyzing at times, to think about the thousands of people depending on you for your app. In everything we do, we ask ourselves what our backers might think and how they might react to an update.
When you’re getting negative feedback (which is inevitable), the vocal minority of haters will seem louder than quieter backers. Don’t get too discouraged by them. For every one angry or entitled backer you have, you’ll have a few patient, quiet, supporters. (And, as always, never ever feed trolls.)
Beyond just a set of forums, we made some good friends from our involvement with the community. It’s beyond Next keyboard. We’re in regular correspondence. We play video games with some of them. One of them just had a baby (congrats Brett!). Some of the more enthusiastic beta testers in the community became core testers, and there’s a small Slack group with just us in it.
What’s Next + Lessons Learned
If we were to do it all over again, we’d focus on the fulfilment phase and following through on deadlines. Even though there was only one delay after our Kickstarter campaign, multiple backers complained that they were sick of our delays.
Nonetheless, we should have added more cushion. We would also have taken more time to plan. Don’t make the same mistake we did.
Between February and now, we’ve ramped up the team and brought on data science experts and more iOS developers. We have improved key features and improved our product using feedback from the community. We’ve invested heavily in marketing and have created a new promo video. And we eventually launched Next Keyboard in September.
The launch was a big success — we ended up hitting #2 on the top paid charts and got some great press from publications like Techcrunch and The Verge.
Whew.
So long story short, Kickstarter can be a great place not only to raise funds, but also to build a community around your product. You can also get a decent amount of social proof through Kickstarter — enough for some journalists and bloggers to write about you (but not necessarily everyone, and definitely not if your software isn’t available for beta downloads). However, it’s not perfect for certain software products specifically paid iOS apps:
- There’s no smooth process to distribute an iOS app into the hands of Kickstarter backers.
- Backers want concrete ship dates, but these are difficult to set and adhere to.
- The attention (e.g., emails, messages, Tweets, etc.) that people give your product is thrilling and we appreciated it, but it was also exhausting and took away from development time.
- The Kickstarter community isn’t as excited for software as they are for hardware (i.e., physical products raise a lot more money than software).
We would definitely use Kickstarter in the future, but would probably never crowdfund a paid app with it again.
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Robleh Jama is the founder of Tiny Hearts, an award-winning product studio. They make their own products like Next Keyboard, Wake Alarm and Quick Fit — as well as products for select clients. You can follow him on Twitter @robjama.
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Published in #SWLH (Startups, Wanderlust, and Life Hacking)
