32,000 People In 14 Days – Marketing on Kickstarter

Every Single Marketing Strategy & Resource To Hit A $14K Week

70% of product launches fail.

Yet a handful of creators continue to confound critics and create successful products launches and campaigns over and over again.

While other meticulously planned and extremely well funded campaigns that are destined to succeed are left out in the dust.

So exactly 1 month ago,

I decided to detail an honest and transparent account of a product launch as it happens. In real-time.

A document of my journey of trying to take a product that I’ve spent 5 months creating and testing, and turning it into a global success.

Hence, even if I fail, I leave behind a blueprint for everyone else to win.

The story unfolded in real-time.

I sent out a collection of letters via my email list in real-time as I attempted to detail every step of the way. I wanted a documented journey to exist for anyone who wants a blueprint on how to take their idea, create it, and market it to the world.

You can read them all here (if you’re going to launch a product, it will save you a lot of headache, but keep some time aside it is a LONG post):

Hence, below I want to share Chapter 11 which is the TLDR version which gives you every single marketing strategy and resource I used to attempt to reach a goal of…

Capturing 32,000 eyeballs,

45 sales a day,

$14,000 in sales, and

Doing it all in 14 days.

It is likely to be the most valuable.

Click here to go to the Kickstarter page to see how it all turned out. It’s LIVE now (1% of the way there at time of posting…).

Otherwise let’s jump right into the details.

Here’s a very short background to give some perspective…

My expertise is in marketing — I’ve grown businesses, done $15M+ in sales, have products featured on primetime TV, and so on. A quick Google search will give you all you need.

Having lost someone dear to me recently, I realised the lack of time we all have and when we do get to spend moments with those close to us — it should result in something meaningful.

So I spent 2 years developing an app to try to get people together in more meaningful ways (spent $11,000, a lot of time, and heartache doing it) and pulled the plug late 2016.

Believe me it was heartbreaking…

Then, long story short, after lots of self loathing, instead of trying to get people together more often, I realised, why not make the times people get together just more valuable?

So I created a game. A card game that leads to people have life-changing conversations. Skipping the small talk and getting past the surface.

The Gameplay
There are no rules. Only 2 suggestions.

All of the below was crowdsourced.

I didn’t come up with any of this and if you go through my documented journey — every aspect of this product has been based on feedback from others.

Rules:

1. Each round, one player picks up a card and reads out the hypothetical, and selects someone to answer the question first.
2. Then that person selects which direction to go, and based on that direction, everyone else answers one after the other.

The Cards
How many cards do I commit to?

Everyone says this, but I mean it…

I wanted to over-deliver on value and make it worth it for anyone who bought the game. I didn’t want someone to feel the game didn’t out-do what was promised.

So, even though I wrote 300+ scenarios, I culled it back to a 96 card pack.

The ABSOLUTE BEST out of the lot, and realised this number of cards should last 50+ catch ups with friends.

So one purchase for 50+ group catch-ups — that felt I was over-delivering.

But all that out of the way, here’s the…

Sent 23rd July 2017 – 2 days before launch.

I hope will be worth at least $1M in sales to at least a few of you reading this.

Marketing.

Since day dot of documenting this journey I’ve continued adding all marketing strategies in excruciating detail to this email.

So even if these don’t prove to be successful for me day after tomorrow, at worst case you will get something practical and actionable out of this.

A note before I continue — from years of experience — no matter how confident you are that you’ll hit the target with your campaigns and ideas. There will always be an unexpected gust of wind that needs to work in your favour.

Hence 49 out of 50 targets you are likely to miss. But that 1 time you strike makes all the misses worth it.

For the usual suspicious bunch questioning whether I am actually doing this in real-time. Above is a screenshot of me writing this with the current date and time to put your minds at ease.

And here I will lay out my blueprint to hit the target.

How To Launch — The Nitty Gritty

So, here it is. My entire marketing playbook.

I will go into as much detail as I can, because that is likely to be the most useful for you to replicate for your own projects. Secondly it will also help me get further clarity. As I have a tendency to skim over the critical detail which then bites me in the a**.

“If you want to learn something, read about it. If you want to understand something write about it. If you want to master something, teach it.”

If any one section gets too granular, just skip to the next that may be more useful.

Friends & Family

1. Facebook

a) Facebook Event

I have scripted the details for a Facebook event which I’ll use to invite those friends that have either been a part of testing the game, or been involved in the journey in some way (nearly 200 on that list already).

…So this aspect of the marketing needs to start months in advance.

After that has been done, in order of how close I am with a particular person — I will invite the rest of my Facebook friends.

The invite limit is 500 people per person.

So asking the above friends to then invite their friends, and so on, can increase that list dramatically.

The key to a successful Facebook event for me is:

• Only creating one when something important is taking place, people create Facebook events for any random thing to spam their list, I haven’t invited my friends to an event for probably 2 years,
• Inviting friends VERY close to the event date as there is too much noise for someone to remember your event a month prior — I’ll only invite people to the event 2 days before launch (this obviously works for a digital launch where no one needs to change or make plans, for a physical event some warning may be required),
• An intriguing image — typically event flyers, product images, and general stock imagery doesn’t catch the attention of friends as say an image of you, or you and your partner, you and your kid (people love family photos…) and,
• The title, name of the event — keeping it short as 54% of people access Facebook via mobile. And make it engaging by doing the following…

Even if you invite a friend and they get a notification it doesn’t mean they’re going to click. Keep in mind people get an event invite from spammy event organisers every hour of every day.

So if your event name is
“Launching My New Kickstarter Project”

Yawwwn. Sounds spammy. Trying to sell me something. Ignore.

But if it is something more engaging like
“Important Life Announcement — I Launch Jouska”

It is likely to get someone’s attention a little more.

And if you have the liberty to test your titles before committing to one — even better. That way you KNOW and aren’t postulating.

I will create one event from my personal Facebook page and another from my Facebook fan page — as the personal one will appeal to friends more than one from a “page.” Whereas the Facebook page event is also important as it allows greater functionality in terms of inviting other pages to cross-promote, advertising, etc.

b) Facebook Live

Just dropping the event invite on people and asking something of them is likely to encounter resistance unless you’ve warmed that ask up a little.

So what I mean — for a few days before the above event invite is sent out, I will:

• Turn the most popular email out of this list into an article and share it on my personal page — which at this point has been the email about the need to change the name of the game (the worst situation makes for the greatest reading…go figure),
• Share a video with some behind the scenes information which shows them I’m a human…not just some faceless spam,
• Go LIVE on Facebook as it increases your reach to other friends who Facebook normally filters out with its algorithm (this however needs to be used sparingly, so I may likely just save it until the day of launch), and,
• A status update sharing your thoughts — free of any request, or call to action, or spam.

Maybe some other stuff closer to the date that pops up at the time but it is likely to be something along the lines of what I’ve mentioned above.

2. WhatsApp

WhatsApp? Are you serious?

Because family and close friends are easily accessible via this platform and you’re not competing with an influx of spam, it is a great way to market your stuff. Interesting imagery and video content can be shared by your friends and family quite easily with their contacts.

I will be compress the video content (that I outline in the below “advertising” section) to be under 30MB in size (limit) and share that with groups I have with my family and friends.

And script the following for them to on-share with their contacts:

My son/nephew/cousin/friend and his wife just created this — have a look.

If they want to add an “ask” to the script they can like “go buy 200 packs right now!” I don’t want to create that resistance by scripting an ask. If someone likes the content — they’ll share it regardless.

That’s all I can ask for.

3. Email

We grew our education podcast (for our business K2AV) to iTunes top 10 at launch solely through email.

So a good subject line, short sharp script and getting your connections (friends/family in a corporate role, colleagues, clients, and suppliers) to forward it on are how it can do wonders.

All the various email scripts with subject lines that I’ll be using are here.

I’ll send an email on the day (one by one) with the script above to friends, family, colleagues, and clients whom I have strong relationships with. Making it relevant to the industry they work in. And, the critical component, I will script an email they can copy and paste.

It will get FORWARDED on to many people I wouldn’t normally be able to reach.

Existing Audience

1. Email List

This is you, yes you, reading this right now.

Over the last month being a part of this journey, by my side. Step by step. If I’ve done my job and you find this series valuable and entertaining enough, you will likely help spread the word to your friends about the product.

For this I will send an email on the day which will have a link to share.

And depending on what each person finds easier, I will also include a script you can copy and paste to send to your email contacts.

The resistance needs to be minimised.

But even if you don’t share, it strengthens my relationship with you and the entire list, and there may come a time to lean on you for your support in the future.

2. Facebook

For the past few months I’ve created a new video each day (6 days a week).

In an attempt to learn and prepare for moments like this.

The content is typically self-help through comedy. So for the engaged audience that has been consuming my content for this period of time — they are likely to support and spread the word to their friends and other relevant people.

What will I do? Good question sir.

I will obviously share a the link to the campaign, but also create an event, and go live on the day of the launch.

But to leverage this audience to reach others I will create similar videos around the following topics, which are likely to be the audience that will be interested in Jouska:

• Parents of teens — video topic “stop the boring dinner chat with your kids, here’s a way to connect and get to know them a lot better”,
• People with a birthday — video topic “your birthday is around the corner, instead of getting stuff, this year you rather someone give you their time”,
• Gamers — video topic “real life isn’t as fun, that’s why you game, so let’s change that”, and,
• Self help — video topic “the friend who goes into deep conversations at the wrong time, here’s a game to time it better”.

In terms of the nitty gritty of how to create these videos -

Firstly it requires a script (I script everything on the Ulysses app), I then do a single take of me talking to the camera using this script (no cuts, no edits besides cutting the start and end). And just add a headline banner to the top and bottom of the video to capture attention.

That’s it.

For the detailed equipment list I use to record these videos:

• Canon EOS600D DSLR camera standard lens (they don’t seem to make the 600D anymore, so 700D seems to be the closest)
• Rode Videomic Pro (plugs straight into the mic input of the DSLR) or Zoom H5 with a Shure SM58 microphone plugged in.
• Video editing — iMovie (I import the video file and audio file individually and line them up based on a clap I’ll do before recording)
• Graphics to create the headline banner on the video — Canva

3. Medium

The advice I received from most people who have had successful Kickstarter campaigns was to reach out to blogs.

I have a good friend who works for Cycliq, who as a team, have raised $1M+ from Kickstarter by running 3 campaigns.

And the advice was also blogs, reach out to blogs, and more blogs…

…unfortunately the success ratio in terms of time spent reaching out to blogs and getting featured for me has been very low. I’ve tried it many times in the past.

So taking a different approach here that saves me time.

I’m a writer on a few top 20 Medium publications (total 250,000+ readership). And the Medium audience (on which I’ve built this email list) is interested in marketing, business, personal growth, and self-improvement.

Hence highly relevant for this venture.

So pre-arranging the post with the admin of the publications — I will share this entire behind the scenes journey on Medium. I haven’t fully compiled it, as I’m not sure how I will make it digestible in one post, or how it will draw people to the campaign.

But it will likely reach a sizeable audience that would have taken me a lot longer to attain by cold approaching popular blogs.

But I’ve nurtured these Medium relationships over the years, so again this process has to start many months ahead of a launch.

I will share the final article with you all for you to see.

4. Instagram / Snapchat / Podcast

The other usual suspects where I have a small following.

I will post something on each platform around the launch date which may draw that audience across, but isn’t really a big focus of mine unlike the avenues above.

Not much to lose when it takes a few minutes to post in return for even a handful of people.

Advertising

Total budget — $3,000.

So a very small budget for advertising.

The reason being, I know this ISN’T going to be the decider — banking on advertising to make a campaign a success is rarely a “safe” bet. It is usually a way to bypass the hustle which is a necessary component.

This budget is more to help provide the fuel for the fire to grow. To give the below pieces of content enough of a kick that one of them catches on and goes gangbusters.

How good the content is that will be the decider, the advertising just gives it a nudge.

Calculations to determine your spend are simple…

Advertising budget / profit per pack = Number of pledges required to break even.

So based on the statistics we’ll have access to (via our ad platform and Kickstarter) if we get more pledges than the break even point, we can continue increasing this budget.

1. Facebook

There are 3 main pieces of video content we’ll use for advertising.

• The Tail End,
• News Report, and,
• Instagram Stories,

I’ll explain the reasoning behind each and how we created them. Each video has been designed to strike a nerve (generate emotion) that compels people to share with their friends.

So these were three we decided upon.

The Tail End

Audience targeted — 28 to 38 year old males, married, with or without kids.

Inspired by The Tail End an article on Wait But Why’s website. I wanted to put into perspective the limited time we actually have with our close friends once we cross the age of 30 and get married.

Here’s a first draft of the video:

(and as you are probably used to by now, so many things to still be ironed out with this video — lighting, timing, my face!…3 days plenty of time right? ahem.)

Recording this was quite the challenge. As I had to juggle an elaborate setup all myself in the late hours of the night…and my wife falling asleep on my “set” aka my lounge room chair.

Tools used:

• Animations — PowToon,
• Video Editing — iMovie, and,
• Music Editing — My music engineer / business partner Chris.

News Report

Audience targeted — event organisers, and people interested in card games like Cards Against Humanity & others on Kickstarter.

This piece of content was inspired by the stunt Guerilla marketing world.

Here we will create a news report (which looks like a real news report) but the presenter is reporting on a new app that has been released as part of a marketing strategy by the “creators” of Jouska.

The app lets you zap your friend if he/she checks their phone while in a group gathering.

The news report features

• the anchor,
• a “technology expert” that they cross to for more information on this app, and,
• a “close friend” of the creators of Jouska.

Script for the news report is here.

The aim is to have a comedic, yet somewhat plausible circumstance, where people tag their friend who is always on his/her phone.

I may be insane, but pulling off this production myself wouldn’t be possible in the timeframe. So this script was sent to a freelancer on Fiverr and the total cost to deliver within 4 days was $550AUD.

There has been some dispute with the freelancer, but fingers crossed it can be delivered on time.

Instagram Stories

I’ll keep this one brief.

As Instagram stories seem to have the most attention and engagement from audiences at the moment (based on statistics and personal testing). I’ve recorded these short 10 second point of view (POV) videos to simulate how an awkward conversation would feel with me at the other end.

The aim is to make it look like you’re actually sitting across from me and I’m having a really awkward conversation with you (the person who is viewing the story).

With the call to action being “eliminate these conversations” and a link to Kickstarter.

2. Instagram Influencers

This involves finding Instagrammers with a large following who share content relevant to what we’re doing and paying them to place our product in their feed and/or story.

After getting pricing — it seems to have a good ROI.

We hired freelancers (3 at a time due to time constrictions) via Fiverr to search relevant influencers for our product with criteria we provided them:

• Range of minimum to maximum followers the influencer must have (2,000 to 200,000),
• Minimum engagement level of 5% (comments and likes to number of followers) to make sure it wasn’t an account with paid followers, and,
• The specific categories the influencer posts about.

We also posted a request on a platform called Brandsnob where influencers bid for your job.

Average cost for an influencer with 100,000 followers is $150.

So calculations are as follows:

• With 1% conversion = 1,000 people will come to the Kickstarter page, and,
• 2% typical conversion from arriving on Kickstarter to pledging = 20 sales for $150 of advertising.

At this stage — the numbers seem to work. If so, we can again scale this endlessly.

3. Needls

Another advertising platform recommended to me.

This one scours social media for relevant conversations and then places ads only for those people discussing topics where our product is the solution.

Called Needls (bizarre name) but worth trying.

Hence, as I’ve never used it before, a small component of the advertising budget will be dedicated here…

Cold But Gold

Cold approach avenues that are likely to produce good results for the time spent.

1. Facebook Groups

These seem to be kind of under-utilised.

With the size of some Facebook group communities around a particular niche and huge levels of engagement as each group generally requires approval to join. It is a perfect place to promote a product/service that is in line with the interests of that group…

…and free.

Explained really well in this video snippet from an online marketing course.

As I am not okay with making fake profiles, the best method is to join relevant groups and then post a message in line with the interests of that group and linking out to the Kickstarter campaign.

Script in same file as before.

2. Reddit Subreddits

Reddit is the unattractive cousin of Facebook groups.

Not many people, including me are as familiar with Reddit as the other platforms out there. So here’s the best explainer video to give you the Reddit 101. Definitely worth 5 minutes and 19 seconds of your time.

In summary, as 99% of you wouldn’t click the above link, there are an endless list of “subreddits” (essentially categories and interests) which people subscribe to.

For me I am subscribing to the following subreddits gaming, travel, thought provoking questions, etc. and will use the opportunity to share a story or suggestion to the large community subscribed to each of these groups that links out the Kickstarter campaign.

Salesy stuff, as always, will get downvoted (which is Reddit lingo for eliminated from existence). So good examples of “promotional” posts are the example above.

3. People with large email lists (moonshots)

This is essentially a cold reach to people who, if they share, would have a massive impact on the trajectory of the launch. A list of minor celebrities.

But very little time will be spent on this as the time investment vs return = very minimal.

I’ve included a couple of sample emails I’ve sent to these moonshots in that same doc file.

And if this post isn’t long enough already, good on you for still hanging around, let’s move to the last section which are the common…

FAQs

1. Why have you not created a website or landing page for Jouska?

It makes no sense to do so at this stage. I want to route everyone to the campaign page, I don’t want to add another click in the way to deter people from where I want them to go.

2. What about Google Adwords?

I find it overpriced. Even though for people searching keywords like “travel games”, “party games”, “cards against humanity” etc. we could advertise against that. The cost per click, considering our product is a loss grossing item, is not affordable.

3. How are you doing all this? Who is helping?

99% of all this I’m doing myself.

It has been a full on few weeks and I am already semi burnt out. And doing a launch again is something I would do very differently — it is the first time I’ve done this and I’ve thrown myself in quite deep without structuring my time as effectively as I could.

My optimistic nature makes me think I can pull everything off myself.

But with the cold approaches (listed above), I am using our team at work to help post to Facebook groups and Reddit. However, all:

• Video recording,
• Video editing,
• Scripting content for each video,
• Writing of these posts and articles,
• Designing graphics for marketing,
• Creating all ad campaigns, and,
• Improving and tweaking the hypotheticals as I keep play testing them with friends.

Is all on my to-do list.

So how to do this? Just work like a maniac and keep an on-going Evernote checklist.

And then hopefully after the self-inflicted chaos has subsided after the launch, I will sip mojitos in the Bahamas.

Okay that DEFINITELY won’t be happening.

But with all that said. I hope the effort I’ve put into scripting this email has been incredibly valuable for you. I’ve literally sat in one spot for 8 hours straight and then followed up with an hour editing session.

I now say au revoir and count down the last 48 hours as the nervousness builds…

P.S. Depending on when you’re reading this — click below for the Kickstarter campaign to see the results of these strategies.

To get more stuff like this — click here and you’ll be a part of my email list.