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First-time Reddit poster here – go easy on me
Context: I own this small calendar company that recently ran this Kickstarter in November. We sold $24,040 worth of calendars over a 30-day campaign. This the list of things that I wish I knew before I had launched the campaign.
What Didn’t Drive Sales
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Crowdfunding Blogs & Affiliates: Most of these are worthless. We spent money on Gadgetflow, BackerClub, and Kickbooster, and never had a positive ROI (we opted for the lowest tier in each). It seems like the best use for these services is to say “that you were featured in X ” and include this on our campaign page. Maybe they work better for more tech-focused products, but I would personally stay away from most crowdfunding-specific pay-to-play sites.
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Marketing Agencies: We talked with most of the major crowdfunding agencies and ultimately decided to hire Enventys Partners. This was a waste of money, our ads never had a positive ROI. I think this was partially due to the digital assets that we had weren’t really intended for ads (they all looked too professional and photoshopped). However, it still felt like Enventy’s could have told us that before instead of suggesting it in the middle of the campaign as a “known issue”. Only later on was I advised that Enventys has a pretty bad rep as a crowdfunding agency. Overall we felt like we were one of their couple dozen clients and that they barely cared about us.
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Tools: We used Stocklimits to monitor our inventory, it is incredibly buggy and kept locking us out of our account. Would not touch with a 10ft pole. Ultimately we had to adjust our inventory limits ourselves.
What Did Drive Sales
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Video: We were lucky to have a relatively high converting video. I think the format of somebody looking directly into the camera and “breaking the 3rd wall” works well. Around 10% of people who watched our video converted.
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Email List: We were lucky to have a small email list of around 400 previous custoemrs. This community drove a significant portion of our early sales and helped us build early momentum.
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Blogs: A couple of small design blogs picked up our product and included it in their newsletter. This drove a meaningful amount of revenue and if I had known that they would be so impactful I would have spent far more time finding similiar publications.
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Luck: The Kickstarter gods were smiling on us. Maybe because we launched during November when there are generally fewer projects, maybe because Kickstarter corporate liked our project, but for whatever reason, we received a fair amount of traffic through different Kickstarter discovery mechanisms. This was probably over 50% of our sales.
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Cross-Promotions: We did some cross-promotions with other campaigns, They drove some sales, but nothing to get too excited about ($500 max, maybe). Maybe they are more impactful if you have more backers or do more of them.
Things I wish I had tried, but didn’t
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Ads / Marketing Agencies: I would spend significantly more time creating creative content to run ads against. It seems like this is the lifeblood of most large Kickstarter campaigns. In addition, I would hire multiple crowdfunding agencies (say 3) to all run ads at the same time and double down on the one that works. Finally, I would hire a different pre-launch company to help us build an email list. Generally, this seems to be the formula for large $100K+ campaigns, however, when we started out we had no that this was standard practice in the Kickstarter world.
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PR: I would spend far more time on PR. We talked to some agencies early on and were told that we didn’t have a great story, especially as our campaign was running around the holidays, so most PR for a product like our would be focused on getting us on a “seasonal gifting guide”. Because of this we mostly ignored PR for this product. While the aspect of not having a great newsworthy story might be true, we definitely could have ended up on more niche design blogs and such. In addition, I’ve heard that Yanko Design has decent ROI for paid media. I’d be down to maybe give it a shot in the future
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Subtitles: I regret not adding subtitles to our video for other languages or translating our page. No idea if this would conversion, but seems worthwhile to try, especially given how international Kickstarter is.
Shipping
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Domestic Shipping: Domestic shipping was pretty easy, we used Shippo and were able to print and label all 200 domestic orders in about 6 hours. However, we should have lowered our shipping cost for U.S. territories as the shipping cost to Puerto Rico via USPS is similar to domestic.
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International shipping: International shipping was a pain – We used Easy Ship, but it was pretty janky on how it imported files and has almost no way to actually pay import duties. I would love to know if somebody has a better solution to this. In addition, we way undercharged for International shipping. Luckily our shipping costs were mostly balanced out was we overcharged in other areas, but this could have ended poorly.
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Other: We should have made sure to collect phone number for international orders (makes a carrier contacting them if there is a problem easier)
Other
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Customer Support: Providing customer support (even just to our 370 customers) was a non-trivial amount of work. I could see how this could be overwhelming for large campaigns.
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Project Updates: I would pre-write all of our project updates next time. Coming up with these when needed was overly stressful. Could have easily been avoided.
Anyway, I hope this helps on your Kickstarter journey. Overall, we had a fantastic experience, learned a lot, and plan to launch a follow-up product in a couple of months (Drop your email here if you’re interested – we’re building a beautiful desk clock)
P.S. We are going to start staffing up on pre-launch marketing, ad spend, and the creative side in the next couple of months. Would love to hear any recs for fantastic marketing, PR, or pre-launch people.
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