Thought I'd share some intell with you about running a Kickstarter. I'll start by saying my campaign failed and it hurt my business.
Here's the deal on Kickstarter;
1. Kickstarter the company provides zero support.
When you ask questions you get canned responses. When you rate their customer service you'll get you more canned responses.
RESULT: So you're on your own with this platform.
2. Company Culture -
If you check the staff of this company on LinkedIn etc. you notice a very eccentric, young looking staff. They look more interested in what hipsters are hating this week than business. This platform seems to be heavy on the geek staff when it needs business minded staff. Business people have business needs and Kickstarter staff could care less. It's like a payroll company that cares more about the computer system software than the end result for their customer.
Us campaign launchers are Kickstarters customer; we bring the income to pay their bills.
3. Community -
It's a fact certain items just speak to the Kickstarter community. If your product doesn't strike a cord with that group be cautious of dragging your personal circle of supporters into Kickstarter. Why over priced plastic water bottles sell like crazy I'll never know! You can get a plastic water bottle at any retailer for $7.99 but people are paying $30! If you're launching a plastic water bottle then you might be on the right track with Kickstarter.
MISTAKE: We encouraged our inner circle to pledge to Kickstarter in hopes that it would boost our page rank.
RESULT: Not hitting our goal, losing that funding opportunity to the platform failure. We could have used the money we raised but how many times can you ask people you know to enter their credit card for the same project? The money we could have actually collected had we just sent these people to a paypal link dropped by 60%.
4. Kickstarter is complicated.
Believe it or not there are a lot of people online that are not net intuitive. They do facebook, gmail and surf the web. Kickstarter's pledge process is not streamlined. First you have to register, that right there is more than some people want to do. Then the concept of rewards is not understood by many. As a matter of fact we had people who would rather hand us money and let us do the kickstarter part for them.
RESULT: We ended up spending a lot of time educating people on what Kickstarter IS and how it works. The concept of possibly getting a "reward" just was lost on most people. The idea that they may of may not be charged on their credit card was also bewildering.
NOTE: Even 30 somethings were challenged with the concept, typically a computer literate group!
5. TRUST
If you've never heard of Kickstarter you might not trust them with your credit card. We found that people are hyper sensitive to credit card fraud online. They are very selective on where they will enter their info. With the challenges of not fully understanding what the hell Kickstarter is comes the final road block, simply not trusting the site with their payment info.
6. Flawed Backend Algo System
You would think that Kickstarter would want to give every campaign a chance but they don't. If you don't come out of the gate on fire with tons of pledges on day one you're likely never going to get any traffic from the Kickstarter community.
Naturally you will send all your friends and family to reach higher funding percentages but as stated before that is a mistake. Your rank may bump up for a tiny bit but will fall immediately. When you don't hit your goal all those supporters funds will be lost.
On our campaign, using google analytics, we could see that 100% of all traffic to our Kickstarter landing page was from our own efforts. Meaning our twitter, facebook and paid advertising. Nothing from the supposedly huge Kickstarter community.
Bottom line: If you're going to launch a massive social media campaign, put out paid PRweb press releases, do media events, launch parties and call your aunt back in the old country for some money; just do a "PRE-ORDER" and Donate paypal button on your own website. Piggyback the Kickstarter campaign using all those efforts but drive the traffic to your site. If the Kickstarter community jumps on board then you double win.
When you send readers of a news articles and tweets to your Kickstarter landing page you assume 1. They will understand the concept of Kickstarter, #2 trust the site and lastly go through a signup process to give you money. Think about that.
While I fully get Kickstarter I was suprised how many didn't.
Here's the campaign we did. We knew going in it was not a popular product category for Kickstarter but we never expected to get ZERO traffic from the Kickstarter Platform.
We've since routed all the social media and PR efforts to our site where they always should have been directed.
Keep in mind we brought almost every dollar into the Kickstarter from the outside, I think we had at most 3 people for $45
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