We’ve received several requests over the past few months for advice on how to run a successful Kickstarter campaign.  Although we don’t think there’s any one formula that everyone can follow, we do have some advice about what’s worked well for us during our Kickstarter campaign.

Before Launching Our Campaign

We were planning our site for months, going through all the details of the layout, content, mission, and what the possible uses could be. We had this great idea we wanted to share with other design enthusiasts, but didn’t know how to most effectively tell people about it.  The idea to launch a Kickstarter campaign came about randomly.  We were discussing how our partner, SimpleScott, successfully funded his book “Designing Obama” through Kickstarter, and it occurred to us that this would be the perfect platform to showcase our idea to people who love art & design and support new creative ventures. 

The challenge was that we were already in November, and the holiday season was right around the corner.  We knew it would be nearly impossible to raise funding right after the holidays, so in order to launch our campaign before the holiday season we had to do so in 3 weeks.  This created pressure to very quickly decide on all the elements of the campaign, including how much funding we needed, what reward levels to assign, what to offer as a reward for contributing, as well as to finish and launch our website, and create one of those amazing videos we’ve seen on other successful Kickstarter projects.  Therefore, our first piece of advice to anyone wanting to do a Kickstarter campaign is to plan ahead.  The more time you have to prepare your idea/product, to plan your campaign, rewards, and marketing, the bigger the chances that you will create something that actually appeals to your target audience and your message will be able to reach your potential supporters.

The Importance of a Video

One thing never to underestimate when launching a Kickstarter campaign is the importance of a good video.  Do some research by watching the videos of successful campaigns, particularly those that are within the same category (art, film, design, technology, etc.) as the one you want to target.  You will quickly notice that most of the successful campaigns have more or less professional quality videos that introduce you to the idea and the person/people behind them.  The dialogue is well thought out, and the creator does a thorough job of explaining the product, why someone should get involved, and how the backer will benefit through supporting (their reward).  But most importantly, videos create a level of trust and rapport that’s difficult to establish through just text and images. 

Living in Los Angeles, we were lucky enough to know someone in the film industry.  We talked one of our great friends into giving up his Saturday (and his apartment) in order to shoot our video using the equipment he had.  We worked for days to prepare the script.  It’s incredibly difficult to fully explain and convey your idea in a limited amount of time (usually just 2-3 minutes.)  But no one wants to sit through a long video of someone going on-and-on about their idea.  Our motto has always been “Keep It Simple”, so we tried to talk to the audience like we were talking to our friends, and to explain the idea behind our site in the clearest way possible.

In order to demonstrate how our backers could select different symbols to create their own messages on the NounShirts we offered as a thank you, we turned to a friend at San Francisco’s Bars+Tone to help with the graphics.   Creating this video gave us a whole new appreciation for video production….it took us about 4 hours (and some shots of whiskey) to shoot a 2 minute video. 

You can find more pictures from the photoshoot here, and our final video can be seen below:

Campaign Marketing

One of the most important aspects of running a successful Kickstarter campaign is pushing your own marketing.  Before launching our campaign, we created a marketing timeline of when and how often we would tweet, post on Facebook, email friends and family, and contact design blogs and people in the industry.  We also created a list of our “social connectors” – people in our social circle who were prominent in the fields relevant to our campaign - such as technology, design, and marketing.  A couple days before the campaign, we sent a separate email to the social connectors with detailed information about our mission, the campaign we were launching, and sample tweets/posts they could write.  A great reference book we recommend about marketing is “The Tipping Point” by Malcom Gladwell.  The book discusses what Gladwell refers to as “social epidemics”, one of which being the power of marketing through word-of-mouth.

Another important part of our campaign marketing plan was to identify a list of 40 design blogs/websites that we wanted to reach out to in the hopes that they would write about us to their followers.  Before launching, we created a spreadsheet of these sites and their contacts, and throughout the campaign we tracked when we contacted someone and whether or not they got back to us.  From researching other successful Kickstarter campaigns, we knew that most traffic and funds are generated during the beginning and the end of a campaign, with a lull in the middle.  Since our campaign was only 3 weeks long, our goal was to create enough buzz to drive up traffic during that middle week.  Therefore, we started to contact the blogs/websites during the first week to give them enough time to hopefully feature us in the upcoming days.

It’s difficult to say whether it was our efforts or just plain luck, but towards the end of our first week we started to receive amazing coverage by media we haven’t even contacted.  In the same day that we were published on Kickstarter’s “New & Noteworthy” feature and their “Project of the Day”, we also got picked up by NotCot, TechCrunch and Coudal Partners.  The next few days were a whirlwind of excitement of getting covered by FastCo Design, Engadget, PSFK, and Big Think.  I believe that was when our server temporarily crashed.  Soon after the end of our Kickstarter campaign, we were also mentioned by SwissMiss, The Atlantic, and Smashing Magazine, among others.

The following graph demonstrates the relationship between received media coverage, our traffic numbers, and the contributions we received during the 3 weeks of our campaign:

Rewarding Your Supporters

We offered six levels of support to our backers, from $5 to $105.   Our most successful by far was the $30 level, which was the first level at which a supporter would receive a NounShirt.  The next level up was $45, which offered a custom-made NounShirt designed through a collaborative process with the backer.  We limited this level to 25 backers due to the substantial time commitment it takes to design custom orders (it sold out quickly).  We also received funding from donors who selected no rewards, with two of those donations being over $100. 

Here’s how the reward levels corresponded to the total amount of pledges and to the total final revenue:

Other Recommendations

People want to know what’s going on.  If you have something new or exciting to share with your supporters, by all means let them know.  They want to know their money is going to good use.  For example, we felt it was important to keep our supporters up to date with information about the progress of the website, major media coverage, and also the status of their NounShirts.  It took us a while to collect everyone’s information for their NounShirts, so we wanted to keep the communication going to make sure people knew we were trying to get everyone’s responses back as quickly as possible.  We’ve posted a total of 10 updates, three of them throughout the campaign.  We probably should have posted more, but since we personally don’t like being bombarded with emails, we tried to only send them when we had something valuable to add.

When calculating how much funding to request, remember to include the 5% Kickstarter fees, 3% Amazon fees, as well as any applicable shipping charges you may incur.  Also don’t forget to take into account any potential international shipping fees.  We didn’t request additional contributions for international shipping because we assumed this would only account for a small percentage of our total contributions, but after the campaign ended we found that nearly 1/3 of our reward-fulfillment needed to be shipped internationally.

And last but not least, keep in mind that whether or not your funding goal is met, Kickstarter offers an invaluable service for you to 1. get your idea heard, and 2. to get feedback about your idea.  We received a lot of great suggestions from our supporters, and we listened carefully to their comments.  Companies pay a lot of money for focus groups and specialists to conduct customer surveys.  All of this information is available to you for free just by listening to your backer’s feedback.  

We’re very grateful for Kickstarter and their team for all of their great work!