Kickstarter is the world’s largest crowdfunding site, where creative projects of all shapes and sizes can find backers who believe in them. When you want to produce a creative project or innovative product, but don’t have the funds to do it on your own, crowdfunding can be a great way to get started. Last year in 2021 we tried our hand at raising funds through Kickstarter’s platform. The goal was to fund an animation to pitch to investors. Long story short, we raised over $10,000 on Kickstarter, and a further $100,000 through investments. In this post, we will tell you what we learned raising $10,000 crowdfunding on Kickstarter.

Crowdfunding on Kickstarter

If you are new to the world of crowdfunding, you may find it pretty simple. Tell your friends and family what you are looking to raise money for, how cool it is, and why they’d be missing out if they didn’t help fund it. Sounds easy right? Well if that was your initial thought, you are in for a very rude awakening launching your first Kickstarter campaign.

So then how does Kickstarter work? Kickstarter and crowdfunding, in general, is a series of campaigns executed in order to convert traffic, ie your friends, family, and even strangers, into supporters that pledge money toward your project. This series of campaigns include a pre-campaign, campaign launch, and even a post-campaign.

You Must Have a Powerful Pre-Campaign

Without a dynamic pre-campaign, you’re doomed to fail. Let’s get that out of the way. There is absolutely no way you will have a successful crowdfunding campaign if you neglect this step. A pre-campaign is essentially an audience prep period. First, you need to figure out who your target audience is. Without knowing that, it will be impossible to convert later on. You may even fall victim to losing money if you plan on running ads. Once you have a clear idea of who you will be targeting, it’s not time to define your messaging and content strategy. This will be used to generate leads onto an email list.

Email lists are a very important factor when running a pre-campaign. Aside from social media where you have no control over your audience reach, with an email list, you own your audience. We will dive further into this at a later time. During the pre-campaign stage, we set up our website, social media accounts, and email list opt-in forms. Next, we began to create content and drive traffic to our website with the strategy of having people sign up for our email newsletter. This would have them ready for when we made our official launch. If you need help coming up with content ideas, check out this post here.

Kickstarter’s “Projects We Love” Badge

Contrary to popular belief, the “Projects We Love” badge on Kickstarter isn’t as great as people believe. Aside from credibility, and a slight boost in traffic directly from Kickstarter, the success of your project is still up to you. Many believe that if you receive this badge of approval, the Kickstarter algorithm will push you heavily on their website. Well, yes, if you’re lucky enough to land on Kickstarter’s homepage or newsletter, great. You will receive a massive amount of traffic. However, if your page isn’t optimized correctly, that traffic will not convert into backers. Make sure to nail your pre-campaign and develop an audience and strategy that will be your prime source of traffic.

Where You Should Start

If you are interested in launching your own Kickstarter campaign, start by signing up for our newsletter. We will be covering many marketing tactics on how you can achieve successful crowdfunding campaigns as we did. Lastly, Follow us on social media and ask us any questions you are having relating to your projects! We would love to help.