When you think of crowdfunding, you might picture a magical land of supportive strangers just itching to throw money at your awesome new idea.
It's easy to fall into the trap of believing your own hype and thinking you are going to be the next big crowdfunding success. After all, Oculus asked for $250k and ended up with over $2.5million from their Kickstarter campaign.
It can't be that hard right?
I've had a few conversations with budding entrepreneurs recently who have shared that they would simply crowdfund their big idea, like it is a simple forgone conclusion to get funding. So I thought it would be useful to share our story of crowdfunding and the key learnings / pitfalls we found in the process.
Spoiler alert: we achieved our funding goal but it was not the runaway success we had imagined.
When we decided to launch Really Good Conversations for Businesses on Kickstarter, we did not go into it naively. We knew fully that this is a launch tactic that requires significant resource, time and investment to make a success. We've been involved in crowdfunding projects in the past and know the amount of effort required to make it work. However, we felt we had a very strong product that had been thoroughly tested through our consulting work, backed by our established card brand (Really Good Conversations), and we have access to high level design, copywriting and marketing resources for promotion.
Sounds like a no brainer, right?
We thought so, but oh my were we wrong.
Here's the story of our Kickstarter experience with some key learnings you might find valuable if you are planning on crowdfunding in the future.
Where It All Began
For many years, Starts With A has been helping businesses align their ideas and solve big business challenges through strategic workshops. In those workshops, we’re not paid to have the answers, we’re paid to ask the right questions.
One of the exercises we developed over the years was a series of "Big Questions" that we used to tease out important conversations for clients. This are questions that spark engaged and focussed discussions and reliably produce breakthrough ideas and insights.
We thought...
could we package this up in a way that business owners could use our big questions in their own business, without the need of a consultant to facilitate the process?
Enter Really Good Conversations for Businesses, the strategic card game that makes meetings more valuable.
Why Crowdfunding?
Our previous products were aimed at families, children, and anyone who might stumble across them in one of the many independent gift shops who stock us across the UK, Australia and USA. This one was a slightly different target as it was aimed at the business crowd, and there was significant risk of producing a product that would not be easy to sell to the existing Really Good Conversations audience base.
Crowdfunding felt like a smart way to measure audience interest at the same time as securing product pre-orders before going ahead with printing a large number of packs. There's nothing worse than investing in a stock pile of product that you then find you can't sell.
So, how do you launch a Kickstarter?
Setting up a campaign on Kickstarter is relatively easy, you can get a simple page up in a few minutes. Making a pitch convincing enough for a stranger to pledge their hard earned money to your big idea is a different kettle of fish altogether.
The key asset within the campaign is typically a promotional video that showcases your project and explains what you are trying to do. There are many tools and apps available these days which allow the average person to do video editing but this does not make the average person a good video producer. Here's ours.
Now it's time to populate your page with your proposal / pitch to the community. This is your chance to explain in detail what your product idea is and why it provides value to it's intended audience.
You need to sell the benefits at the same time as building confidence that you can actually deliver on what you are promising. Having written many value propositions over the years, we felt we had that aspect of the pitch quite clear. We knew the product did what it said it does and the pain points it addressed for clients as we had been refining it for a very long time before deciding to productise it.
Next step is to set up a variety of different package options for users to pledge their money for. The obvious first one for any product business is to offer the product itself in return for the pledge, sort of like a presale. From there, it's a sliding scale of small to very large packages that can be anything from a bundle of products and a t-shirt right up to a meet and greet with the founder or your own custom branded version of the product.
It's useful to include a few hail mary big ones just incase you catch the attention of someone with real money to spend who really likes your idea. Remember, one big pledge can be the equivalent of 1000s of smaller ones.
Then you ready to hit go and wait for all the money to come in...
...or not.
So How Did it Go?
The launch was fantastic.
Our friends, family, and existing network came through and supported the project. The first week saw a flurry of pledges, high-fives, and that feeling of "this might just work".
Then came the dreaded mid campaign plateau: the pledges slowed to a trickle, and we were left staring at the campaign dashboard, wondering if it would come good in the final weeks.
During this lull, we concluded two things:
Kickstarter doesn’t magically bring you traffic. We'd assumed that putting the campaign on such a big platform meant a built-in audience. In reality, only about 20% of our backers came from Kickstarter’s community. The rest, hard-earned from relentlessly pushing our own network.
Some pledges aren’t what they seem. We got hit by countless sneaky marketers who pledged just so they could pitch their “Kickstarter services,” only to pull their support when we politely declined.
With one week to go, we were miles away from our funding target and we had started to prepare ourselves for the possibility that the project would not go ahead on Kickstarter alongside the type of communications we would need to release to our audience explaining what happened.
Then something miraculous happened: a single backer (a connection on LinkedIn) pledged the remaining funds alongside a message
"I can't stand the anticipation any longer, YOU ARE FUNDED, congrats guys"
My hero.
While this was a moment to celebrate, you don't count your chickens till they've hatched and we were not about to crack open the champagne until the money was actually in the bank account. It takes a little while after a successful campaign for each of the backers to confirm payment and then Kickstarter deposits the funding into your account. This was a nerve wracking time as we had only just scraped over the finish line so anybody pulling their pledge would have had the power to kill the project.
Thankfully the money came through so we then gave the green light to production on the packs. Not long after this we started getting them out to the various wonderful people who had faith in the idea and backed the project.
This part went without a hitch.
What Surprised Us?
Despite our pre-existing knowledge of crowdfunding, we still expected that launching on a platform like Kickstarter would have brought more attention through the platform than it did.
In reality, being on Kickstarter alone is not enough to generate interest or awareness. It is not a case of "build it and they will come", the onus is very much on YOU to market your campaign and bring the traffic to the page.
We knew we would need to promote this project to our professional networks as part of the marketing but we didn't realise quite how much we would need to push this angle. In reality, almost all the pledges came through our immediate network and Kickstarter accounted for about 20% on top. It was nothing short of a grind from start to finish and despite a successful result, it felt like a LOT of hard work for funding we potentially could have generated in other ways.
If a brand strategy consultancy with vast marketing experience, creative resources and a tried & tested product can struggle to generate a comparatively modest figure on Kickstarter, consider how hard it would be for the average Joe who simply has a good idea.
The Big Lessons
Crowdfunding ≠ Instant Traffic: One of our biggest misconceptions was thinking Kickstarter would bring a flood of strangers clamouring for the product. Nope. About 80% of our backers came from people we already knew. The rest? A trickle from Kickstarter’s own community. Lesson learned, you need to build your audience before you launch. Then you can launch your Kickstarter to your already engaged and interested audience. Think of it like a running start where you immediately carry momentum into the campaign rather than having to generate all the awareness on day one.
Set a Target as Low as Possible: Here’s the deal with crowdfunding, it’s all or nothing. Miss your funding goal by a single pound, and poof, it all disappears. My advice? Set the lowest target you can live with, even if it feels a bit conservative. Better to hit your goal and move forward than aim too high and end up back at square one.
Promote Like Your Life Depends on It: Crowdfunding isn’t a “set it and forget it” situation. You’ve got to keep the buzz alive the entire time. That first week? Great, everyone’s excited. The middle weeks? A soul-crushing lull where you’ll question your life choices. The final days? A mad dash to the finish. Having a plan for what to post, when, and where can save your sanity.
Beware the Sneaky ‘Supporters’: Oh, and let’s not forget the sneaky pledgers. They swoop in with their £80 pledge, only to send you a message offering “premium marketing services.” If you’re not interested, they ghost you and quietly pull their pledge. Although this sounds like just a minor nuisance, if you only just about scrape through the funding target, someone sneakily pulling the pledge AFTER the conclusion of the campaign can be enough to drag you below the threshold and mean you don't get funded.
So, Would We Do It Again?
Honestly? Probably not anytime soon. It was an intense, exhausting process, and we're still recovering. That said, crowdfunding did get our product off the ground, connected us with our audience, and sparked plenty of meaningful conversations, and not just the ones in the card game.
Crowdfunding isn’t the magical quick fix I thought it might be, but it’s an incredible way to bring a new idea to life if you’re willing to hustle. Build your audience first, set realistic goals, and have a promotion plan.
Oh, and if you want a pack of Really Good Conversations for Businesses, you can get one from our web store here.
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