The Bitter Taste of My Own Medicine
We always tell our clients that honesty is the best policy. Groundbreaking, I know, but if you are not a business owner, you might be surprised by how enticing the occasional exaggeration can seem. That might not mean much coming from a marketer, a profession even I might be tempted to equate with professional lying, but today I am facing hard truths head-on.
Anyone who has ever applied for a job knows the utility of spinning a negative as a positive, but that is not why we tell our clients to be honest. Taking honesty as a policy, besides being more morally defensible than the opposite, does a few useful things for you. First, it relaxes your shoulders. Second, it helps you improve because you do not have to keep conflicting realities straight in your head. And lastly, it forces you to get better.
The worst people to lie to are your mother and your spouse. The third worst is yourself.
Lies you tell yourself have a nasty way of becoming truths over time. When those false truths conflict with reality, your mind will double down. The thing is, reality rarely cares about the lies we tell ourselves. You can find yourself fighting an impossible war, desperately confused about why things are not the way you thought they were.
One of my recent articles outlined a Kickstarter campaign we were involved with. It was a project we truly believed in, but despite our best efforts, it did not meet its campaign goal.
In the spirit of vulnerability, and learning from that great fount of knowledge that is failure, I offer this article as a postmortem and as an exploration of an ontological stance I hold: within successes, there are failures. More interestingly, within failures, there are successes.
Thus, there is always an opportunity to sip from that great fount, and today we shall drink deeply.
Success Is Not a Coin Flip
Kickstarter is an amazing platform. Crowdfunding, in general, is one of the coolest social developments I have seen in my lifetime. Many amazing ideas have been brought to life that otherwise would never have gotten past the whiteboard stage because they managed to resonate with their intended audience and intended purpose, rather than needing to appeal to arbitrary VCs with arbitrary KPIs.
That said, the Kickstarter platform does have the unfortunate byproduct of coming across as "all or nothing." In a literal sense, it is. You put your idea out into the world, set a deadline and a goal, and if enough people pledge such that you meet your goal by your deadline, you receive the money pledged by your backers. If you do not meet the goal by the deadline, you do not receive the funds and your backers are not charged.
I would not want to change this system. It gives backers a sense of security and encourages them to back ideas they believe in. Kickstarter itself explains that all-or-nothing funding protects creators from being expected to complete a project without the necessary funds, while giving backers a goal to rally around.
But I do think this "all-or-nothing" mentality needs to have a small amount of cold water splashed on it before the idea takes hold in those who would see crowdsourcing, in general, as a pass-fail endeavor.
Success on paper is not always success in the real world. There are gradients to success. There are even pre-successes, as well as various assets at your disposal that can immediately contribute to your success or factor into future success.
Even a shuttered business might lead to a better venture. The only bad idea is the one not evaluated.
A Kickstarter campaign can fail to meet a funding goal and still succeed in a myriad of other ways. In fact, if leveraged correctly, a crowdfunding failure can put you in a stronger position to launch your business another way.
Business outcomes are gradients, not Bernoulli trials.
If you get in the habit of taking stock of all the assets at your disposal at any given time, you can learn to raise your visual horizon and take a more honest assessment of your path toward your own personal definition of success.
The Cautionary Tale of the Floating Tailgate Table
For more on the specifics of the strategy and work we did with Live Easy Solutions, I would encourage you to read my earlier article, Bringing Flotable To Market: Top Kickstarter Tips.
For the sake of this article, I will recount the short version.
Live Easy Solutions is run by two brothers, Myles and Michael, who, during the pandemic years, realized how much they loved the freedom that working from their cars provided. A problem they kept running into, though, was that it was logistically difficult and uncomfortable to work out of a car when reliable flat surfaces are so scarce.
Flotable, the floating tailgate table, was a thin, easy-to-set-up, and inexpensive table that improved on your average plastic folding table in almost every conceivable way.
The product was solid, and I mean that truly. It was one of those great opportunities where simply explaining the product, its design, and its intended purpose was nearly all it took to convince someone that they could use one.
There were whispers of potential traditional investors waiting in the wings. From the start of the campaign, I knew that, win or lose, being able to show real interest from the target demographics would be key.
The Kickstarter funding goal was set at a lofty $20,000 to be attempted throughout the month of May. It was a long shot on purpose, and the reasoning behind that decision should become clearer as you continue reading.
The best-case scenario was full funding with enough extra overhead not only to fulfill backer rewards, but also to fund a stronger redesign by the manufacturer and pay for patent lawyers to secure the Flotable designs.
The main point I would like to highlight in this article lies in the worst-case scenario. The absolute worst case for my client was not, "You will just be right back where you are right now." The more realistic worst-case scenario was that they would end the Kickstarter campaign with demand signals, content, data, subscribers, tested messaging, and a clearer sense of who cared about the product.
Bare minimum.
So, while it was not my suggestion at first, I came to see the utility in a lofty campaign goal. Setting the funding goal significantly higher than the minimum viable manufacturing order opened up more strategic possibilities in the case of failure than setting the goal as low as possible would have.
If I Knew Then What I Know Now
If you are considering a Kickstarter campaign for your idea, here are the main things I would recommend based on this experience.
1. Build Your Pre-Campaign as Early as Possible
The minute you decide you would like to do a Kickstarter, sign up with placeholder information and get yourself a pre-campaign page. That gives you a permanent URL that you can use across your socials, marketing campaigns, website buttons, emails, and other promotional materials.
As soon as you have your Kickstarter pre-campaign page decently populated, start directing traffic there. Gaining Kickstarter project followers is possibly the single best thing you can do for your campaign's success odds. Pre-launch pages allow potential backers to click "Notify me on launch," and Kickstarter sends those followers a launch notification when the campaign goes live.
Unfortunately for the Flotable project, we were brought in too late to have authority over the campaign publishing timeline. The pre-campaign page only went live a day or so before the campaign launched. That kneecapped us in a few different ways. Principally, we did not give Kickstarter users enough time to discover and follow the project on their own.
2. Build a Website Before the Campaign
We did this for our client, but it is important enough to mention here anyway.
Do not assume that simply having the Kickstarter page itself will be enough, especially if you intend to turn a Kickstarter campaign into a full-fledged business.
You do not control the Kickstarter page the same way you control your own website. Having an online location that is entirely under your control is a major breath of fresh air. For our client, we helped them run a pre-launch newsletter and installed Google Analytics on their site. We also ran small ad campaigns that used newsletter signups as their conversion goal.
This helped Live Easy Solutions build a useful list of leads through the newsletter itself, but pushing people to the website through socials, blog posts, and ads also helped populate Meta Pixel audiences and Google Analytics. That gave us target audiences and useful targeting data that we used to optimize ads and organic content.
The broader point is not to let Kickstarter be the only place your audience exists. Use the campaign to build an audience you can continue speaking to through opt-in channels like social media, a newsletter, your website, and Kickstarter follows.
3. Install Tracking Before You Need It
Set up your Meta Pixel, Google Tag, and analytics accounts as early as possible. If you have a website and you are using it as the central hub where all paid and organic media point, then your website should be actively tracking the kinds of people who visit, where they come from, what pages they spend time on, and what actions they take.
That means you do not have to start from zero on day one of the campaign.
Kickstarter also has Google and Meta integrations, so you can run ads pointing toward your pre-campaign page and use project follows as a conversion goal. It is critical to set this up early because it prevents your ads from wasting the precious first days of your campaign in the learning phase.
4. Calculate Your Marketing Budget Early
Once you know how long you would like your campaign to run, you should decide on a marketing budget. That budget can be informed by your assumed customer lifetime value, the amount of organic buzz you are seeing on social media, and a reasonable estimate of how competitive your ad market will be.
Estimating your average lifetime customer value requires you to have your manufacturing situation sorted. More than likely, you are seeking funding to cover your desired manufacturer's minimum order price, the cost of design and shipping, and whatever profit margin you are seeking. From a business perspective, you should generally have that sorted before launching a crowdfunding campaign.
Content marketing goes without saying, but I will say it anyway. A major factor in the longevity of your project is the community you are able to build around it. Regardless of the outcome of the campaign, a solid audience that understands your vision is an incredible resource, and organic social media content is the best way to start building that.
Do not wait for the campaign launch to start shooting reels, use cases, prototype reviews, interviews, founder updates, and process content. Put them on social media. Turn them into blog posts. Use them in emails. A healthy social media page serves as a signal for how easy or difficult it will be for your idea to gain traction.
Market research is also critical. Do not be afraid to check what your competitors are doing. Be honest about how your idea improves on theirs, even if your idea is to be strategically worse than them in some areas. See our article on positioning for more on this. Do a SWOT analysis. Try to uncover as much of your competitors' marketing tactics as possible.
With these pieces in place, you will have a much better idea of how much you need to spend on marketing and how efficient your ads need to be in order to meet your goal. Any leftover funds should be devoted to pre-campaign awareness in order to populate newsletter lists, website analytics, Kickstarter follows, and social media followings.
Create content that shows and teases your vision, then spread it far and wide. Give people places to learn more or form a community. Your goal should be to form a little cult of hype behind your idea before the campaign launches.
5. Decide on the Strategy Behind Your Goal
As I said at the beginning, the funding goal for the Flotable was set deliberately high. Though we ended up getting painfully close to meeting the goal, we still did not meet it. There are pros and cons to this. The cons are obvious, so I will explain a bit about the pros.
If you have no intention of turning your Kickstarter into a long-term business and you genuinely have no prospects through a traditional investor route, then my recommendation would probably be to set your goal at a minimally viable amount.
If you do have long-term business aspirations and need an opportunity to test the viability of your idea in order to impress more traditional investors, you might be better served with a "shoot for the moon" goal. Obviously, take an honest assessment of your idea first. Social media content can help with that. If your project genuinely wows people, then your prospects are stronger. Even getting close to your goal can leave you with useful assets.
That does not mean setting an arbitrary number for vanity. The number still has to make business sense.
But even if your idea fails to wow, not getting anywhere close to a low goal stings more than not getting anywhere close to a high goal. Both paths have reasons for pursuing them. You should weigh both paths accordingly.
6. Document the Entire Process
Document product development, founder meetings, prototype tests, compliments from friends, moments of confusion, and even days when everything feels like it is going sideways.
You would be surprised by what can be turned into useful social media content with minimal effort.
Authenticity makes for the best content, and Kickstarters live or die by authenticity. You are already developing your business. You might as well let that work help you twice: once when you do the work, and again when you show yourself doing the work as organic content.
In the case of funding success, you will have documented your rise from nothing to something. In the case of failure, you will have a detailed roadmap to look back on and learn from.
In either case, you will have ammunition for social media should you struggle to come up with fresh ideas later.
7. Turn Backers into Retained Audience Members
This is probably the single most important idea in this article.
During the campaign, do not treat backers as anonymous pledges on a dashboard. Treat them like the earliest members of the world you are trying to build.
Answer comments. Post updates. Invite questions. Show prototypes. Ask what they care about. Encourage them to follow the creator profile, follow the project, join the newsletter, and connect on social media. Give them multiple ways to remain part of the project's orbit.
Do not assume you will always be able to reach everyone directly later. Backers' email addresses are not visible in the backer report until after a project ends successfully. If a project is live, canceled, or unsuccessful, those email addresses do not populate in the backer report.
That should highlight the importance of being in direct and value-rich conversation with as many backers as you can while you still have access to them.
Kickstarter updates can help with this. Project updates are the best way to keep backers in the loop, and are a great way to repurpose top-performing social media content. Pre-launch updates are visible to anyone visiting the project page and send notifications to project followers. Yet another reason to treat your pre-campaign more like a campaign-lite.
So, if someone backs, comments, follows, or engages, do not wait until the campaign is over to start caring about that relationship. Make the campaign feel like a community while it is still happening, or even before it starts if you can. The most valuable long-term business assets are not pledges. They are a list of highly engaged leads.
The Best Possible Kind of Failure
The way our client's Kickstarter campaign "failed" is a kind of failure so tantalizing that it rivals or surpasses some success stories I have seen.
Unlike a standard marketing campaign, a Kickstarter campaign usually runs along a much shorter timeline. That leaves little opportunity for long-term strategy and slow optimization. Instead, it necessitates more of an all-out blitz approach to promotion.
A Kickstarter campaign forces you into a sprint. You come out the other side like you are awakening from a fugue state, feeling the way one might feel after realizing they had built a castle brick by brick while sleepwalking the night before.
What I stressed to our client was that our strategy was to set them up for success regardless of the Kickstarter campaign's outcome. In order to do that, we built a strategy wherein they would come out the other side astounded by the amount of assets at their disposal, no matter which side of the goal they ended up on.
When all was said and done, Live Easy Solutions ended its Kickstarter campaign a few thousand dollars short of its goal, but what they gained in the process was:
- business logistics and documentation
- promotional materials, including images, videos, graphics, and branding guidelines
- a newsletter with active subscribers
- a website with good SEO
- a blog that continues to gain organic traffic
- analytics data from their website and social pages
- assembled and functional ad trackers across multiple sources
- an absolute mountain of marketing research
- conversion and demographic data from the ad campaigns
- multiple social media pages with active organic followings
- an archive of high-quality, evergreen content
- vetted marketing strategies and positioning
- a visible record of real people willing to support the product
That last one is the real treasure.
Backers are like ultra-warm leads in the sense that they were willing to put in their payment information and pledge money to an idea rather than a definite product or service. That is a much stronger signal than a like, a casual comment, or a drive-by website visit.
But backers only count as an asset if you can retain them after an unsuccessful campaign, which requires building a connection with them and giving them more opportunities to stay in contact after the campaign ends.
Kickstarter backers are not passive like social media followers. They were willing to take a leap of faith. If you cultivate that relationship during the campaign, invite them into your newsletter, encourage them to follow your social pages, and keep them engaged with updates, then some of that belief can survive even if the campaign does not.
When many businesses start out, they start with nothing. If you assume that post-Kickstarter means "back to square one," then even after a failed campaign, you are starting out on better footing than most.
You are starting with tested messaging, campaign data, content, audience signals, newsletter subscribers, social followers, project followers, and evidence that real people cared enough to try to help the product exist.
Ultimately, your goal with a Kickstarter is not only to find a small group of people and fulfill the rewards they signed up for. Sure, that is probably what you are aiming to do in the short term, but your long-term goal is to use the Kickstarter as a stepping stone toward creating a legitimate business.
If that is the perspective you take, then your ability to prove that there is real demand for your product can be more valuable than your ability to set an arbitrary campaign goal and hit it.
Turning a small failure into a stepping stone toward success makes for a better story than a journey with no obstacles anyway.
Frayed Edges to Silver Linings
The moonshot funding goal that overshot what was minimally needed ended up creating multiple viable paths forward for our client's business.
Currently, they are weighing their options. They still have a good number of their backers who followed them through their newsletter or social media and would gladly pledge again should the opportunity arise. They could very easily try to improve upon their existing design using the marketing data on which features drove the most sales and relaunch a "Flotable 2.0" Kickstarter campaign. They can take all of the assets I previously outlined and use them to create a more compelling pitch to traditional investors as well.
The Kickstarter campaign may not read "funded" on the webpage, but thinking that amounts to abject failure would be shortsighted.
"We set a modest goal and hit it" is not nearly as compelling as "we failed to meet our moonshot, but we learned from that failure and created the new and improved business you see before you today."
There is nothing that says you have to be funded through either crowdfunding or traditional VCs. There is nothing that says an unmet campaign goal needs to be the end of the road for your business.
What survives failure? Dreams. Dreams survive failure.
The campaign left behind content, research, analytics, campaign infrastructure, audience signals, a newsletter, social proof, product feedback, and a clearer path toward the next version of the business.
That is my point here.
Success is a gradient, not a binary. No endeavor worth doing is valueless simply because it does not go the way you hoped.
Diving into something head first, giving it your all, is a value-rich undertaking regardless of outcome. You do not need to get your idea 100% right on the first try because every little push loosens the obstacles in your way.
I know that does not eliminate disappointment. Believe me, I would have preferred this article to be a victory lap instead of a learning experience. However, I am also a big believer in weaponizing disappointment. It is cliche, but true: a failure is only truly a failure when you refuse to try again.
So stay scrappy and get in the habit of constantly looking around you to take stock of the assets at your disposal, because they are probably better than you think.