KickstarterForum.org

Hi. Magnus,

Incredibly great stuff. I wish I had read it before I started my Kickstarter project.

Thank you so much for sharing.

Unlike other sites that only offer information for crowd funding campaigns, on Crowd101.com you’ll find information for investors and supporters as well as for crowd projects. Also we fund the companies.

Hi! I love this forum as well I would love it if you could check out my campaign and give me some sage advice.. Thanks! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/go ... ess-device

Man, I didn't realise this thread was still receiving replies...

There have been some questions and I will answer them shortly (even though most of them were a few months ago).

Out of interest...

I've still be launching campaigns while I've been gone and continue to learn.

The current campaign for a high-end Titanium Pen ( Click Here to check it out ) one is the most successful to date.

I'll be back soon to answer questions and perhaps break-down some of the things I did on the current campaign.

wow! u still willing to share! you have been on my radar for months and yes, you are indeed a serial crowdfunder!

greggdavis wrote:Magnus,

Your experiences in crowdfunding are fantastic, even as you said- its like feeling ones way through the dark, you've learned an amazing amount already!

I just launched my first crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter (link below) and wondered if you'd have any impressions for me to learn from your experience?

If you can take a look at it and give me any feedback, that'd be deeply appreciated!

thanks,
Gregg

Hi Gregg,

I'm obviously fantastically late to reply to this. I saw your project never got funded. Are you going to re-launch?

pbsanford wrote:Wow. I'm a little bleary-eyed but I did read every word of your post... well, sort of... I'm struck with both how well written it is and the experience and thought behind it. Thank you!

I just joined this BLOG but when I get a few more hours (or days) of experience here, I'd love to have you take a peek at my ks campaign and give me a couple comments. It's my first campaign - my baby - and I have to say I'm disappointed by its abysmal beginnings. I don't know if my product/invention is not appealing or if it's the design of the campaign page. I spent the afternoon napping to try to shake off the blues.

I'm going to stop blathering and read a few more posts.

I'm hoping to grow up to be like you.

Hi Peter,

Only just seeing your project now. I can see you cancelled it. Are you going re-launch.

Was the $58k goal an absolute minimum to get the project off the ground?

Magnus

johnnie smith wrote:

Magnus wrote:Oh, and another thing on videos...

The only other option is to hire someone to do it properly.

I've been in talks with someone to do this - and it's going to cost around $2k for a simple 3-minute video.

...from what I can tell, I doesn't make much difference.

First off, thanks for this wonderful thread. It's awesome.

Now, you state couple of times that video is not needed. You've done well without it. Agree.

But how can you tell it doesn't make a difference? did you try both methods, with and without?!

Not trying to persuade you to hire me . . . you can get this done on fiverr thorough multiple sellers plus one film editor. It would end up costing way below 2k

It's basically from looking at thousands of Kickstarter campaigns. Which campaigns did well and which ones didn't.

Having great photos in your project is a lot more important than a great video. In fact, I'd even go as far as to say that poor-quality photos will almost certainly kill an otherwise good project stone dead!

I've always had a video in my projects - but it's usually been me in front of a video camera for 30 seconds or so just asking Backers to read the page instead.

I've not got conclusive proof to test this (i.e. an A/B split-test). The only way to do it on the Kickstarter platform would be to keep adding and then removing a video a few times and monitor the resulting stats.

I might do this at some point down the line.

johnnie smith wrote:

Magnus wrote:Some crazy advice I once heard...

In summary...

You can perhaps now understand the crazy advice of "do some advertising" for a Kickstarter campaign.

Getting advertising to work is an ongoing testing-and-tweaking, and continually evolving process.

Trying to throw cash on advertising your crowdfunding project is madness - crowdfunding is about receiving money ...not spending it.

Magnus, this post made me think.

So you don't believe in advertising your crowdfunding campaign. You even tested some ads and saw it's not worth the bother.

Have skimmed through all your posts in this GREAT thread again.

Have I missed something?

How did you manage to get your funding done?

[Hmmm... don't tell me because you had a wonderful product. Many better campaigns out there fail.] Yours did not fail. They all succeeded!

HOW DID YOU GET EXPOSURE?

My short response is:

Yes, it pretty much is because of having a better product (I'm serious here).

My longer response:

I went about this differently to most. I watched to see what worked... and then just did that.

I only do titanium products (so far)... because they are very popular.

My first project I did no promotion at all and got around 150 backers ($12k reached).

Second project did promotion to previous Backers. Project ended up around 300 Backers ($16k reached).

Subsequent projects, again, no promotion apart from that to previous Backers. However, the last few projects I've done more cross-promotion with very specific projects (I get lots of offers... but most I turn down because they are so unrelated to my demographic. Golden Rule: Treat Backers with utmost respect).

There are a few other things... like spending a long time crafting the "pitch", spending an obscene amount of time positioning Rewards, and so on.

So, perhaps I don't have a "better" product overall... but, for those Backers I'm targeting, I might just have a better product.

In saying that... I know for sure my project "pitch" pages are better than 99.9% out there.

Charlesbreen wrote:I am. Big fan of all of your projects, can I ask for a moment of your time t check out my project as it is my first one and I am struggling to get off my feet, thanks.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/12 ... n-clothing

Again, late on this... but I'll answer anyway.

T-shirts as Rewards generally don't do that well (take a look through Kickstarter projects and you'll see this). So a t-shirt as a project in itself has the probabilities against it before it's even launched.