KickstarterForum.org

Hi Jonathan,

You raised alot of good points, especially building up contacts and then staying in touch and marketing to them when the time is right. If you look at LinkedIn, it's the same thing - just keeping in touch and building up your contact list in case you have the opportunity to do something. Networking is necessary unfortunately ;/

Ok onto your potential KS campaign. It depends what it is really. If it's a gadget/art thing then my own target audience will probably like it. To get maximum exposure instantly, yes you probably need to spend money to do it.

I think alot of the time it's luck and timing how a certain site or campaign gets exposure, then the owner gloats whilst explaining they "did nothing". I'd like to hear more about your campaign though.

Hi Gifts,

I appreciate the reply. Yes, the networking is the hard part, just so busy with other things. I think we're just going to try to do our best and just reach out to as many ezines, magazines and bloggers as possible. Hopefully we can get some publicity that way without spending too much. Like most true KS campaigns, we don't have a ton of money to spend on Mark & PR but the more I reseach about this stuff, the more I realize that spending big money on PR is not always required....

You could have a celebrity pick up your design, tweet about it and Bam, you wake up the next day with a million dollars worth of orders ..... ok ok, maybe that's a little bit of wishfull thinking but that's what I love about this industry, KS and croudfunding, there is the potential for HUGE success, sometimes even overnight. KS and IndieGG are like a designers, artists dream come true. It's just really exciting.

"I think alot of the time it's luck and timing how a certain site or campaign gets exposure, then the owner gloats whilst explaining they "did nothing". I'd like to hear more about your campaign though."

Hahaha, yes good one. I'm sure there is always something behind a successful campaign, maybe one of the ads they paid for kicked in and they didn't realize or forgot about it.

In terms of hearing more about my campaign, at this point in time I have 2 major project parterships on the go and one personal project I want to run from my own account. One of the partnerships actually came about through the kickstarter community! Which is pretty cool and I'm excited to reveal it. I can give the categories that we will be in:

Project 1 will be in Product design, "desk art", "desk toy", "educational device"

Project 2 will be in Product design, "gadget" "docking station" "desktop peripheral" etc. etc.

Project 3 will be in Product design, "desk art", "desktop storage", "Novelty gift"

I don't really want to give too much away as we havn't exactly figured out when we will be launching yet so I just feel that someone could easily be inspired by or easily copy our concepts and beat us to a campaign if we pre-launch too early. We want to pre-launch only a month or two prior to our campaign launch. Again, I'm new at this, so not sure if this strategy is warranted or if we should be spending even more time for pre-launch. I just feel that with product categories I'm dealing with, there's a lot of competition and I'm sure many designers and artists are surfing the web for inspiration so we have to keep that in mind. We're trying to balance the paranoia somewhat

I had a chance to browse your site and I would have to say, my first to projects would be ABSOLUTELY PERFECT fits for your website. The third project would be a little colder because it's more a "tech" gadget, a little less "desk art". I think it would be better suited to a "tech & gadgets" style blog or ezine.

Send me a PM. If you don't mind, I will send you a press release when we're ready to go.

I think one thing that I'm starting to realize also as I mature and learn more about business and this new world of croudfunding is that I had the mind set that KS was the be it and end all.....as in, I thought that if you launched a campaign on kS and it failed that that was it, it was over. But I think if anything, it's just more to learn from. During the 30 days, you get a free market test for you idea, sure, if you didn't do your marketing properly it might impact your bottom line but the cool part is, the KS community alone is pretty large, so atleast you're going to get some comments and feedback, not to mention the analytics from the build in platform to see where all the traffic came from, which is really invaluable. So you're don't really loose. In the worst case, you get feedback about your product and it could be a case where everyone is saying, "no, not a good idea, move on" or "good idea, but change this, this and this, and I would buy it" etc. etc. If the feedback is overwhelmingly negative, then you might have to walk away and pursue something else. It's all a learning process.

So your product or project is a lot more than just a 30 day campaign.... you can have a great project and it can still fail for a variety of reasons but as long as you have a good product to start with, you can move on and build from there, try other promotional channels, maybe pursue other funding options etc. etc. My thinking now, which in hindsight is obviously is that, I think if you have a good product and team that is passionate enough about something, you can build and create the industry around it, regardless of KS and really make it happen. It's not so much about the success or failure of the campaign or coming up with the "PERFECT" end product your first campaign launch, it's more about how good is your idea or concept in the first place, is their a market for it, do people actually want what you've created, can you execute properly, can your team work together to realize the end goal, can you rally people around your idea, can you build buzz etc.

Wow big replies from you! All your points are valid and make sense.

I'm pretty sure the pm function doesn't work on this site, I've notified the owners but most of the time I found the message gets stuck in the outbox and doesn't go anywhere.

You can contact me at email@giftsandcoupons.com

Lol. Yes, I'll have to cut them down a bit...I like to talk shop, what can I say.
Well good to make the connection. I will be sure to contact you soon about our projects. Thank you.

This post has been moved to the General Chat + Introduce Yourself section.

Hi Jonathan,

You're on a right track that you want to connect with your followers on a more personal level, because that is what most of backers also want before they decide whether to donate or not. That is also one of the reasons why you have to work on building your contacts base several months before the start of your campaign.
You can use our app Krowdster to get in touch with hundreds of proven backers on social media filtered by your projects' category. https://www.krowdster.co/blog/crowdfund ... press.html

I'll be honest with you, I'm skeptical about how much your site would help. I'm sure many people choose that route and I bet your contact lists are inundated with campaigners trying to push their products. I'd rather build followers organically just by doing the research myself. Are your contact lists "opt in" ? are the fee's monthly or a one time fee? How do I know the quality of the contact lists?