KickstarterForum.org

I'm surprised that there's not more of the community discovery side of things

I think you have to get into one of the feeds to increase the chance you will be discovered, whether that's on the magic sort, the recently launched section, the soon ending section, etc.

Everyone should make sure to put an Event in the facebook calendar. This will insure that ALL your friends will see it as opposed to just a % from a regular wall post.

I was surprised by how many backers I've had find me directly through Kickstarter, an unexpected bonus has been that some of the people who found me there have stuck around as regular customers afterwards

As an artist I post on sites like deviantart, Tumblr, facebook, etc a lot, so I've had a small following for a while, so quite a few of them have been backers.

A few family members and friends have backed as well, though it's a small percentage. They all been wonderful in helping with promoting projects though

I agree with sbriggman , the people are coming from the technology ,gaming,tabletop , but also Press ,Youtube , friends,but its so difficult to get them even from all this ....tech ,game...

I agree. I thought my concept was amazing I understood to do research before launching and I thought I was ready! friends and family were all waiting for me to go. Assumption is very dangerous indeed! The thing is you never stop learning and changing and re evaluating your ways to traffic potential backers...

I am slightly nervous. I took ages creating my video and stills and I have only 17 days left with 15% reached! I just have to keep pushing!

This thread got me to sign up for twitter.
Exploring it now.

What I'm taking from this thread is the need to develop a following before leaping into a crowdfunding project.

Dave's Meat & Nuts wrote:Everyone should make sure to put an Event in the facebook calendar. This will insure that ALL your friends will see it as opposed to just a % from a regular wall post.

Great tip!! So glad I read all the way through the replies! Ha!

I believe the first third of your funding comes from your local community and people you know. Through social media, you project will spread from friends, to friends of friends, etc. It all depends on what category your project is in, different categories receive different backers from different communities.

On our campaign so far, it appears about 10% are family /friends and the rest people I don't know
hope this helps!

A little known fact about a lot of successful crowdfunding campaigns is that they presell the products before launching the project and then get those presold customers to flood kickstarter/indiegogo the day of to push the popularity of the project.