KickstarterForum.org

Just needed this! Seems like there are still some works to do..
Pretty useful stuff to gain traffic prior to the start of campaign.

What were some of your struggles early on?

Thanks! Just launched my Kickstarter so I found this really helpful.

Interesting article, thanks for posting and congratulations on your successful campaign!

M8fitness wrote:What were some of your struggles early on?

1. Angering our earliest fans: as part of community building efforts pre-launch, we posted our product idea to forums to solicit feedback to share how we were building the prototype. Of course, we had the inevitable backlash from people who claimed we were charlatans- these can be easily dealt with or ignored, because many are unlikely to even support the idea of Kickstarter. However, because we dropped product features and compatibility (specifically, support of the Nexus 6 phone with our phone sleeve), we alienated some of our most vociferous supporters. Even before we had launched our Kickstarter, they accused us of over promising and under delivering. That was hard to take. Solution: make it clear that Kickstarter is NOT a pre-orders platform, and that as backers they are part of the product development process; that means things break, and things don't materialise! I think this is ultimately the best/ right thing to do if you're building a long-term company.

2. Getting Press: It is hard to get press before you've even launched, but essential if you want to stack the deck in your favor. So demonstrate your success in another way: e.g. get 2000 people to sign up for your mailing lists or win a startup award, so press can point to that as market validation/ a justification for writing about you

Totally agree on networking and building a community, no matter how hard you work getting an audience on the internet is a lot more difficult than it will ever seem.

I advertised on bgg.com to get people to my project.

Thanks so much for all these info. They're very helpful!

Thanks guys! Very useful tips!

This is all great stuff. Thank you for posting it!