KickstarterForum.org

@denemante with 1,500 member Salvador has done a great job building this community forum. Not sure what the stats are your requesting with this individual stats are but Kickstarter offers site stats here:https://www.kickstarter.com/help/stats and we recently posted on our blog about why is a great time to crowdfunding. http://commandpartners.com/blog/prime-time-for-crowdfunding

Thanks for the reply roymorejon...you might actually be able to answer a question that's been nagging me. I noted it in another post, but I initially viewed KS as a promotional tool. But I'm starting to realize or believe it's more of a hub to direct your family/friends/Facebook friends to as you ask for money - a central depository of sorts for people who want to help you out. Most people probably have 200 combined family members, friends, neighbors, Facebook friends and/or Twitter followers. You could probably squeeze $25 out of each of them, so with 200 people you could reach a funding goal of $5000.

But what if somebody doesn't have many friends, social or otherwise? Maybe they only have 25 people in their life - so they'd get $625 in funding - then need to rely on total strangers to make up the difference and reach $5000. How do you reach these strangers?

Kickstarter themselves says the majority of funds come from people you already know.

Related - maybe you meet your funding goal thanks to family/friends - but then your could get it overfunded, perhaps significantly, by reaching strangers. How?

So is it foolish to start a KS campaign if you have 13 buddies, 4 neighbors, 9 Facebook friends and 2 Twitter followers? Should your approach be to seriously ramp all that up prior to starting any KS campaign?

Or - are they ways right now to get total strangers interesting in your KS campaign and reach a $5000 or other funding goal, even if you are a social hermit?

Basically, I don't understand if "the game" here is all about ramping up your physical and online social status so you can then rely mostly on your "friends" for funding - or whether you can skip that entirely and still meet funding goals thanks to strangers....

@denemante - Each campaign is different. Each project owner is different. Many times in the campaigns we strategize, we always try to pre-launch with friends and family in mind, many times we offer early bird rewards to 'reward' early backers. A range of 10-35% of funding comes from friends and family typically. If you don't have any friends this may be a problem not only for the campaign

For social media marketing on a crowdfunding campaign we offer these tips: http://commandpartners.com/blog/3-social-media-tips-for-a-successful-crowdfunding-campaign.

We also try to integrate PR into every campaign we do with releases and blogger outreach. You can read about that process we recommend here: http://commandpartners.com/blog/4-reasons-to-integrate-public-relations-and-digital-marketing-with-blogger-outreach.

Again each project and circumstance is different. The product, just like IRL needs to be unique and of value. If the product your crowdfunding isn't any good, chances are the public will feel the same.

Thanks roymorejon - starting to like what I hear. It's really just 10-35% of funding coming from friends/family? For the average project, I would have thought it was more like 90% - but I'm honestly glad if I'm wrong there.

@denemante many times it is 75-90% of the smaller campaigns, but for when you're looking to make a major splash with the media, friends and family can only take it so far. That's where we step in.

Hey guys - I believe I have it set so that any user can create a poll. We could use this to gauge the demographic of this community.

I imagine we represent a pretty small portion of overall creators.

With regards to failure, I have seen creators on the forum fail the first time and after retooling, succeed the second time with the help of other members on the forum. Example: http://www.crowdcrux.com/aspiring-artis ... ckstarter/

This inspired me to write a few articles on relaunching your Kickstarter:
http://www.crowdcrux.com/ultimate-tips- ... -campaign/
http://www.crowdcrux.com/how-to-success ... -campaign/
http://www.crowdcrux.com/the-story-of-r ... nd-myself/

I care far more about the quality of the community than the numbers .

"Basically, I don't understand if "the game" here is all about ramping up your physical and online social status so you can then rely mostly on your "friends" for funding - or whether you can skip that entirely and still meet funding goals thanks to strangers...."

Family/friends/professionals vs strangers really varies from campaign to campaign. Have seen some with 90% from friends/family, others with literally 10% and the rest from strangers. Some categories like design and gaming cater more to strangers than a campaign for a local effort or in the publishing (book) category.

My view: I don't view Kickstarter as a beginning, middle, end, kind of event. It's a part of a larger journey towards going full-time on your creative endeavors (or in scaling up your business). It's a tool you can use as you climb up the ladder to realizing your dream - whether thats to attract 1000 true fans and be able to produce music full time or to launch a startup like Pebble.

The skills you learn in doing a Kickstarter project will continue to yield dividends as you launch new products down the road (off Kickstarter). I wrote about this more in "Kickstarter and Indiegogo are not about money, they are about community"

See: http://www.crowdcrux.com/kickstarter-an ... community/

Speaking of building a fan base of sorts, if your KS project fails - can you still see the names/email addresses of everyone who has pledged to thus add them to your emailing list?

Can you see these people's email addresses while the project is underway? Or must you correspond with them only through KS?

Same for funded projects - do you have all the email addresses of your backers?

Finally - I wonder if there is any opt-in verbiage within the process. I mean, say my project funds and I have 200 backers. I'm guessing I'll have 200 mailing addresses to mail their rewards to. But if I also have 200 email addresses and want to bulk-email all of them - must that then always be done through KS? If I start emailing them stuff, even though they've backed my project, they might get sick of my emails - yet aren't hooked into any system to unsub or opt-out of?

You can survey backers during the campaign, and only once you campaign ends can you get additional details from your backers. We encourage our clients to use backerkit to handle the project management after a successful campaign.

We just launched our KS campaign today. Despite me doing weeks of research, refining our campaign a dozen times, etc. I still feel overwhelmed! LOL

I have now started trying to work with a PR company as well to help get the word out there!

Can anyone share there past experiences? What worked? What didn't?

Thanks.

@geminifilms - See: "Lessons learned" 8 pages of tips - what-have-you-learned-from-running-a-kickstarter-campaign-t814.html