KickstarterForum.org

I heard that they operate by using at least 10 other websites. That’s a scam and even worse than criminal.

I doubt that they are making any money anymore. These posts about them are everywhere. The must be living in a 3rd world country in order to survive off of this scam income.

Regardless, you can’t give money to support a crime or else you are perpetuating a never ending cycle of marketing scams. It’s hard though since as soon as they get caught they just start back up again with a new name looking for new prey to devour.

We have been perusing the net for different solutions to our crowdfunding marketing needs. I thank you in advance for sharing this. From what I have gathered, there are 4 main ways to acquire backers at scale:

1. Facebook Ads
2. PR (public relations)
3. Influencer Marketing
4. Community

PR and Ads are expensive, save for the largest campaigns I believe these channels of marketing are out of the question for most project creators, same goes for Influencer Marketing.

Which leaves us with “Community”. Here seems to be a great forum to meet and greet, networking can be a powerful ally to a kickstarter project. All it takes for our project to succeed is 100 backers. A small amount yes. Clearly this is an amount that can be gained by making friends online and in person. Support and be supported.

Community can also be acquired by networking in person. I have built a small media list by visiting meetups in my local area and my partners have done the same in their own areas. If your product involves retail, a great way to gain some hard needed backers is to partner with a local store in order to boost your email list. It’s like the equivalent of leaving your business card out on the table.

But the mother of all methods is to network with people who have influence. This is different from influencer marketing because you are not paying them to run advertisement. Peak Design made their brand on this method. With their first bag, they got a high profile photographer to evangelize for them. The rest is history.

I think for every product there is a key high profile person who will love it and share it. If you can find on of them, a single influencer of this tier is enough to drive a thousand backers or more to a campaign. I continue to look for my key influencer and I hope you will too.

Absolutely brilliant post my friend. I have been so frustrated with traditional marketing methods. What you are describing is kind of like word of mouth marketing on steroids. It’s really a mix of word of mouth, PR, and influencer marketing.

Could you imaging getting 3 or 4 high profile influencers to evangelize for you? I think this is the key to raising large amounts.

To really pull that off though you have to know people in your space like the back of your hand. I know tech really well, and admittedly it is easy to know because of all the tech blogs. But the problem with this is that tech products require huge upfront investments in order to be made. And i’m talking about a quality tech product, not just some desk ornament that you’re calling a tech product.

For example if Travis Kalanick (former ceo of Uber) were to share a product it would easily drive a thousand backers. It’s not easy to make something so good that someone of that level of fame would bother to share about it though.

Fidget Cube was a simple tech product that raised over $6M:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/an ... l-desk-toy

They got 154,926 backers. Literally a crap ton of press & publicity from what I can see. I wish there was a way to see how many advertisements they ran. If I could see the number of ads and what platform they were, I would be able to estimate how much they spent on ads.

It’s a shame what happened with that campaign though. The cube that they are selling now is nowhere near the quality of what was shown on the kickstarter. The current product that you can buy now looks 3d printed with obvious errors on the plastic. The cube in the kickstarter video and photography was damn near a work of art. I wish I could have gotten what was shown.

What is it going to take to put these *** out of business? They just hide behind their private whois registrations on all of their domains. If we could find a way around that info to reveal the true info, one of us could go to their home or place of business and talk some sense into them. That would be great.

I remember that Alexa (the website ranking service, not the Amazon device) used to ignore whois privacy. It was so awesome, you could see everyones domain data regardless of if it was private or not. But then Amazon bought Alexa and the ability to do that just went away.

I legal subpoena is one way, but would be expensive. If several of us got together and filed a lawsuit and got an official request made, it would be so easy to get each and every single one of their domain registration information.

If anyone is interested in doing this with me send me an email

That was an amazing campaign that I backed. The end product did suck though, but it was cheap so oh well.

SandraNYC wrote:Fidget Cube was a simple tech product that raised over $6M:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/an ... l-desk-toy

They got 154,926 backers. Literally a crap ton of press & publicity from what I can see. I wish there was a way to see how many advertisements they ran. If I could see the number of ads and what platform they were, I would be able to estimate how much they spent on ads.

It’s a shame what happened with that campaign though. The cube that they are selling now is nowhere near the quality of what was shown on the kickstarter. The current product that you can buy now looks 3d printed with obvious errors on the plastic. The cube in the kickstarter video and photography was damn near a work of art. I wish I could have gotten what was shown.

This is an amazing idea!

Mightee wrote:Absolutely brilliant post my friend. I have been so frustrated with traditional marketing methods. What you are describing is kind of like word of mouth marketing on steroids. It’s really a mix of word of mouth, PR, and influencer marketing.

Could you imaging getting 3 or 4 high profile influencers to evangelize for you? I think this is the key to raising large amounts.

To really pull that off though you have to know people in your space like the back of your hand. I know tech really well, and admittedly it is easy to know because of all the tech blogs. But the problem with this is that tech products require huge upfront investments in order to be made. And i’m talking about a quality tech product, not just some desk ornament that you’re calling a tech product.

For example if Travis Kalanick (former ceo of Uber) were to share a product it would easily drive a thousand backers. It’s not easy to make something so good that someone of that level of fame would bother to share about it though.

This is amazing advice!!! You need to post more here please!!!

ThatDapperLook wrote:We have been perusing the net for different solutions to our crowdfunding marketing needs. I thank you in advance for sharing this. From what I have gathered, there are 4 main ways to acquire backers at scale:

1. Facebook Ads
2. PR (public relations)
3. Influencer Marketing
4. Community

PR and Ads are expensive, save for the largest campaigns I believe these channels of marketing are out of the question for most project creators, same goes for Influencer Marketing.

Which leaves us with “Community”. Here seems to be a great forum to meet and greet, networking can be a powerful ally to a kickstarter project. All it takes for our project to succeed is 100 backers. A small amount yes. Clearly this is an amount that can be gained by making friends online and in person. Support and be supported.

Community can also be acquired by networking in person. I have built a small media list by visiting meetups in my local area and my partners have done the same in their own areas. If your product involves retail, a great way to gain some hard needed backers is to partner with a local store in order to boost your email list. It’s like the equivalent of leaving your business card out on the table.

But the mother of all methods is to network with people who have influence. This is different from influencer marketing because you are not paying them to run advertisement. Peak Design made their brand on this method. With their first bag, they got a high profile photographer to evangelize for them. The rest is history.

I think for every product there is a key high profile person who will love it and share it. If you can find on of them, a single influencer of this tier is enough to drive a thousand backers or more to a campaign. I continue to look for my key influencer and I hope you will too.

BEWARE SLICK SALES PITCHES EVERYONE

Proud_ESP wrote:Crowdfunding marketing is so important to a kickstarter project. They all come in with their slicks sales pitches about how they will pitch journalists, the media, and secure lots of publicity for a product.

I think it needs to be drawn to everyone’s attention that in terms of marketing kickstarter projects, PR is by far the worst method of doing so. Why is this? Because the media, media outlets, and journalists do not care about products. They cover news. News as in politics, that’s what publications cover.

No one anywhere wants to write about out small products. Sure there are blogs, but what have blogs ever done for a campaign? You can email a blog yourself you don’t need a full fledged PR firm for that my friends.

Plus, blogs never drive any backers. We all know that. Facebook ads and Adwords are all the works, and since most of us don’t have the budget for that then it’s pointless.

The kickstarter platform was founded and designed to induce organic traffic. That is why you see great products raise huge amounts on kickstarter. It’s because there are millions and millions of people each day going to kickstarter and just looking for projects to back.

Don’t focus on marketing, focus on making a quality product. The whole world is watching what is happening on kickstarter. If your campaign fails then go back to the drawing board and come up with a new and improved product. Wash rinse and repeat. Iterate your way to success and quit fiddling around and wasting money on marketing.

Excellent findings my good sir.

ChasingThatGold wrote:I’d like to step up and provide something that someone has posted previously, hope it’s okay that I paste it here again. I think that it needs to be said.

Crowd PR Guru has a fiverr profile. It was hard to find, but I found it here:
https://www.fiverr.com/crowdfundingpro/ ... ng-project

It says they are based in India. And yet on their website they masquerade as if they are a US based company. That is fraud and punishable by law.