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When it comes to planning your timeline, what sort of time would you advise allocating for planning, putting the campaign together before launch, outreach, etc? How far ahead of the launch of your campaign did you start working on it?

I have not launched my project yet, but we have been working on it since Nov, 2014 and we plan to launch it in Feb 2015. We naively thought we could get everything done in a month or two, and were planning on launching the project in Dec., but we quickly realized how unrealistic it was given how much work was still left to do. We may not stick to the Feb launch date if we feel that we are not prepared.

It took us about 2 months to get project content ready (video, infographics) and to layout the project page. We have also been doing outreach since Dec to friends&family, business associates, bloggers, magazines, etc., and we plan to continue this through out the duration of the campaign.

Obviously, we don't know if we will be funded or not, but we are working towards exceeding our goal. Just to share a little bit of what I'm doing - I think calculating how many people you need to reach to get a portion of those people to pledge in order to hit your goal may be a good way to gauge if you are prepared. For example, if your goal is $2000, and you have a great reward for $20 which you think is what most people will go for, then you need 100 backers. If, say, 0.5% of the people who visit your project end up pledging, then you would need to drive at least 20,000 people to your project page (This would be out of the ppl who actually visit your project, so if, say, 1% of all the ppl who saw your ad/email visited your site, then you would have to reach 200,000 ppl to achieve this goal). This is not an exact science, obviously, but I think this can give you an idea of the minimum number of people you need to reach.

Anyway, good luck to us all

Most creators I interview who have been successful allocated about 3 months to preparation. However, some more and some less.

Choco0912, I think we are in the same boat as you. We shot the video in November and figured we'd complete the campaign page in two weeks and launch in December. Only after a thorough review did I realize how much more work is involved.

Need to get quality product shots, infographics and build-up social following. Now it looks like we won't be ready for launch until late February 2015. I really under estimated the efforts needed.

Yea, having images for your project page really make a big difference in the presentation and are worth delaying the campaign to include later.

Übertüb (OOber-tOOb), Feb 02, 2015 - We have been prepping our project for months. With our video shot in late summer, all hopes were to launch our new product "the Übertüb " in the fall. During the Thanksgiving weekend (first week of Oct in Canada), we realized the timing was not right. It wasn't that we couldn't have launched, but delaying seemed to be the best option. Our strategic plan changed to officially launching the "Übertüb - The Classic Black Inner Tube. Reinvented.", at the International Toy Fair NY on Feb 14, 2015.
This event is hosted by the TIA (Toy Industry Assoc.) and hosts retailers, buyers and media from around the world. Our delay was in part to do with strategy and we took advantage of the additional 120 days we delayed our project t. The delay allowed us to be better prepared. We have now established corporate style guides, synchronized and optimized our social media channels, created both ecom and retail packaging concepts (which will be important for the industry buyers to see what a shelf set will look like at the show), and fine tuned our campaign, plus, plus, plus. Time has benefit us in being better prepared as our goal is to have manufacturing done quickly (manufacturing had previously been established for the most part in the fall).
So I guess taking our time will hopefully be seen through preparedness. The time of year also played a factor just before the holidays. I guess the drawback for us was our dollar has slipped about 10% since Thanksgiving. After adjusting our numbers to reflect currency fluctuations, we're now comfortably ready to make a splash in New York and time did allowed for that. Certainly waiting to be part of the largest industry specific event in the western hemisphere can't hurt either. Watch for us, we will be launching Feb 07, 2015.
ubertub.com #ubertub Like us on Facebook at ubertub and check out the video of a 7 ton loader running over our prototype.

Hey h4baine,

There is so much to plan and work for before you can even start your crowd funding campaign. There's content and images, social profiles and following, email list that you have to keep hot with regular emails and auto-responders, then there are other buzz campaigns like crowd speaking that needs further efforts.

Generally outreach to bloggers and media should be done after you launch your crowd funding campaign, but the research for it has to be done months in advance.

So, depending on how efficient you are, take 3 to 6 months of time for planning,

thanks,
Uttoran Sen,

at least 2 months before.