UviCube (
www.bit.ly/UviCube) has hit its funding goal last night and here are some things that I've learned so far.
-
When other creators say 'start building your audience early', it means not a week or two ahead, but months ahead. We made an internal decision not to share that we were going to be on Kickstarter way in advance, so we only started aggressively building an audience right before the launch on FB, and I think the outcome could've been much better had we had a huge base to start with. It is also not enough to just have an audience... you need a
highly involved audience as these are the people who will be the first ones to advocate and share your project. So don't just gather 'likes' but rather, have a conversation and communicate with them to build rapport and loyalty.
- When we sent out a mass email to our subscribers, only about 27% actually opened the email, which apparently is on the high side, according to Mail Chimp stats. Think of all the junk mail you just delete every morning without opening.
Don't count on your emails being read by everyone, especially if it's a mass email.
- It seems as though the 'new & noteworthy' category has a totally random algorithm as there seems to be a lot of campaigns that have gotten zero funding and are still way ahead of our project in terms of visibility. There was only a very very small percentage of backers that came from using the 'discovery' feature, I'm assuming because of our project's invisibility in relevant categories, e.g. Design, Most Popular, New and Noteworthy. Point is,
don't bank on your project being visible even when you reach your goal or close to reaching your goal. (Obviously, this may change in a few days, and I'll update on whether or not there has been a change in our status)
-
Promote your media coverage. We were featured on Digital Trends (
http://www.digitaltrends.com/home/uv...r-kickstarter/), which was awesome, but having it featured doesn't mean automatic traffic. You have to really share the news for it to be worth it, unless you're smack at the top of the site where you can't be ignored. So, tweet it, share it, email it, post an update on your campaign page, etc.
We still have 39 days to go, and we still have a lot of ammunition, but I have to say that it has definitely been a grind. Emails, updates, posts, tweets, outreach to blogs, media & fellow Kickstarter creators, answering questions and comments, etc.... Whether you have a campaign that is kicking butt, or getting its butt kicked, you have a lot of work laid out for you.
Please please check out our campaign and share it www.
bit.ly/UviCube !!!