by asum » Wed May 11, 2016 1:22 pm
Thanks! As I tell everyone that has asked me, there's no secret recipe. I just read a lot the advice I could google, including a lot on crowdCrux, followed as much of the advice as it made sense. Put a lot of time and effort to every aspect I felt was worth it. Press was harder... I got only a bit of fashion press. But each little bit of success helped the next. A little bit of everything helped.
Partly I think for me was that friends, family and some fans have seen my genuine passion for years, so some really helped drive the initial energy, which got others to do the same.
Like it was mentioned in other posts, I think in general you should be able to gather interest at least from some of your friends and family. Cause even though that's a smaller group, at least some should represent some of your audience. If not, you target audience might be too specific for something like Kickstarter.
Before launching, I didn't know if my project was going to succeed (I also had no idea many friends would back me... i knew some was planning to but I didn't know that many), but I did think it was the near the best it could be. I felt as prepared as I could (of course there's always more--but some like fashion press, I just felt that was a bit out of my control. So I think you can tell only you can tell if you have done all your work or might be rushing. You should be able to ask yourself that.
I get very random "can you give me some advice" or "take a look at my project...". For the most part, I don't think that's really useful (unless you have a very specific question for a very specific project creator). You are trying to ask a random stranger to take time to look at your project and give you feedback. Unless they spent a good solid amount of time to really analyze your work (and additionally they likely don't know your market as well as you), they won't be able to give you much specific valuable advice--I mean anymore than if you re-evaluated your project. Like maybe a quick "bad photo" or "unorganized". But anything like that--you should be able to get a decent grasp of if you've studied enough of the information online and other Kickstarter projects. Plus, anything like that, you should be able to ask some friends of yours (like if you aren't good visually, I'm sure you have one friend that is and can give you feedback on visuals)--you friends would be more invested to help you. Plus it's a good way to get them in or let them know about your project.