KickstarterForum.org

- Have you learned any new skills (marketing/social media)?
Yes! I have a solid marketing background, but our new Kristala Tarot project is our first foray into the crowdfunding space. It's been interesting to see how what might work well for a typical promotion/campaign doesn't work quite the same as with a crowdfunding campaign. Seems like Facebook/Instagram and PR are big players in the crowdfunding space, but it's also super clear that having a solid email/newsletter list prior to launch is key.

- Have you gotten any backers you don't know?
Yes, quite a few in fact! My absolutely favorite thing is the rush you get when you see a new donation come through - especially when it's someone you don't know or someone who wasn't previously following your project.

- What has been frustrating?
Maintaining momentum has definitely been difficult for us. Like most creators, we had a solid rush of donations coming in during the first few days of launch, but now into our second week things have slowed down quite a bit. We continue to stay positive and keep chugging along on experimenting with promotional strategies, but it can definitely feel daunting/disheartening.

- How did you motivate yourself daily?
I try to stay upbeat and focus on manifesting the success for our campaign. Taking time to reset and regroup each day (breathing, meditating, affirmations) have always helped me to stay grounded and motivated on my goals.

- Are you planning on starting a business if your Kickstarter goes well?
I do have a business! Our project is unique in that it's a side project for my primary business as an indie game developer. Our Kickstarter project is focused on a tarot deck that's featured in a side quest in our video game, Kristala!

- What tools or websites do you recommend (others than this one haha)?
We've used a bunch of tools and platforms to help with our campaign! Everything from teaching ourselves new skills with Youtube videos to checking out some courses on sites like Pluralsight. Trello in particular has been incredibly helpful for outlining our project management and campaign strategy. Definitely recommend, especially if you're working with a team on your crowdfunding project.

- Have you learned any new skills (marketing/social media)?
Patience is certainly a skill I've improved upon! But I've also discovered how hostile a lot of communities can be to advertisements. Prior to starting the KS, I was not very active on social media at all. Now that I've started, I've come to realize how difficult it can be to integrate in different online communities. There's a fine balance to be struck between promoting one's own content and not appearing as pure "shill".

- Have you gotten any backers you don't know?
100% of my current backers are unknown individuals.

- What has been frustrating?
Advertisements, as a general rule of thumb, don't seem to actually work. 10,000+ views on advertisements across platforms like Reddit, Facebook, and YouTube. But this does not correlate with backers; only 9% of my backers have been from external sources.

- How did you motivate yourself daily?
Daily goals are set (e.g., X number of advertisements, X number of engagements, etc).

- Are you planning on starting a business if your Kickstarter goes well?
Yes! If all goes well.

- What tools or websites do you recommend (others than this one haha)?
As opposed to recommendations, I would advise against YouTube advertisement campaigns. The cost can fluctuate wildly without providing returns.

Overall, I'd say my experience with KS has been mixed. The campaign itself is still hitting all of the necessary milestones to succeed, but this appears to not be the result of any advertisements I launched. Rather, backers are all independently discovering my campaign via KS.

Just in my first week. I do think it's a platform worth exploring, but I admit I did not factor in donor fatigue as much as I should have. Also, I'm not thrilled about joining dozens of extra sites just to gain exposure. I ackknowledge my choices may cause my campaign to fail. Definitely worth a try, though.

Edie

We have launched our campaign for a week now and it has been going okay I think. We don't have much experience with kickstarter so we don't know what is normal for a new creator. Some campaigns reach their goal very shortly after release and I guess promotion is the key to success. Kickstarter has many ongoing projects so for a person that scrolls through is difficult to see everything that is live. This way is difficult for a new creator to gain backers only through kickstarter page.

My first campagin not was good for my "low" esxperience. After some years i have try to make new campagin with all my new experience and now i see nice result with 1 campaing done and nother one, online in this days, in goal:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wi ... llustrated

Biggest thing for us I think has been figuring out the marketing angle. We're currently mostly using Meta, it's been interesting to try to figure that platform out and develop content that drives the most economy of people to follow. It's also interesting in that we get a LOT of link clicks, but percentage wise very few who actually click the 'notify me on launch' button (we're launching in a few weeks).

So far so good!

everyone has been very positive and respectful... time will tell if it will maintain!

I love Kickstarter, although their project post process is frustrating. We initially got rejected and the feedback was limited. After speaking to a VP at the company, they let us resubmit and were super helpful.

Our project goes live on Tuesday: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/st ... for-patios

I did fail the first project because I did not realize how much preparation was needed for a campaign to be successful, but I plan on relaunching. I have had an overwhelmingly positive experience. However, most of the negativity has come from spam and unpleasant people who messaged me on Kickstarter. I am working on a poetry book called Red Robins Sing in the Winter. It is not your typical poetry book because it has an overarching theme of perseverance, with each section of the poem being split up based on the four seasons: winter, autumn, summer, and spring. There are drawings to accompany some of the poems and each season will have its own art style. I'm raising money to get a good editor/proofreader, pay the illustrators and for marketing/advertising purposes. Plus, I don't want there to be typos or grammar errors.

Sign up through my landing page to receive updates on the project.
https://subscribepage.io/XufR7V

Hi, mine has been wholly negative...

So I had an email list with 350 subscribers. 81,000 insta followers, 35,000 tiktok followers, press release in local press. Posts specifically about the books getting thousands of likes, have a direct call to action and link to pledge, but getting no pledges.

So am resigned to it not getting funded. I can only think that people don't want to sign up to Kickstarter .i.e. people are clicking through then not pledging... the page I think is good, the project good, the pledges reasonable... but maybe it's a sign of the times with people not prepared to economically plunge etc?