KickstarterForum.org

It's a bit of a long article, but I felt compelled to share my experiences with Funded Today.

They boast a lot of success and in their defense, they have had some wildly successful projects.. but I had a miserable experience with them. They didn't treat me like a valued client at all and omitted some very important information that I would have liked to have when deciding whether or not to hire them.

Here's the TL;DR of the post:

TL;DR: Funded Today left out critical information during the preliminary sales call, failed to communicate well throughout validation, and cost me $3500 and 10 days of my campaign for no substantial gain. Afterwards, hired CommandPartners for a lower price, a better return, and an extremely pleasant experience.

And here's the post itself: http://blog.julianhartline.com/archives/81

We spoke before on Twitter, so it was good to read your post on Funded Today...

I read your email conversations with interest, I didn't know they relied so heavily on FB ads, whilst the work we do is more of the organic approach.

So really the money they spent on Tests (via FB) came out of your own pocket...it's a shame you didn't pay someone to teach you to use FB ads and you would of saved yourself alot of money!

In terms of the refund, I'd have to side with Funded Today. They did raise you money, they did do the work, whilst the point you were making about basing it on a competitor was important - it seems like they didn't base their promotion solely on that aspect, but on their experience.

You agreed to their (high priced) terms, so you didn't get a refund.

Unfortunately they didn't deliver, showing that Command Partners used FB in a different way - for the amount you spent hiring these guys, was it worth it? My feeling is no ;/

You should of used us instead...as we don't rely on FB alone and we've got great organic results.

We just launched and are looking for an effective marketing partner. What do you mean by organic results?

Sure, we prefer to do the proper research on what worked for other campaigns and niches, then apply it to campaigns.

I saw your campaign, I think you could of started the video at 2.25 as it's specific to what you're doing

Best of luck!

DivaBitch Couture wrote:We just launched and are looking for an effective marketing partner. What do you mean by organic results?

Hi all,

I'm running a campaign at the moment until july 30 and it slowed down quite a bit in the last 5 days. I'm looking for a low cost but good digital agency that could help us in our last 15 days of campaign. Any guesses? Uh, by the way, it's for an animated short film + music album project www.bit.ly/black-live-ks
Thank you!

Finally, someone reviewing their service! Thank you for sharing.
I use funded.today for my second campaign and had a bad experience with their service as well.
Lost my $3,500 down the drain, no significant return from their service and no refund basically same like yours.
The worst part is they marketing system is really shady, We don't know where they spend our $3,500?
If you ask them for a proof of what marketing that they already done, and how much they already spend daily for the FB ads they will only show you their google analytics chart and that's it.
Oh btw they can just use that money ($3,500 of yours) to boost other campaigns that already make a lot of money for them, just sayin'

I've tried Funded Today for my crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter.

The goods are they do have their own recipes to marketing crowdfunding projects. And the recipes work very well for some projects

The bads are their marketing strategic works for some not all and the cost is quite high. We had to pay around $3500 nonrefundable upfront fee for a thing called validation week. They said they would use this upfront fee to validating our product. Later I know they did it by using mostly facebook ads. Based on what i have seen and statistics on GA, they might have spent no more than 1/7 of the upfront fee. When the validation didn’t well, FT just canceled the contract and there is no refund. The pass rate is only 40%. Moreover, I didn’t even think the people who had ran the facebook ads for my campaign were really good at it. Just sensed it tho, they didn’t share any information about how they were running the ads.

At the end, we didn’t pass the validation week. So we decided to hire a freelancer to run facebook ads for us. We bought a list of around 1k Kickstarter super backers for $35 (with names, facebook url and id) from a guy on Fiverr, studying their behaviors, creating lookalike audience and running facebook ads ourselves. Fortunately, not all gigs on Fiverr are crap. Those ads brought up more revenue way more than what FT could.

I will definitely not use FT ever again. If you are gonna spend up to $3500 on facebook ads, just run it yourself or hire some really good one and take control of the whole situation. Because no one understands your product and cares about it better than you

Hi guys,

We were running a campaign for a fitness tracker device called Specter.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/10 ... =user_menu

Towards the end of the campaign we were nearly $10,000 over their $30,000 dollar goal. I visited their page one Monday and nearly spit my coffee all over my screen. Specter had lost over $9,000 in pledges over the weekend. We were still barely above the goal mark, but what could have happened? I contacted the owners of the campaign to ask if they had any idea how they could have lost 30% of their funding in just two days.

It was then that I heard that they had previously signed up for some deal with a company called Funded Today. The backers that were lost were all the backers generated through their deal with this company.

I do not know how much money was spent on this program, but the owners seriously regretted their decision to work with Funded Today.

I have not personally used this service, but based on this experience from one of our clients I would strongly recommend against them.

Hope this helps someone

This post is addressed to Specter

I find your post to be very misleading as it is quite clear that you inserted your own money to artificially boost the campaign. Obviously you were not aware that this does very little to bring more traffic to your campaign because Kickstarter ranks campaigns by backers per day and not by amount pledged. They obviously do this to combat people who try to game the platform in a fraudulent manner by inserting large sums of money to deceive potential backers about how successful a campaign really is. Anyone with a simple Kicktraq installed could clearly see that it was not Funded Today that led to all of that money coming out at the end of the project. The money coming out at the end of the campaign was you wanting to pull that money out and avoid paying Kickstarter's 5% and Stripe's 3%. The joke was on you at the end though because Kicktraq clearly showed how fraudulent the campaign really was. Well run campaigns do not have that kind of thing happen.

I even went and grabbed a Kicktraq because those were some pretty serious allegations you brought up against Funded Today and I wasn't just going to take your word for it.

I would suggest you study up on Kickstarter's algorithms for ranking projects and display a little bit more honesty when you post in a large forum like this.

http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/103413 ... hart-daily

jsmizzal14 wrote:This post is addressed to Specter

I find your post to be very misleading as it is quite clear that you inserted your own money to artificially boost the campaign. Obviously you were not aware that this does very little to bring more traffic to your campaign because Kickstarter ranks campaigns by backers per day and not by amount pledged. They obviously do this to combat people who try to game the platform in a fraudulent manner by inserting large sums of money to deceive potential backers about how successful a campaign really is. Anyone with a simple Kicktraq installed could clearly see that it was not Funded Today that led to all of that money coming out at the end of the project. The money coming out at the end of the campaign was you wanting to pull that money out and avoid paying Kickstarter's 5% and Stripe's 3%. The joke was on you at the end though because Kicktraq clearly showed how fraudulent the campaign really was. Well run campaigns do not have that kind of thing happen.

I even went and grabbed a Kicktraq because those were some pretty serious allegations you brought up against Funded Today and I wasn't just going to take your word for it.

I would suggest you study up on Kickstarter's algorithms for ranking projects and display a little bit more honesty when you post in a large forum like this.

http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/103413 ... hart-daily

Hello Jsmizzal14,

I wanted to comment on this post because it seemed a lot of fellow forum users were having misgivings about the Funded Today platform. I wanted to relay the experience of one of our clients, that got involved with them. I have not personally worked with Funded Today, but this is a story that was given to me by a client that claims he did invest in their services.

Kicktraq is great for looking at the analytics of a campaign, especially once it has concluded.

I appreciate you looking into this. Cynical as always =p