KickstarterForum.org

[fvreeman]

Hi all,

This forum was a fantastic find for me! I really appreciate all of your advice and comments.
I included my kickstarter profile below.

Here is my story - I have a small machine and mold making shop with a couple of injection molding machines in Southern California. I am an inventor/tinkerer/engineer and I set up the shop/business mostly to do some projects I was working on. In the last 5 years I've been developing my own products and helping other entrepreneurs get through the prototype phase and into pilot production. We have been in operation for about 10 years but never really successful. My day job, to make ends meet, is working as an environmental engineer in Alaska.

Recently my shop helped 5 different kickstarter creators with their products. After those successes, I thought I'd try one of my own. I picked a smartphone thermometer as my first launch, basically a relatively easy hardware product concept that appeared to have a lot of success on Kickstarter with other creators. I developed and prototyped a better one than had been made before, and offered it for half of what the other thermometer creators put their reward levels at. I set my goal at the minimum necessary to achieve production, which turned out to be 1/3 of the goal the competing campaigns had set - and they were successful. My project seemed like a slam dunk.

Two weeks into the campaign I realized that I was in trouble. My video was not being viewed enough, and even though I was landing a backer for every 5 views of the video (20%), there wasn't near enough traffic to make the campaign successful.

The kickstarter creators I worked with said I needed a "following", but I had no idea what that was or how to create one until I read through the posts and links on this forum.

I am looking forward to learning from everybody here, and maybe by next year I can post a success!

Fred

http://www.kickstarter.com/profile/systemd#

[sbriggman]

Hi Fred- What did you learn from helping the other campaign creators? Those are pretty good metrics (20%). Are you tracking the amount of traffic your campaign gets at all?

As with all great things, in my experience, attracting a following takes time. Would recommend checking out: http://www.crowdcrux.com/get-a-crash-co ... resources/