Let’s talk about spam

Spam is an unfortunate part of the online world and Kickstarter is no exception. As soon as you launch your Kickstarter project you’ll start to have people getting in touch offering to help your campaign.

Typically these will be offers of marketing services, for example adding your project to a newsletter that will be sent to a top quality list of Kickstarter super-backers.

There are of course some legitimate crowdfunding agencies out there that can improve the chances of your campaign succeeding. But you should be careful when these offers come out of the blue. Particularly if an offer seems too good to be true, because it probably is.

Before responding to any offers of help, think to yourself - why are they getting in touch? And if they were really good, would they be coming to you?

Running a Kickstarter campaign can be a very emotional experience. You’re putting your idea out into the wild to see if it will live or die. You desperately want it to succeed and it’s easy to convince yourself that just spending that little bit extra on a marketing service will get you there. Sadly, some unscrupulous people pray on your insecurities and fears in an attempt to profit from your eagerness to succeed.

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Incidentally I’m talking about this from the point of view of a Kickstarter creator. As a Kickstarter backer you may have concerns about scam projects and I’ll probably do another post about looking out for those. However, in my opinion that problem is overstated and outright scams on Kickstarter are extremely rare. Creators mess up for sure, but Hanlon’s razor applies - “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

What to look out for

It’s up to you to do your due diligence when working with any third party collaborator. There are some good ones out there, but you need to be careful.

The simplest tactic would be to ignore any unsolicited approaches - either by email or via Kickstarter messages. Frankly, you could stop reading here and I’d be happy to provide that advice.

But there is a non-zero chance that you might miss a good opportunity that way.

Below are some of the types of things I look out for in these potentially spammy propositions.

Lazy approaches

Similar to when you get generic spam/scam emails about inheriting a million dollars from a prince, some are easy to spot. In the case below they’re barely even trying. And when you look at the account: it was recently created, they haven’t bothered to add a profile image, and they’ve never backed a project.

Simple verdict: ignore.

`Half-arsed pitch via a Kickstarter message`

Gmail

Again, as with regular scam messages look out for senders with email address like sdfd2343@gmail.com. As far as I’m concerned if anyone is offering me professional services they should have a proper email address.

Newsletters

A very common pitch will involve an offer to add your project to a magical list where a large number of perfect backers will see it. Here’s a typical line:

Your campaign will be on the top listing of our website with a customized image and in the newsletter distributed to our super backer members immediately.

It can feel nice to see your project listed on a third-party website, but there are loads of these websites just covered in links to Kickstarter projects. You have to think why would a potential backer go there and not just Kickstarter directly to find projects to back.

Paying to get yourself ‘featured’ on a website no one has ever heard of is unlikely to be fruitful. Especially compared with getting your Kickstarter genuinely featured in an editorial sense.

I won’t even mention the font choice, but another specific warning sign in these messages was the references to my campaign only having a few days left to run. When I received these emails that simply wasn’t true and it was obviously a poor cut-and-paste job.

Other marketing and ad services

Paid marketing is definitely a valid part of a crowdfunding strategy but you need to do your homework. If you’re going to use an agency to run online ads for you then the same logic applies with regard to unsolicited pitches.

This is a particularly important point because of the risks in the way Kickstarter has implemented it’s Collaborators feature.

An obvious thing to do is have a search for independent reviews of these marketing services online. Reddit is a good resource for this - with the usual caveat about taking advice from strangers on the internet.

A personal recommendation is a great way to feel more confident about choosing a partner to work with. Even if you don’t happen to know anyone who’s run a Kickstarter campaign before, have a look at other campaigns that you like the look of and see if they mention marketing collaborators. Drop them a line to ask how they got on with them. You won’t always get a response, but I’ve had many great interactions with fellow Kickstarter creators when I’ve asked them random questions about things.

Ghost backers

I haven’t had personal experience of this one, but have been hearing about recently. It seems that some people will back your campaign with big pledges of a few hundred/thousand dollars or more. Then they’ll get in touch to effectively blackmail you into using their services with the threat of cancelling their pledge.

I suppose they’re trying to play on your loss aversion - the cognitive bias that means we feel more upset when we lose something than when we never had it in the first place. I can see why it might be tempting to prop up your campaign with this kind of bogus funding, but my advice would be to report it to Kickstarter.

The bottom line - be careful, and do your research

It saddens me that I’ve become so sceptical about these things, but unfortunately that seems to be the way of the world.

I’ve definitely paid for Kickstarter ‘marketing’ in the past that has turned out to be a bad investment. But then I’ve also had positive experiences and positive ROIs from paid marketing.

There are so many things to think about when running a Kickstarter campaign so remember to keep your guard up when people come to you with offers that seem too good to be true.