12 Things You Shouldn’t Forget Before Launching Your Kickstarter.

13 Oct

So you have an idea for a product and you’re planning on crowdfunding it.

You’ve done all the product development work and are getting ready for your Kickstarter launch.

There are so many things to think about when getting ready to launch, it’s important to make sure you’ve covered everything.

With a Kickstarter campaign there’s a lot of emphasis on getting a strong start. Most of the hard work needs to happen before the campaign, so once you launch, in many ways, your fate is already sealed. That pressure to make sure everything is perfectly ready can tempt you into delaying and delaying the launch. You can always have more project followers, more people on your mailing list, and more contacts for PR and marketing.

But at some point you have to launch.

The List

I’ve now successfully funded ten of my own Kickstarter campaigns and helped with many others, but I still find launch day nerve-wracking!

It’s good to know that once you’ve gone live though, there are plenty of things you can still change. Knowing this can take some pressure off launch day.

Here’s what you can and can’t change once your project is live, in Kickstarter’s own words:

The following can be edited while the project is live:

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Project category
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Project title and description
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Project video and image
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New rewards, including add-ons, or rewards without backers (be sure to check Our Rules to see if you need approval first)

Rewards quantity (this can be increased but not decreased)

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Project FAQs
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Kickstarter profile bio
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The following cannot be edited after the project has launched:

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Funding goal
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Project deadline
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Reward tiers and add-ons that have already been selected by a backer (only the image can be edited)

Information in the Payment tab, including your bank account and verified identity

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Kickstarter profile name
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For obvious reasons, my list below has an emphasis on those things that you can’t change after launch. There are plenty of other things you should make sure you do before launch though, including many things outside of the Kickstarter platform.

Here’s my list of all the critical things I make sure I’ve done before hitting that launch button.

Funding goal

I’ll start with this big one. It goes without saying that your funding goal is something you need to think long and hard about. As it says above, you can’t change this once the project is live.

It’s a bigger subject than I can cover here so I’ll probably write a full post on this another time.

A good piece of quick advice when it comes to your funding goal: think through how you’d feel, and what would happen, if you hit 85%, 100%, 150%, or 1,000% of your goal.

Project page content

This is also probably worth a future post, but the short story is that you can still change almost anything after this point, certainly everything from a content and editorial point of view.

Having great content on your project page is obviously critical. Make sure you’re telling a compelling story. Make sure you have great photos, graphics, GIFs and videos. Re-read, re-read, re-read again (out loud), share with friends.

But don’t overstress about this. For a start, pretty much no one will read your whole project page. A lot of people won’t even get to the end of your 90 second video. And remember that you can make tweaks and amendments once your campaign is live.

Ideally you wouldn’t want to make massive changes like creating a new video, but if you decide halfway through the campaign that something’s not working, then you can change it. Your project will likely be live for a month or so, and that’s quite a lot of time.

Rewards

This is a critical one. Although you can easily change a typo in your project story once the project is live, once a single backer chooses a particular reward, you can’t change the details of that reward. If you’ve got your reward pricing or shipping costs wrong, that can cause big problems for you.

All I can say here is that this is spreadsheet time. Once you have all your costs - manufacturing, shipping, Kickstarter fees, marketing, taxes, everything else - you need to be happy that the numbers are going to work for you.

Plug in what will happen if you get enough backers to hit 100%, 150%, 1,000% of your goal. You’ll have to make assumptions about which rewards backers will choose, and maybe which countries backers are from, but you need to think it all through.

Arguably, the worst result at the end of a Kickstarter campaign is that you only just hit 100%. In this scenario will you have enough money to fulfil all the rewards?

Or on the flip side, what happens if you reach 1,000% of your goal? Depending on the type of product you’re making that might just mean your unit costs come down and it’s an amazing outcome. But could it also get you in trouble if you have to make way more products than you were expecting? Do you need to limit available reward quantities to mitigate that risk?

Of all the things that I check before pressing the launch button, reward pricing is the one that keeps me up at night.

Remember though, in the worst-case scenario you can always cancel and restart your project if you made a massive mistake in your financial calculations, but you don’t want to have to do that.

Project followers

You might hear people giving advice such as: don’t launch until you have 1,000 project followers. Or an even more complicated formula about percentages of funding total and cost of your rewards.

This does point to the fact that it’s critical to get potential backers lined up and aware of your campaign before launch, but there’s no magic number here. As a rough estimate you can perhaps assume 10% of your followers will back you when your project launches. If that happens, how far towards your funding goal will that get you?

You know what they say about assumptions though, so be careful. Not all followers are equal. I’d rather have one follower who’s a personal friend or a backer from one of my previous projects, than ten project followers I bought on TikTok.

Get ahead of the game

Those are some of the non-negotiable things that you must do before you press that launch button. There are also lots of other things you can do to get ahead of the game and make your launch more comfortable.

Here are some quick-fire things to do:

Make sure your list of contacts is tidy and up to date. This can include anyone from friends and family through to online forums or journalists and bloggers
Pre-write message copy for telling those people on your list about your project.
Prepare a press kit.
Get your referral tags set up and ready. You can use these to track the effectiveness of your various communication and marketing targets.
If you have the time and inclination, add Google Analytics to your project.
Line up some photos, videos and words for social media posts throughout the campaign
If you have a company or personal website, get everything ready so that you can link from there to your project once it’s live.
Similarly, get ready to update your profiles and headline info on any social media sites you use.

Ready to Launch?

There’s definitely a hell of a lot you need to think about when running a Kickstarter campaign. In this post I haven’t even mentioned the fact that you actually have to come up with a product idea in the first place and a plan to make it!

Kickstarter launch day is a big deal. It’s the single focal point that all your hard work has been leading up to.

It shouldn’t be a day of panic and fear though. By remembering the things on this list, hopefully you’ll feel more relaxed and confident about hitting that launch button. Good luck!