Global Trends
If you’ve been keeping track of international crowdfunding trends in the past 5 years, it’s hard to miss that Kickstarter consistently ranks as the best overall crowdfunding platform, not least for early stage startups.
It’s popular among creatives, but also ideal for tech and service-based businesses to get their idea off the ground. Kickstarter is advantageous if you want to reap the benefits of a large community and brand recognition for your crowdfunding campaign.
We’ve curated a checklist of vital things to look out for if you want to succeed at reaching your funding goal. The list is by no means comprehensive, but teases out some of the most critical and novel ideas.
- Set up a budget and calendar for all your activities. Your budget, which should also go into your Kickstarter page should reflect your application of funds: Cost of completing the project, cost of fulfilling rewards, legal, PR & marketing, 10 % platform & processing fees, and 30% cushion.
- Research other successful campaigns in your industry vertical and examine their successes / failures.
- Craft a story, video, written content, and enough compelling visuals (pictures, charts, graphs) for your Kickstarter page. Organise all the information to make your story flow and easy to read.
- The first 48 hours on Kickstarter are crucial since this is when the first jolt of backers will pledge money to your campaign, so make sure that in the months leading up to campaign launch you’re ready with a prototype, landing page, and a network of collaborators, freelancers, staff, and most importantly people interested in your product / service.
- Create a community! Collect enough emails from your community to reach them when your campaign launches. Email addresses could come from: Viral giveaways, content upgrades, Facebook ads (lead generators), and personal outreach.
- Send newsletters, updates, keep everyone involved in your progress.
- Generate enough content on all platforms and don’t forget to use ‘read more’ and ‘content upgrade’ hacks to get more emails addresses.
- Assign ‘surrogates’ (friends, family, confidantes) to mirror all your activities and push with individual big-ticket backers. You can’t only rely on viral small contributions to fuel the first wave. Also utilise influencers with a big social network.
- Explore services like Gadget Flow, BackerClub, or Kickbooster to put some more fuel on the fire.
We cannot emphasise how important it is to pursue every success factor simultaneously. Do a lot of research and ask people with experience to audit your work. Livia, who’s in our accelerator program, recently finished a Kickstarter campaign for her startup Era Zero Waste. Take a look to learn more and make a contribution if you want to help transition to a zero waste world. They are setting a blueprint for a truly waste free cosmetics industry.
Get inspired by our startups or found one yourself! We will open up applications in October for the High-Tech SeedLab batch 2021.
Take a look at our website to learn more about our program requirements and contact us if you have any questions: [email protected]
This program is financed by the European Social Fund (ESF), as well as the State of Berlin.