Things I learned running my first successful Kickstarter Campaign

Pre-Kickstarter launch:

Social Media: Start outreaching right away on social media. I found facebook the toughest to outreach so I mainly focused on twitter and instagram. For twitter, I used a find-follow method and started to build an audience that way. For instagram, I found a script online that searches hashtags and likes photos. Both of these strategies will yield a certain amount of followers. They don’t necessarily lead to a high percentage of conversions come launch time but are good for social proof and will be used during your Kickstarter campaign. Pre-KS launch I had 6000 twitter and 4000 instagram followers, for free!

Blogger outreach: This is by far the hardest area to get traction on but you have to do it. Make sure you have plenty samples that you can send out and offer it in the email. The small to mid-size blogs will be more receptive and cost significantly less/free. Most of the larger blogs want you to pay over $2k for a post/review. Start with the specialty blogs that cater to your product. I found some underwear blogs and they gave us the biggest return for the buck. Make sure you budget appropriately and set a goal in line with your budget.

Stress the importance of Day 1:: Send emails to your friends/family and put your pride away. Stress the importance of Day 1 support, even if it’s only at the lowest tier level. That’s where having a $1 backer reward pays off. In retrospect I should have stressed this even earlier but once I did, the support came flowing in.

Kickstarter Campaign

Reaching out to other Kickstarter Creators: This is one of the best ways to get new backers. Once you launch start, reaching out to other successful campaigns and offer to mention them in your updates if they mention you. Also, offer to share it to your large twitter and instagram following (over 10,000 followers!). This is where all the pre-kickstarter work pays off. There will be some really big Kickstarter campaigns that will mention you for this reason and you will see a spike in backers.