146% on Kickstarter: was it easy
Hi, Habr!
In fact, I embellished a little headline: Black Swift scored 161% on Kickstarter for this minute - and he has five more days ahead, so the percentages will increase. We deliberately launched the project for a short period, three weeks, and now with a slight shudder we are looking at projects with a period of up to 60 days, only creeping out at 100% for its end.
And while the memories are fresh, I want to talk about what we did and did not do, whether it was easy or cheap, and so on - I hope this will help other Russian startups who are thinking about crowdfunding.
')
However, I will put something else to draw attention:
These are the first 100 Black Swift car kits in the final (third) design that arrived in Russia the day before yesterday. Since in China from February 4 to February 19 is the New Year, we will collect the next experimental batch here. If everything goes well with her, in March we launch the production of the first full-scale party.
However, I promised about Kickstarter.
First, of course, the traditional question: why in New Zealand dollars? The answer is banal: Kickstarter allows you to withdraw money only to a limited list of countries, Russia is not among them. Traditionally, Russian projects use intermediaries in the United States, but our team was a person living in New Zealand - so there was no need for a mediator. On the one hand, as a result, we don’t have the usual NZD as a currency, on the other hand, there are no losses for the commission to the intermediary and there are no concerns about possible problems with it.
Then, perhaps, I will go with theses.
Do not count on success . The more you get used to the idea that you are making millions now, the less likely you are to make them. People who invest money in you want to see that you can be trusted - and the best way to show them is to work on the product you are leading, because even if Kickstarter does not fly up and there will be no money, you still need to do something . Have a plan "B" (by the way, we had it) and work on it - then people will see that you are really doing something, rather than sitting, sleeping, waiting for the money, as one Korean business manager said .
In general, the ideal option - if you have a clear long-term plan, what do you want to do with your project. Not necessarily drawn on the timeline in Excel, but a general understanding of where you want to go, what steps to go there and what specifically to do. Unless, of course, you really want to do something, and not just make money on crowdfunding and put it all on the far shelf.
Don't go to Kickstarter for the money . It would seem, and for what else to go there? For fame. For partners. For the press. For contacts. No, money is very good, we do not plan to refuse. But if money is all you want from Kickstarter, then you do not understand what you can get from it. A successful start at Kickstarter, during which you explained who you are and why you are needed, gives you fame - and you can now come to potential partners with confidence that you can explain who you are, and some of you will call and write to you. Here, for example, Seeed writes with a proposal to help with the production. Not by automatic mailing - went to the site, found the necessary names, linked them with emails, wrote. We do not need, but nice. There are appeals that are bigger and more pleasant, about which I won’t yet - if we succeed, we’ll tell you.
And, by the way, there is no word “investors” above. To sell an idea or a semifinished product to investors, in my personal conviction, is far from the best idea, despite the numerous hatched incubators and accelerators. You will need an investor when you have a small business with the desire to grow it to a large one - but for now you do not have any. And yes, the investor is not the one who gives you money (if you think otherwise, you are confusing it with the bank), but the one who will help you grow and rebuild this business. Perhaps, by the way, when you get to a more or less sustainable business, you will realize that you simply don’t need help. Again, see above about the long-term plan.
The main thing is the product . The thesis seems to be obvious, but for some reason many start-ups do not reach it, focusing too much on beautiful presentations, working out the techniques of 30-second pitches and on other cargo cults. The product is always primary. Even if you have a multimillion marketing budget. Yes, sometimes it is possible to create in the heads of potential buyers an image that is weakly associated with a real product (as those lovely comrades on Kikstarter did, which, in the wake of all sorts of protest movements around the world, tried to push through the project of a “protected Tor-router”, which brought together many swift as soon as it turned out that they are selling an ordinary Chinese piece of iron), but usually it already borders on fraud, sometimes turning into it. In all other cases - it is necessary to dance on the product, and a bad presentation with a good product gives the best exhaust than vice versa.
I'm not talking about the fact that if you have normal prototypes, the best is a few, then your confidence will be much higher than if you show a great idea, as long as it is embodied on the layout from Chip-and-dip.
Your product is an image in the heads of customers , or, to put it more simply, you should be able to tell about a product so that the buyer understands what it is and, most importantly, why it may be necessary for it. From the moment when the buyer saw the first picture, an image began to form in his head - and your story should turn this process in the right direction. Never rely on "yes everything is clear from the specifications" - with this phrase you just forced the buyer to do a competitive and functional analysis on their own, and since he usually does not want to do this, the result may not please you.
For many small technological teams (from which, in fact, crowdfunding projects grow) tend to bury themselves in the technical details and features of their favorite product. You have to disregard it with all your might - and position the product as if you still really want to sell it, but it has ceased to be your favorite (as a matter of fact, this is a buyer's view, which should form a desire to buy this product). Test on friends and relatives, on friends and Habré - the ideal result would be a story that people listen to until the end, even if they express disagreement with your theses and ideas. They may disagree, but they are already interested - it is an order of magnitude better than if they are simply not interested.
If no matter how you turn around, and in response you get either indifference or the questions “why does it need something?” - you have something wrong with either communication or with the product. The fact of entering Kickstarter will not fix it, but will emphasize.
PR and marketing communications are dancing on the product . Here, I share marketing and marketing communications — the tasks of the first include a lot, including a set of requirements and wishes for the product, and the latter is a marketing division dealing with all issues of conveying information about the finished product to potential buyers.
You have several communication channels to use.
1. Kickstarter itself. Everything is clear enough here, at least theoretically - you need a good text about the product (if you are ready to read something fashionable about landings, funnels and conversion, throw this garbage into waste paper, read better Ogilvy About Advertising). Not "selling", not short, but just normal. If a person is interested in your product - he will read this text in order to learn more, therefore the text must contain what the person may want to know. Promotional messages and invitations either throw out altogether or leave in the first paragraph.
Video - need. Professional video - depends on the product. If you are doing - as we do - a thing for DIY and electronic engineers, and you are still a little startup artist, then professionally shot video is simply not necessary at best, because your audience will be waiting for specifics, and not watch the picture, but at worst, if you overdo it, it will raise questions about whether you are such a small start-up and whether you need money, if you can afford commercials. If you make a mass product underlined, literally consumer electronics - yes, then you need a beautiful video, because your viewer will look first at the picture. Specifications of his concern to a much lesser extent.
Photos are needed, and good photos are easy and inexpensive to make, at least for small objects. Only normal uniform lighting is needed, so I donate two life hacking: a light box from an Ikea laundry basket, which is lit with a light box made of white plastic wall panels with table lamps, on the box of which a 600 Ă— 600 mm ceiling LED lamp is placed on top ( link ; photos for our the pages were made in this miracle of technology). Well, or for 2-3 thousand to buy a Chinese ready-made lightbox and light bulbs. As long as you do not rent large appliances or full-length nude models, you do not need professional photographic equipment and studio rent.
Do not forget about such a communication tool such as comments and FAQ. The latter should be filled either immediately or three or four days after the start of the campaign, if during this time you receive any comments with questions. The presence of the FAQ causes the illusion of dialogue.
And finally - a striking image as the title. Just something that stands out when viewing Kickstar mug diagonally. Entries from the project directory can give you a very good increase in money.
2. Newspapers and magazines . Relations with the press very much depend on what product you have - probably stronger than any other communication channel. The press you should be interesting. As a Russian project, you will definitely be of interest to the Russian press - for example, very noticeable publications about the topic about us were written at the start ( one , two , three ), and not less noticeable and already universal themes - right after we collected 100% ( times ). Moreover, we were shown on TV and called on the radio . All this is completely free, and this is not yet the final: here, for example, the interview in Russian just came out , but very similar to English, for a large and serious site that decided to get a crowd funding column and fumbled for fresh technological projects, so far is standing in line there. Yes, it is very good to have very direct - friendly level - contacts with editors, but contacts are just a way to bring the news about you faster and more directly. Some publications will write and not knowing you in the face (by the way, although all journalists deny it, many of them still read press releases just falling in the mail), some will not write about you until they are convinced that you are interesting. in spite of any degree of acquaintance (see above about those who wrote only after dialing 100% by us).
Then begins an interest in the product - it is determined by the attention of the Western press, for which your fifth column is not a news item. As soon as you publicly announce somewhere that you plan to go to Kickstarter, you will get free advisers, most of whom work on the same training manual - for example, they will tell you right away that you need to familiarize the press with your product in 3 months or more. Throw in the neck. In general, drive into the neck of any advisers who, instead of "we usually do like this" or "I think it might turn out better here," begin a conversation with "you have absolutely everything wrong, I will explain how it should be." The more confident the “expert” tone is, the more likely it is that he is mistaken - because a good expert doubts himself first of all.
By the way, among the adequate advisers who wrote to us there were literally a couple of people, and they were the least categorical and intrusive.
So, the product. Look at it and understand a few things: 1) a news story or article; 2) article or testing; 3) profile site / section or interest in passing. From this growing interaction with the press.
For example, Black Swift is obviously a news item (there’s nothing to write about the article), there’s nothing to test, we’re specialized only for sites that specialize in electronics of this kind, for the rest, some kind of microcomputer. In our case, it would be just silly to start talking about yourself in 3 months - it takes 10-15 minutes for the author to evaluate the material for the news, no more if you start feeding him with it for 3 months - depending on the intensity, he will feed you either forget or add to the black list, because they are fed up. Maximum - you can try in two rounds, choosing different news occasions and maintaining a not too long interval between visits.
The exact opposite - for example, computer games. The chances that you have an insanely good idea that you will like purely from the screenshots, in general, are there, but not very big. Accordingly, you need a beta version, and a journalist needs a free evening to drive into it. If this journalist is not your old friend from the third grade of high school, he may be looking for this evening long enough.
There is also a popular advice to be friends with journalists in advance, to the extent that subscribe to their twitter and violently retweet it. It helps. But only if you have chosen a journalist who will be interested in your topic in principle - because in this way you do not raise the level of interest, you just get a shorter way, which allows your news to be brought to it without fail. Believe me, as a person with a dozen years in the IT press - even knowing your number of my cell phone will not affect whether your topic is interesting to me at all.
And yes, do not offer gifts before they notice you. After - you can. Before - create the feeling that you want to buy a mention, and it is cheap. It is cheap to buy, as a rule, those who do not make sense to buy at all.
What you need to do is create a beautiful picture and headlines for the media. Feel free to buzzwords. For example, we were not noticed by the western relatively universal editions (although the highly specialized ones reacted with vigorous interest) - and I now think that if we immediately made for Black Swift some meaningless expansion card, for example, “the smallest router in the world” or “ 100% compatibility with Arduino, our chances of getting on the cover would have increased dramatically. The publication that writes about your topic in passing is not interesting to understand what you have done there - so it would be nice to save them from this by telling them in terms that they understand. Even if in fact no one needs this smallest router, because no new tasks are compared to a centimeter larger.
3. Blogs and forums . Use necessarily. Your own blogs, especially if you have a decent audience, can bring not only a certain percentage of bakers, but also unexpected support and acquaintances - support from people from the first circle who always, in principle, were relevant to your topic, but did not pay the fact that you do it, special attention, until you began to create about it a lot of interesting noise. Dating is the second round, and there may be something completely unexpected, for example, one of the developers of MIPS architecture. With the corresponding consequences .
Third-party bloggers - attract if you can. Just remember that it makes sense to pay money here only for very top bloggers and their coverage of projects for a very mass market - and this will be expensive, and if you have so much, it is not clear that you forgot Kickstarter. In addition, of course, look at the attendance - to spend time on people who write a post once every two months and collect under one and a half likes, usually there is simply no point. Do not fall for your favorite in the PR departments of KPI "number of publications."
Forums - spud those that somehow relate to your subject matter yourself. Interesting results can bring related forums to you - from there ideas will come that can be shown and told about your product in order to expand the target audience (though, in order to have time to realize something within Kickstarter, it is better to start working on them in advance - if, of course, there is something to show there). Look at the rules, it is not allowed to advertise yourself everywhere. Look at the attendance - if you see that a post published three days ago (not yours yet) with a quite normal title gathered a dozen three views, then spending time on this forum is somehow meaningless. You can, but it will not pay off.
In some forums you will begin to discuss without your participation. If there is something to say and you speak the native language of this forum - come there and speak.
4. Your site . It should be and it should not be a stub - from the point of view of your target audience, it should look like a normal site on which its owners tell visitors what visitors want to see.There is no universal “format that everyone is used to at Kickstarter” - there is a format that your target audience will understand (especially since we have, for example, a third of bakers - they are invested for the first time at Kickstarter).
And yes, some media will want to put the link to the site, and not to Kickstarter. Therefore, a large banner on it can bring you a hundred or two deposits.
5. PR agencies. You will receive many offers of different formats - from complex promotion of crowdfunding projects for three-digit amounts and down to the bottom to posting on Best-Crowdfunding-Websites.com (I do not joke, I have several letters from them) for $ 49. I'll be brief: all in the neck. First, the only real service they provide is sending out a press release to a large database with a very small exhaust (it could somehow cost thirty, but not three hundred the same). Secondly, if a PR agency starts to stress what kind of crowdfunding experts they are - this is a wake-up call, because in general, working with PR in crowdfunding is no different from just working in PR.
A working PR agency is a stable office, as a rule, which appeared long before the word “crowdfunding” and has direct contacts of journalists who understand that they will not send garbage from here. You can work with these agencies, but they prefer to do this, as a rule, under contract and with reputable clients, so if you have money for it - again, what have you forgotten about Kickstarter?
Resources. Actually, the main question is how much it cost and which team we had to hire. If we talk about the actual preparation of Kickstarter and the company's website, then this was done almost entirely by one person and without third-party costs. That is, if the production of samples of the type presented in the examples of use and in the updates is attributed to the usual work on the project, then the Kickstarter output budget goes to zero.
Spoke out Thanks for attention.
PS Oh yes, was it easy. Perhaps yes. If you have an understanding of where and why you are moving, and you are not moving in different directions along this path, then nothing really complicated.
In fact, I embellished a little headline: Black Swift scored 161% on Kickstarter for this minute - and he has five more days ahead, so the percentages will increase. We deliberately launched the project for a short period, three weeks, and now with a slight shudder we are looking at projects with a period of up to 60 days, only creeping out at 100% for its end.
And while the memories are fresh, I want to talk about what we did and did not do, whether it was easy or cheap, and so on - I hope this will help other Russian startups who are thinking about crowdfunding.
')
However, I will put something else to draw attention:
These are the first 100 Black Swift car kits in the final (third) design that arrived in Russia the day before yesterday. Since in China from February 4 to February 19 is the New Year, we will collect the next experimental batch here. If everything goes well with her, in March we launch the production of the first full-scale party.
However, I promised about Kickstarter.
First, of course, the traditional question: why in New Zealand dollars? The answer is banal: Kickstarter allows you to withdraw money only to a limited list of countries, Russia is not among them. Traditionally, Russian projects use intermediaries in the United States, but our team was a person living in New Zealand - so there was no need for a mediator. On the one hand, as a result, we don’t have the usual NZD as a currency, on the other hand, there are no losses for the commission to the intermediary and there are no concerns about possible problems with it.
Then, perhaps, I will go with theses.
Do not count on success . The more you get used to the idea that you are making millions now, the less likely you are to make them. People who invest money in you want to see that you can be trusted - and the best way to show them is to work on the product you are leading, because even if Kickstarter does not fly up and there will be no money, you still need to do something . Have a plan "B" (by the way, we had it) and work on it - then people will see that you are really doing something, rather than sitting, sleeping, waiting for the money, as one Korean business manager said .
In general, the ideal option - if you have a clear long-term plan, what do you want to do with your project. Not necessarily drawn on the timeline in Excel, but a general understanding of where you want to go, what steps to go there and what specifically to do. Unless, of course, you really want to do something, and not just make money on crowdfunding and put it all on the far shelf.
Don't go to Kickstarter for the money . It would seem, and for what else to go there? For fame. For partners. For the press. For contacts. No, money is very good, we do not plan to refuse. But if money is all you want from Kickstarter, then you do not understand what you can get from it. A successful start at Kickstarter, during which you explained who you are and why you are needed, gives you fame - and you can now come to potential partners with confidence that you can explain who you are, and some of you will call and write to you. Here, for example, Seeed writes with a proposal to help with the production. Not by automatic mailing - went to the site, found the necessary names, linked them with emails, wrote. We do not need, but nice. There are appeals that are bigger and more pleasant, about which I won’t yet - if we succeed, we’ll tell you.
And, by the way, there is no word “investors” above. To sell an idea or a semifinished product to investors, in my personal conviction, is far from the best idea, despite the numerous hatched incubators and accelerators. You will need an investor when you have a small business with the desire to grow it to a large one - but for now you do not have any. And yes, the investor is not the one who gives you money (if you think otherwise, you are confusing it with the bank), but the one who will help you grow and rebuild this business. Perhaps, by the way, when you get to a more or less sustainable business, you will realize that you simply don’t need help. Again, see above about the long-term plan.
The main thing is the product . The thesis seems to be obvious, but for some reason many start-ups do not reach it, focusing too much on beautiful presentations, working out the techniques of 30-second pitches and on other cargo cults. The product is always primary. Even if you have a multimillion marketing budget. Yes, sometimes it is possible to create in the heads of potential buyers an image that is weakly associated with a real product (as those lovely comrades on Kikstarter did, which, in the wake of all sorts of protest movements around the world, tried to push through the project of a “protected Tor-router”, which brought together many swift as soon as it turned out that they are selling an ordinary Chinese piece of iron), but usually it already borders on fraud, sometimes turning into it. In all other cases - it is necessary to dance on the product, and a bad presentation with a good product gives the best exhaust than vice versa.
I'm not talking about the fact that if you have normal prototypes, the best is a few, then your confidence will be much higher than if you show a great idea, as long as it is embodied on the layout from Chip-and-dip.
Your product is an image in the heads of customers , or, to put it more simply, you should be able to tell about a product so that the buyer understands what it is and, most importantly, why it may be necessary for it. From the moment when the buyer saw the first picture, an image began to form in his head - and your story should turn this process in the right direction. Never rely on "yes everything is clear from the specifications" - with this phrase you just forced the buyer to do a competitive and functional analysis on their own, and since he usually does not want to do this, the result may not please you.
For many small technological teams (from which, in fact, crowdfunding projects grow) tend to bury themselves in the technical details and features of their favorite product. You have to disregard it with all your might - and position the product as if you still really want to sell it, but it has ceased to be your favorite (as a matter of fact, this is a buyer's view, which should form a desire to buy this product). Test on friends and relatives, on friends and Habré - the ideal result would be a story that people listen to until the end, even if they express disagreement with your theses and ideas. They may disagree, but they are already interested - it is an order of magnitude better than if they are simply not interested.
If no matter how you turn around, and in response you get either indifference or the questions “why does it need something?” - you have something wrong with either communication or with the product. The fact of entering Kickstarter will not fix it, but will emphasize.
PR and marketing communications are dancing on the product . Here, I share marketing and marketing communications — the tasks of the first include a lot, including a set of requirements and wishes for the product, and the latter is a marketing division dealing with all issues of conveying information about the finished product to potential buyers.
You have several communication channels to use.
1. Kickstarter itself. Everything is clear enough here, at least theoretically - you need a good text about the product (if you are ready to read something fashionable about landings, funnels and conversion, throw this garbage into waste paper, read better Ogilvy About Advertising). Not "selling", not short, but just normal. If a person is interested in your product - he will read this text in order to learn more, therefore the text must contain what the person may want to know. Promotional messages and invitations either throw out altogether or leave in the first paragraph.
Video - need. Professional video - depends on the product. If you are doing - as we do - a thing for DIY and electronic engineers, and you are still a little startup artist, then professionally shot video is simply not necessary at best, because your audience will be waiting for specifics, and not watch the picture, but at worst, if you overdo it, it will raise questions about whether you are such a small start-up and whether you need money, if you can afford commercials. If you make a mass product underlined, literally consumer electronics - yes, then you need a beautiful video, because your viewer will look first at the picture. Specifications of his concern to a much lesser extent.
Photos are needed, and good photos are easy and inexpensive to make, at least for small objects. Only normal uniform lighting is needed, so I donate two life hacking: a light box from an Ikea laundry basket, which is lit with a light box made of white plastic wall panels with table lamps, on the box of which a 600 Ă— 600 mm ceiling LED lamp is placed on top ( link ; photos for our the pages were made in this miracle of technology). Well, or for 2-3 thousand to buy a Chinese ready-made lightbox and light bulbs. As long as you do not rent large appliances or full-length nude models, you do not need professional photographic equipment and studio rent.
Do not forget about such a communication tool such as comments and FAQ. The latter should be filled either immediately or three or four days after the start of the campaign, if during this time you receive any comments with questions. The presence of the FAQ causes the illusion of dialogue.
And finally - a striking image as the title. Just something that stands out when viewing Kickstar mug diagonally. Entries from the project directory can give you a very good increase in money.
2. Newspapers and magazines . Relations with the press very much depend on what product you have - probably stronger than any other communication channel. The press you should be interesting. As a Russian project, you will definitely be of interest to the Russian press - for example, very noticeable publications about the topic about us were written at the start ( one , two , three ), and not less noticeable and already universal themes - right after we collected 100% ( times ). Moreover, we were shown on TV and called on the radio . All this is completely free, and this is not yet the final: here, for example, the interview in Russian just came out , but very similar to English, for a large and serious site that decided to get a crowd funding column and fumbled for fresh technological projects, so far is standing in line there. Yes, it is very good to have very direct - friendly level - contacts with editors, but contacts are just a way to bring the news about you faster and more directly. Some publications will write and not knowing you in the face (by the way, although all journalists deny it, many of them still read press releases just falling in the mail), some will not write about you until they are convinced that you are interesting. in spite of any degree of acquaintance (see above about those who wrote only after dialing 100% by us).
Then begins an interest in the product - it is determined by the attention of the Western press, for which your fifth column is not a news item. As soon as you publicly announce somewhere that you plan to go to Kickstarter, you will get free advisers, most of whom work on the same training manual - for example, they will tell you right away that you need to familiarize the press with your product in 3 months or more. Throw in the neck. In general, drive into the neck of any advisers who, instead of "we usually do like this" or "I think it might turn out better here," begin a conversation with "you have absolutely everything wrong, I will explain how it should be." The more confident the “expert” tone is, the more likely it is that he is mistaken - because a good expert doubts himself first of all.
By the way, among the adequate advisers who wrote to us there were literally a couple of people, and they were the least categorical and intrusive.
So, the product. Look at it and understand a few things: 1) a news story or article; 2) article or testing; 3) profile site / section or interest in passing. From this growing interaction with the press.
For example, Black Swift is obviously a news item (there’s nothing to write about the article), there’s nothing to test, we’re specialized only for sites that specialize in electronics of this kind, for the rest, some kind of microcomputer. In our case, it would be just silly to start talking about yourself in 3 months - it takes 10-15 minutes for the author to evaluate the material for the news, no more if you start feeding him with it for 3 months - depending on the intensity, he will feed you either forget or add to the black list, because they are fed up. Maximum - you can try in two rounds, choosing different news occasions and maintaining a not too long interval between visits.
The exact opposite - for example, computer games. The chances that you have an insanely good idea that you will like purely from the screenshots, in general, are there, but not very big. Accordingly, you need a beta version, and a journalist needs a free evening to drive into it. If this journalist is not your old friend from the third grade of high school, he may be looking for this evening long enough.
There is also a popular advice to be friends with journalists in advance, to the extent that subscribe to their twitter and violently retweet it. It helps. But only if you have chosen a journalist who will be interested in your topic in principle - because in this way you do not raise the level of interest, you just get a shorter way, which allows your news to be brought to it without fail. Believe me, as a person with a dozen years in the IT press - even knowing your number of my cell phone will not affect whether your topic is interesting to me at all.
And yes, do not offer gifts before they notice you. After - you can. Before - create the feeling that you want to buy a mention, and it is cheap. It is cheap to buy, as a rule, those who do not make sense to buy at all.
What you need to do is create a beautiful picture and headlines for the media. Feel free to buzzwords. For example, we were not noticed by the western relatively universal editions (although the highly specialized ones reacted with vigorous interest) - and I now think that if we immediately made for Black Swift some meaningless expansion card, for example, “the smallest router in the world” or “ 100% compatibility with Arduino, our chances of getting on the cover would have increased dramatically. The publication that writes about your topic in passing is not interesting to understand what you have done there - so it would be nice to save them from this by telling them in terms that they understand. Even if in fact no one needs this smallest router, because no new tasks are compared to a centimeter larger.
3. Blogs and forums . Use necessarily. Your own blogs, especially if you have a decent audience, can bring not only a certain percentage of bakers, but also unexpected support and acquaintances - support from people from the first circle who always, in principle, were relevant to your topic, but did not pay the fact that you do it, special attention, until you began to create about it a lot of interesting noise. Dating is the second round, and there may be something completely unexpected, for example, one of the developers of MIPS architecture. With the corresponding consequences .
Third-party bloggers - attract if you can. Just remember that it makes sense to pay money here only for very top bloggers and their coverage of projects for a very mass market - and this will be expensive, and if you have so much, it is not clear that you forgot Kickstarter. In addition, of course, look at the attendance - to spend time on people who write a post once every two months and collect under one and a half likes, usually there is simply no point. Do not fall for your favorite in the PR departments of KPI "number of publications."
Forums - spud those that somehow relate to your subject matter yourself. Interesting results can bring related forums to you - from there ideas will come that can be shown and told about your product in order to expand the target audience (though, in order to have time to realize something within Kickstarter, it is better to start working on them in advance - if, of course, there is something to show there). Look at the rules, it is not allowed to advertise yourself everywhere. Look at the attendance - if you see that a post published three days ago (not yours yet) with a quite normal title gathered a dozen three views, then spending time on this forum is somehow meaningless. You can, but it will not pay off.
In some forums you will begin to discuss without your participation. If there is something to say and you speak the native language of this forum - come there and speak.
4. Your site . It should be and it should not be a stub - from the point of view of your target audience, it should look like a normal site on which its owners tell visitors what visitors want to see.There is no universal “format that everyone is used to at Kickstarter” - there is a format that your target audience will understand (especially since we have, for example, a third of bakers - they are invested for the first time at Kickstarter).
And yes, some media will want to put the link to the site, and not to Kickstarter. Therefore, a large banner on it can bring you a hundred or two deposits.
5. PR agencies. You will receive many offers of different formats - from complex promotion of crowdfunding projects for three-digit amounts and down to the bottom to posting on Best-Crowdfunding-Websites.com (I do not joke, I have several letters from them) for $ 49. I'll be brief: all in the neck. First, the only real service they provide is sending out a press release to a large database with a very small exhaust (it could somehow cost thirty, but not three hundred the same). Secondly, if a PR agency starts to stress what kind of crowdfunding experts they are - this is a wake-up call, because in general, working with PR in crowdfunding is no different from just working in PR.
A working PR agency is a stable office, as a rule, which appeared long before the word “crowdfunding” and has direct contacts of journalists who understand that they will not send garbage from here. You can work with these agencies, but they prefer to do this, as a rule, under contract and with reputable clients, so if you have money for it - again, what have you forgotten about Kickstarter?
Resources. Actually, the main question is how much it cost and which team we had to hire. If we talk about the actual preparation of Kickstarter and the company's website, then this was done almost entirely by one person and without third-party costs. That is, if the production of samples of the type presented in the examples of use and in the updates is attributed to the usual work on the project, then the Kickstarter output budget goes to zero.
Spoke out Thanks for attention.
PS Oh yes, was it easy. Perhaps yes. If you have an understanding of where and why you are moving, and you are not moving in different directions along this path, then nothing really complicated.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/250399/
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