Kickstarter is a wonderful tool for those with great ideas and not enough funding. How to successfully use Kickstarter to fund your ideas, however, can a bit more difficult than it seems.
For those who are unfamiliar of Kickstarter, here’s a quick breakdown.
From the site:
- Kickstarter is a new way to fund creative projects.
- Projects are created independently
- Creators and backers make projects happen together
- Creators keep 100 percent of their work
- The Kickstarter mission is to help bring creative projects to life
Kickstarter allows creative minds to ask for funding from anyone in the world. Since the site’s creation in 2009, nearly 8.9 million people have pledged more than $1.8 billion to fund more than 87,000 projects worldwide.
Step 1: Know your goal
As with any business model, it’s important to know exactly what you want to do before you do it. This is especially true if doing what you want to do requires you to ask for thousands of dollars from strangers on the Internet.
Take, for example, The Dash, which are wireless smart in-ear headphones.
Nikolaj Hviid had a clear goal in mind, and a plan to actualize that goal – all he needed was a way to raise money. By clearly laying out The Dash Headphones to the Kickstarter community, his product was funded 1,200%.
Step 2: Captivate your audience
This step is almost as important as the first. A brilliant idea with a boring Kickstarter video is just as easy to be overlooked as one with no Kickstarter campaign at all. High-quality video and audio quality may be the determining factor in getting your project funded, so dazzle them.
In The Dash’s case, the video includes a high-energy soundtrack with testimonials from athletes.
Step 3: Sell your product
The COOLEST Cooler received the highest funding of all products on Kickstarter in 2014, and it’s not hard to understand why.
Once you’ve laid out your business plan and captivated the audience with high-quality visuals, there is nothing left to do but sell your product. Every Kickstarter video needs a component that makes the viewer realize how much they need your product. If you can do that, you can hook potential funders and supporters.