One weird trick for a successful kickstarter project

Here is our big Kickstarter advice and lessons post! I am writing this for two reasons: (1) We get a lot of email requests for Kickstarter advice, so I am writing this piece to have one big article to link to when we get those messages, and (2) I did a lot of research and work on the Kickstarter, and I want to write down the things I learned, because then it feels DOUBLE WORTH IT. This post may not apply to the general Doubleclicks follower, but perhaps some of you are talented musicians and comedians and authors in the early stages of Kickstarter madness and are desperately seeking advice because you feel so alone and stupid and lost—I remember this feeling well. Maybe we can help!For those who don't know us: We are a band called the Doubleclicks, and in February of this year we raised $80,000 on Kickstarter to make an album (and thanks for stretch goal insanity, a lot of other things as well.) You can see our Kickstarter project here. Yes, it went very well. People ask us if we were surprised or overwhelmed by the response. We weren't, really—mostly we are THANKFUL. We are SO VERY INCREDIBLY ENDLESSLY THANKFUL to the people who supported the project, who make it possible for us to pursue music full-time and work on things we're passionate about. The reception that our fans gave the campaign was amazing and gave us lots of wonderful good feelings. I don't really know what made people so generous toward us, but I try not to think about it too hard. Mostly we just try to work to deserve the support our amazing listeners give us. We worked real hard and were prepared for the campaign in the abstract, with numbers and plans and orders and timelines, so we weren't too overwhelmed by the numbers when they happened. But the feeling of "Wow, people want to support us pursuing our dream"—that was something that we couldn't really prepare for. People are awesome sometimes.

HERE IS THE ONE TRICK FOR A SUCCESSFUL KICKSTARTER PROJECT:

In our experience: If there was one simple thing you could do to guarantee a successful kickstarter—one weird tip for huge success—it's this: spend three to five years working on your band every day, releasing three albums and two EPs with more than 70 songs, creating vlogs blogs and photos, and networking with your audience both on and off the Internet. Plan tours and play concerts in two dozen states and two countries, and grow a mailing list with thousands of addresses.Our Kickstarter referral numbers (click for data) confirm that most of our backers came from our network, from people who already knew about us, or from word-of-mouth contact with members of our network. The system works! Just use that totally simple trick!Yeah!Yes... I'm being snarky. But we really did get a lot of messages during the kickstarter asking "why is your project successful [and why isn't mine]?". Well, buddy—it has very little to do with Kickstarter and everything to do with All The Other Work we've done since 2009 (plus, our audience is amazing).... but if that one weird trick doesn't work for you, keep reading, we have lots more lessons to share. They may apply even if you aren't the Doubleclicks!

MORE WEIRD TRICKS AND ADVICE IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER

- BE SCARED: If it seems easy, you're doing it wrong.  In my experience, if you are doing Kickstarter "right," you should have nightmare-inducing spreadsheets, and you should be having (figurative) heart attacks over every sentence on your project description and video. Once the project launches, you should always be thinking about your next update, and you should be too scared to sleep. (Yes, I'm a very fun person.) Nice people are giving you their money and faith, and you are solely responsible for taking that money and making something GREAT with it. By now a lot of people have heard the horror stories of the teams who, after Kickstarting a successful project, ending up wayyyy in the red or with years upon years of unexpected work. It is way too easy to fall into this trap—and we nearly did. Thankfully, we did enough work and got enough advice before we launched to find and account for the black-hole-of-horror-and-mistakes BEFORE launching. Mostly.- SETTING THE GOAL: Your goal should be realistic. Sure, we want to buy a van and make a video game and film a webseries starring Colin Firth—but we can't raise enough money to do those projects. To figure out how much money we thought we could realistically raise, we looked at the Kickstarters of bands and groups with audiences of a similar size to us. We looked at people who were more popular, and we did math to see what percentage of their fanbase we have, and thus what percentage of their Kickstarter goal we thought we could raise. This actually turned out to be pretty accurate.We had around 10,000 beautiful followers when our project launched (that's combined among all social media), and just over 1,900 amazing people donated to our Kickstarter. Math!Some people say you should have enough of an engaged network to raise 20% of your goal in the first day. I think this is the BARE MINIMUM. You should know how many people you can reach, and you should warn them that you are going to launch a project, and you should be ready to have an AMAZING first day. We reached our goal in 4 hours—and I know that's not possible for everyone. But our "goal" ($18,000) was just a portion of the "real goal" ($50,000, the amount at which Aubrey got to quit her job). Reaching your stated goal on the first day is an awesome way to gain momentum and press—people want to back a project that looks like it's going to succeed.- THE PROJECT AND PROJECT DESCRIPTION: Once we had a prediction of what amount of money we thought we could raise, we figured out how to fit our project into that budget. (More on the math coming up.) But in addition to being realistic, your project needs to be important, exciting, and easy to understand.Spend some time thinking about these questions:  "Why are you making THIS PROJECT, and WHY NOW? And why should people give you their money?" I read an article that suggested those questions and at first, I didn't really understand the "why NOW" question—but it actually sparked some really good discussion and made us think about and frame our project in a better way. In another way, that could be phrased: "why is this project important NOW in your career" or "why is it important/funny/novel NOW in the current social climate"?Once you know the answers to these questions, write 1-2 paragraphs that VERY CLEARLY explain your project in a way that makes sense to fans, to your mom, to reporters, and to people who have NEVER heard of you. This description goes at the beginning of your video (keep your video to 3 minutes) and the top of your Kickstarter page.Once we sat down and thought about it, we decided that our main reason behind creating our project was this:  we wanted to make more of a thing (videos) that we enjoy making & are proud of, but that thing does not independently create money the way other things (albums, commissions) do. Thankfully, our amazing beautiful backers got excited about the same thing we were excited about. The ability to explain all of the "whys," both to yourself and to your backers, is a really important part of this honest communication.Our album was well on its way to being finished before our Kickstarter launched. I am very glad this was the case, because once the Kickstarter started, I had very little time to actually work on the album, both during and right after the project funded. In retrospect, I would have had even more of the work done before launching.- STRETCH GOALS: there are a lot of different philosophies on stretch goals. Ours was this: we could safely create our product with the base goal ($18,000). If that happened early, we would use the momentum of the project to fund more things that would benefit us and everyone who backed.We didn't post our stretch goals until we met our goal—we had done the math and prep on them, but we weren't assuming we'd raise this amount. This "don't count your chickens" method made us feel prudent and wise, PLUS: it gave us the chance to change the order and amount of the goals based on the feedback we got on what our beautiful backers liked, wanted and how quickly they were donating.We were warned to not sign ourselves up for too much work with the stretch goals. We did sign ourselves up for a lot of work anyway, because Kickstarter momentum makes you do crazy things—but I'm glad we'd been warned against even crazier promises.A tip from Storm of Paul & Storm: Don't keep your stretch goals under your hat for *too* long, especially if you really want to reach them. If people don't see a big upcoming stretch goal, they have no fire under their butt to give NOW or keep sharing. There's a delicate balance here between seeming out-of-touch/ambitious and asking too little—but keep both sides in mind.Also, please put your stretch goals at the top of your Kickstarter page... don't make people scroll or search if they are coming back to check in on your project.Here's a question we were sent on Twitter:

@TheDoubleclicks What types of stretch goals are a trap?— Logan Bonner (@loganbonner) October 20, 2014

Great question. Here are stretch goals that are traps:

• goals that increase your workload: more money doesn't make you work faster. More money doesn't move your deadline back. You are going to think this doesn't apply to you. You are going to forget this. Try not to. This includes:
  • "we will make another album" (WHY DOES THIS SEEM LIKE A GOOD IDEA)
  • "we will learn a new skill and produce something using that skill"
  • we will add something complex and personal to EVERY ORDER
• goals involving other people: getting more people involved means MORE WORK for you, not less. Think about this when planning stretch goals. We decided to add a coloring book as a stretch goal thinking "this is something where all the work is done by our artist friends, not us." That is not true. Because if you're a good collaborator, that means you are a project manager—and that involves a lot of work in creating clear communication (clear communication means less work for everyone), in paying people on time, and so on... don't add people onto your project thinking it will reduce your work load.
• goals that reduce the profit margin on your product more than the quantity increases it. MATH IT UP.
• goals that involve your project stretching far into the future. if possible, make your project something that can be all done and tied up in 6-8 months, so you can move on to the next thing (you can always launch another kickstarter for the next project!). It's hard to take a break when you still have Kickstarter work to do, paid for by your eager vigilant generous fans, and you should probably take a break at least once a year so you don't kill your sister. We have some goals and rewards that aren't done yet. They aren't scheduled to be done yet, everything is on track—but it still feels super weird to be taking a week off when there is still WORK TO DO. I'd recommend trying to avoid this situation.

- REWARDS: Know your audience. Set prices based on other successful projects as well as on your audience's opinions—ask them what they like! Remember you can charge more for things than you would in a "store" because your beautiful amazing wonderful backers are investing in you and buying into the experience of watching the product get funded. Plus, your margins are crazy—a portion goes to Kickstarter, to taxes, to Amazon, to your artist, to postage and shipping materials—give yourself some ROOM. You NEED IT.A lot of our most exciting rewards were things that we didn't think of: a fan offered to hand-make some hats, another designed a plush toy, and yet another offered to customize cat keyboards for those who wanted them. When this happened, we tried to write up clear agreements and set deadlines so everyone was on the same page about budget and timeline.Pricing rewards was hard. Don't undervalue your time. Possibly practice making your "custom rewards" so you can see how long it REALLY takes you to do ____(record a cover song, draw a picture, plan a private house show).My favorite reward, in retrospect, was actually a late addition: we commissioned a button design exclusive for the Kickstarter, and any backer who ordered any sort of physical reward got a button. Now when we tour or play at conventions, backers can wear their Kickstarter buttons, which is an awesome shortcut to recognizing them,  and we can thank them to their faces.Another fun reward was "game night"—where backers got to play D&D with us.There is no built-in system to manage "add-on rewards" in Kickstarter. We used a system called BackerKit. Figure out how you're going to do this before you launch.We used "Endicia" to print postage at home and they are great, even for international packages. Only one of our packages was returned to us, and that was because we forgot to address it :3- DO THE ANNOYING MATH WORK: Before launch, we made a spreadsheet where I can enter the number of backers at every level and see the math. It shows me how much total money the KS makes, how much we're going to lose for shipping (both in postage and buying envelopes), how much amazon and kickstarter will take, and how much money we will be in the green or red. It includes all the non-negotiable costs ($10,000 for production, $2,000 for making the CDs—no matter how many are ordered, $4,000 for a music video, etc). The spreadsheet includes costs for making shirts (assuming that everyone orders the most expensive shirt), for shipping cat keyboards (assuming people need them shipped to england)—all of the worst-case scenarios. Once we made this spreadsheet, we realized that there were some possible combinations of rewards that would leave us in the red, and we increased our goal. Some of our rewards had a really low profit margin, especially if purchased at a small quantity or a really high one (for example: if only 200 people order a physical CD, that order is still at least $1200. If 2,000 people order albums, they each cost less than $2 to produce. If 2,001 people order the album, everything is terrible again.) This spreadsheet was an eye-opener. We adjusted a lot of costs, and our goal, once we put this spreadsheet together, and we kept an eye on it and updated with new backer counts, throughout the project.- MAKE A TIMELINE: figure out when you need to order your products in order to fulfill them on time. Get quotes and timelines from all your vendors before launching—and build in some wiggle room. We got a quote on dice, and were told they would take 6 weeks to produce. However, we had to double our order—and when we did that, the production time went from 6 weeks to 10 weeks. I'm really glad we stayed in touch with them about this—we ended up ordering the dice before the KS funded in order to have them arrive on time.- TAXES: This is second-hand information: but DON'T launch a Kickstarter in November. You have to pay taxes on everything you don't spend, and if you get your money in December, you don't have enough time to spend the money and write it off. Our Kickstarter launched in February and we still set aside 30-40% of the goal aside for taxes, assuming the government will take that away.- STEAL: A lot of the best choices we made were based on ideas we stole from others and from successful projects—both from their choices and from questions we asked them.Go look at successful Kickstarters and see how the formatting makes the projects easy to understand. Paul and Storm's page was super helpful to us, as was Joseph Scrimshaw's—plus we also asked them for help and they gave us lots of tips.Before you launch, you should send your page preview link to SMART PEOPLE and PEOPLE WHO HAVE BEEN SUCCESSFUL on kickstarter before, for feedback, and allow yourself time to make their suggested changes. You don't need to ask your aunts or all your facebook friends to give feedback your page—they don't know what they're talking about, they will just critique you because they feel like they need to, and this will make you depressed.- DURATION AND COUNTDOWN: the excitement from Kickstarter comes from a limited time window. A shorter time window is more exciting. There is going to be a lull in the middle. Long story short: make your project last 30 days OR LESS. Not more. Also, pay attention to when your Kickstarter ends: you may want to make it on a day and time where people can excitedly watch the countdown with you. (these tips come from Joseph Scrimshaw). We had a google hangout for the last hour of the campaign to hang out with our beautiful engaged fans. It was really, really fun.Another note on the last day of your Kickstarter: once your project is over, you CANNOT modify the front page. We went into edit mode a few minutes before the countdown ended and put a paragraph at the top thanking people for the project and linking to our website and newsletter for people to follow along after the project ended.- COLLABORATE FOR THE RIGHT REASONS: Get artists & collaborators involved for the right reasons: because their involvement will enrich the experience of YOUR beautiful backers, not because you think the big name will bring in strangers who don't know anything about you. A little more on this, because it's an awkward thing that happens sometimes you should be aware of: we are asked to be a part of other people's kickstarters sometimes. Sometimes for free, sometimes for pay. Some of these projects are made by people who like our work and think that our involvement will enrich the experience for their backers: and that is a GOOD reason to involve us. SOMETIMES, THOUGH, what these people are really asking is: "Will you promote my project to your fans and make them all back my project just because you are involved?" Don't do that. That is awkward and weird, especially when you're asking us to do work you don't actually care about.- GET YOUR BACKERS INVOLVED: Kickstarter isn't a simple transaction—it's about INVOLVEMENT from top to bottom. (Fortunately, our audience is a bunch of nerds, and they are really good at being involved.) You need to engage with your audience directly and give them REASONS that they want to both support you and tell their friends about you. That involvement is why people are kickstarting instead of just buying a CD at a show like a normal person. You should post updates at least every couple days, with actual information, with behind the scenes photos, with questions and previews. It is really weird to me when people message us asking for help on their project, and they haven't posted a single update two or three weeks in. Don't ask for help if you aren't helping yourself!!- NEW NEWS: make plans for updates and announcements so that you can tweet every day about your project without being redundant. "We added a new reward!" "we added a stretch goal" "we MET a stretch goal" "this artist is now involved" " a demo of a new song is in today's update!" "what do you think of tote bags?" DO WORK and show the work! It's your month to shine! For the last few days of the Kickstarter, we made a GIF for every thousand dollars the project raised—a way to celebrate and something to tweet about!Side note: we tweeted about our project A LOT, but our follower count actually went up during the project. I think that people want to see you valuing your project and being excited about the Kickstarter more than they are annoyed by your tweets—that being said, having NEW NEWS (instead of the same old tweet) helped us feel less annoying.- PROMOTE BEFORE ASKING FOR HELP: Nothing annoys me more than a message asking to promote a Kickstarter before a project creator has promoted it themselves in EVERY POSSIBLE WAY. There should be a link to your Kickstarter EVERYWHERE. If you are asking other people to take up their space to promote you, you should be SHAMELESS. Places the link should be: front page of your website. your page's facebook cover image. your personal facebook cover image. twitter bio. pinned tweet. google+ page. a recent youtube video. e-mail signature. EVERYWHERE.- DO THE ANNOYING SHIPPING RESEARCH: Here's a project that seems like way too much work and you'll think you can skip: make a sample package of EVERY reward level, put it in the envelope you're going to mail it in, weigh it, and calculate the postage to the US, Canada, New Zealand, England and everywhere else you might send it. (This tip comes from Paul of Paul & Storm). We spent over $3,000 on shipping—not including packing supplies.- KICKSTARTER NETWORKING: I'm not 100% sure how important this is, but it certainly makes you look cool on the page: we connected Kickstarter to Facebook and "friended" a lot of people—it's something we hadn't done before, though we had backed a lot of projects. The Kickstarter friends system is pretty cool, actually, plus, Kickstarter "friends" are notified when their friends launch or back a project. According to our numbers, something like 25% of our backers came from sources within Kickstarter. Doesn't hurt.

KICKSTARTER FOR THE NON-FAMOUS

When we launched our Kickstarter, we already had an engaged audience and a social media network interested in our music. This may not be the case for your project. At PAX East, our dear friend Kevin Cole put together a panel called "Kickstarter for the non-famous" and we asked him to give some advice here, based on his fantastic $12,000 Kickstarter Project Maiden, about how to Kickstart without a pre-existing network:

If you are not famous, have no fan base, and have no body of work with which to establish your credibility, you can still have a successful crowdfunding adventure. You're just playing on hard mode. If you have no friends, you're playing on impossible.

Involve your friends at every step of the crowdfunding process, especially friends who aren't afraid to tell you when a thing you have made is dumb. These are the best friends. Friends can also give you that essential first week push of funding that gets you noticed by nice media people. Have friends who are credible, they will (often at their own risk) add their credibility to yours.

I could go on and on about how having a diverse and supportive friend network is crucial to everything in life but I think you get it.

But just in case you don't, over 20% of my project was funded just by friends I met in college. Friends. Have them.

Do Kickstarter. Indiegogo is great for little (<$500) projects or larger projects that don't fit within Kickstarter's strict guidelines. It's the strictness of Kickstarter that scares most first time crowdfunders away, but it's the strictness of Kickstarter that adds credibility to your project. If you are unknown you are fighting the credibility fight.

Crowdfunding, like every system ever constructed, is prone to abuse. Kickstarter doesn't get it right all the time, but they're constantly and loudly fighting against abuse.

Make peace with the fact you won't get rich. Sorry. Downer.

For real though, do this for good reasons. Crowdfund because you have a great idea for a thing and you want that thing to be in the world and the only thing standing between you and that thing is money.

There's no strategy for becoming an overnight Kickstarter billionaire sensation. You can, however, be an earnest creator with an idea that can make the world a little bit better. That's just slightly more possible.

Money is a thing. Let's talk about it.

Get your goal as low as you can get it before starting. How much do you need to eat? What if you ate only ramen? How's your relationship with your parents? See if your room's still the scrap room. Can you quit drinking? Of course not. Make any change you can possibly make to your lifestyle to get your goal lower.

The lower your goal the more likely you are to succeed.

Sometimes this means you have to kick someone off the project. This is sad. If it's that or no project, you have to make the choice.

Contact media folk but not through Twitter. People tend to hate or ignore that for whatever reason. Send nice, clean personalized emails to bloggers and journos and other people who do what you do. Most will not respond, but the ones that do will be enthusiastic. Local writers are often receptive.

Make a video. Make that video 3 minutes long. If you can't make a full trailer read a scene over some still images. You can talk about the project at the end but lead with a taste of the final product. Nothing turns potential backers away faster than the expectation to see a cool video game and instead watching a sweaty nerd say into a $10 mic, "Hi, my name's Kevin Cole, and here's the detailed lore of my very important video game. Money plz."

Finally, Make your backers feel involved. Some backers are genuinely interested in your project, some are backing you for the status (for real), some just think you seem like a cool person. All of these people want to be involved with you and your project. You are a cool kid living a crowdfunded lifestyle, let people hang with you. Make your backers feel welcome and special. This is double true after you succeed.

To review: friends equals good, shipping equals bad, do it for love, you're gonna be poor but so is everyone. Good luck!

Thanks, Kevin Cole! You are the smartest! (Follow Kevin on twitter).

IN CONCLUSION:

To everyone who has asked us for "tips and tricks and general advice" for a successful project:  That's a hard question—clearly, my answer is way too long. You don't just decide that you want a kickstarter, do 3 weeks of work making a great project page, and then launch and fund. It's a lot more complex than that—there is a lot of work to do in organizing your project, and a lot of mistakes you can make. This is the hardest part for me when people ask us for advice: usually they don't ask for help until they've already launched their project and it's not going too well. Hopefully this post showed the importance of that pre-launch work.And of course, there's the other side: if you're someone who's already read a million articles like this—at some point you have to stop worrying and take the plunge. When this happens, just be ready to learn from your own inevitable unforeseeable mistakes. They're going to happen. It's ok.There isn't one weird trick or one simple road map for success on Kickstarter. Ours went well because we are over-prepared, because we have super great fans and friends and family—and because we had a clear idea of a project we were passionate about. There are a lot of ways and reasons you can do something well. Just do lots, and lots, and lots of work.We are so so so thankful for our kickstarter. Our backers gave us a year of funding for a whole bunch of really personal, really fun projects. Our backers have been unusually kind, patient, supportive and interested. They are generous and great. We love them.Best of luck!In the comments below, feel free to leave questions about Kickstarter (there are obviously many things I did not address here, I know)—and I'll try to respond. OR let me know other topics you'd be interested in reading a blog post about, if you're interested in reading more? These are fun for me. Thanks for reading!

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The Doubleclicks are made possible by support from their listeners. If you'd like to support, please consider buying an album or some songs for the price of "pay-what-you-want" on Bandcamp.