10 Lessons from a Failed Kickstarter Campaign (and how to learn from our mistakes)
The Ultimate Guide to Improving Your Kickstarter Campaign
The tech industry talks A LOT about failure. If failing is cool, we just hit the jackpot. A pile of cool-points. In reality, failing is painful. It sucks. Underperforming isn’t fun nor something I’m proud of. Launching our Kickstarter took major time, energy, and investment from our team, our friends, and the broader community. Failing is not cool.
Fortunately, learning is a silver lining. My reflections have produced helpful insights. Instead of calling it a waste and moving on, I’m applying this experience to the next steps of the project. By sharing, I’m forced to refine my understanding and hopefully others won’t repeat our mistakes.
Before diving in, here is some context:
- I’ve been a self taught software engineer and business owner for almost a decade.
- For years, my coauthor and I have mentored and coached early stage developers.
- We are publishing a book for Code School students and graduates.
- Our intention is to help more people transition successfully into their first tech career.
- Our Kickstarter goal was $10,000 to help us fund the editing and first edition.
- On April 13, 2021, our Kickstarter campaign closed at 30% of our goal.
As we move forward with pre-orders, we summarized 10 lessons from our failed Kickstarter campaign. This is not a definitive list of to-dos. Think of it as the steps we skipped or underinvested in.
Hindsight is 20/20 but the changes and insights below could have been the difference between where we ended and success.
Make sure your project is right for Kickstarter
There were three of us on the launch team. Over the course of weeks we worked to refine the campaign page. In the process, we took for granted one BIG detail… you have to have a Kickstarter account to back a project.
As campaign contributor, we were not allowed to back our own campaign, nor were we able to see (without signing out) that Kickstarter does not have a “guest pledge”. About half way into our campaign we realized people were clicking on our project but not converting. After chatting with a few friends, I heard multiple times, “I have had the browser tab open for days. I wanted to input my card but stopped at the registration page.”
The graphic above is page views. The problem? Conversion.
Most of my friends eventually created accounts and pledged, but I doubt the average backer was as committed. Given our primary audience was students, specifically ones new to tech, it was unlikely they arrived to our campaign with an account.
Projects like board games and electronics have a much stronger presence on Kickstarter. I imagine they’d pull in more ‘frequent fliers’, poised to convert without as much headache. As we launched our site for pre-orders, we worked hard to keep the effort very low.
Fractional Effort leads to Fractional Results
My coauthor, Tim Whitacre, and I both have day full-time jobs and busy family lives. This created natural friction with launching a campaign. The evidence is clear, 30-day campaigns are highly effective. What they don’t tell however, is the intensity it creates when juggling competing priorities.
‘Focus will set you free’ is our mantra at work this year. The inverse is also true. Clearly we could have been more discerning when biting off this commitment. Fractional effort often leads to fractional results, as seen in our campaign.
Focus will set you free!
Generally, I’m a huge fan of side projects. They are a great way to learn new skills and stay inspired. I am not discounting that. I believe campaigns can be successful, even amidst life’s distractions and limited time, but it is even more reason to be thoughtful and thorough.
If you can’t throw full-time effort toward making your campaign a success, you are at a disadvantage. You should work to find an edge in another area.
Ask for Help
We are raving fans of Kickstarter’s support team. They helped us with multiple rounds of feedback, suggestions, and even named us a “Project we love”. We also had friends and supporters who promoted to their networks and showering us with support. Some were hyperactive, while others were more casual. It all helped.
Why? We asked.
When trying something for the first time, asking for help is the fastest way to accelerate understanding and avoid blindspots. Along with the Kickstarter team, we had roughly 100 friends across the industry providing feedback on the campaign, the book, and the content we shared.
We set out to engage people in three categories: code school graduates, teachers/mentors, and diverse industry leadership. Looking back over the campaign, we should have done more. Instead of diving deeper into our three categories, I would have gone a little broader to lock-in more perspectives on marketing, PR, online communities, and book promotion. We leaned heavily into known groups, but there were experience gaps we should have been working to close.
Point Online Profiles Toward Campaign
I heard from many campaign backers that something unrelated brought them to my profile (on LinkedIn, Twitter, etc). From there, they heard about the project and clicked-through to learn more. After making the connection, I was kicking myself for days. We were more than a week into our 30 days before I started tweaking my profiles. First step, make the campaign links and call to action more prominent.
Not only did I change my profiles late, I didn’t go all in on banner images, profile photo, and bio. Worst mistake, never asking our launch team do the same.
Three EASY improvements:
- I could have done it before launch. Of course.
- I could have made sure our launch team did it too.
- I could have asked other supporters to do it as well.
A Kickstarter campaign is ‘victory by a thousand wins’. It’s unlikely that a single strategy will get someone over their goal, but every small improvement counts. Checkout the pledge summary below. Few sources brought in massive funds, but the sheer number of locations added up.
Even a few more pledges from each referrer could have been the difference between success and failure.
Experiment and Test Your Assumptions, Early
Every piece of writing, image, and video will perform differently across each channel. During our pre-launch phase, a ‘Coming Soon’ page was running in place of our official Kickstarter profile. We should have been experimenting with which assets people found most compelling. Without a live page, I was reluctant to drive traffic because the initial email signup isn’t very inspiring. The detail I overlooked: It only matters if people click the original content.
One variation didn’t drive clicks. Who cares if the underlying page is weak if people never click through to see it?!
Images are a great example of something testable. People respond to imagery. If your imagery is good, it helps make the sale. Given many Kickstarters occur before there is something real to photograph, this can be tough. We sourced realistic imagery from Creative Market and Unsplash, then put our Photoshop skills to the test. See two images we had below. Too late into our campaign, we tested which image performed better with ads.
Can you guess which one?
Even with a few dollars of advertising spend, you can start to see which audience and content resonates. In the end, we never got into a rhythm with LinkedIn ads (the most expensive). Made some progress with Facebook. And nailed Twitter pretty quick, getting access to high clickthrough at a low cost. Unfortunately, we only had 2 days left in the campaign by the time we realized it.
We should have gone a little broader too. Reddit, Stack Overflow, and Meetup could have been great sources of prospective backers for our project. Each has paid and unpaid options for putting our message in front of the right people.
Apply Consistent Pressure
There is a taco restaurant near my house. Every day, there is a line that stretches out the door and down the block. While surrounding storefronts aren’t unique, the line is hard to miss, even when driving by. The activity attracts more attention.
Momentum requires movement. We should have tried to make a splash EVERY day. Of course time and focus are in limited supply, but a meaningful push every day for 30 days wouldn’t have been impossible.
Activity attracts more attention!
Things we tried:
- Webinar on “A Day in the Life of a Developer” (69 signups)
- Webinar on “Hacking the Interview Process” (50 signups)
- Release key content (table of contents, preface, etc)
- Sharing live updates (like cover design and layout)
- Including and mentioning friends who contributed
- Highlighting someone who embodies who your product is for (for us, Code School student) a week
Other ideas:
- Announce foreword writer.
- Giveaways with stuff our audience likes.
- Announce Brand Partnerships.
- Share individual Q/A video with each author.
- Testimonials from each adaptors/backers of the campaign.
- Live AMA with authors.
- Share snapshots from the project.
- Actual Project progress updates.
People want to join things that seems vibrant and energetic. There is a skill to doing this well. Having thought ahead, we could have tapped a few specialists in PR and marketing to create a jam packed schedule.
Make the Ask, Often
Imagine relationships like a target. You’re at the center (bullseye). The next ring is those closest to you to family or dear friends. With each move outward, your influence and proximity weakens. Those on the outermost ring may cross paths with you, but require significant exposure or persuasion.
The effort moving between rings is not linear. It is not ‘just a little more difficult’ to engage those further out. The further from center, the increase in effort is massive.
My coauthor and I aren’t particularly pushy people. We default to patience and respect to close deals. Crowdfunding campaigns are not persistence hunting… it’s a mad dash. The frequency and intensity of our “ask” decreased over the lifecycle of the campaign. It should have increased.
Checkout this message directly from the Kickstarter team near the end of our campaign. We reached out for help and urgency was their main suggestion.
“If you build it, they will come” is incorrect. You must remind people early and often that you exist, this is a real need, and it’s going away soon.
Swing for the Fences
Most money in fundraising comes from a small number of supporters. There is a concept called Pareto Principle which says 80% of your results comes from 20% of your effort. Similarly, 80% of funding also comes from 20% of your audience.
At New Story, the housing nonprofit where Tim and I work, it’s even more stark. 85% of our funding comes from 5% of donors. Most of our attention comes from a few key relationships. Every contribution matters, for sure, but some move the needle much faster.
My gold standard was Austen Allred. His work with Lambda School has made him quite popular among our target audience. To my credit, I reached out via email, LinkedIn, and Twitter. I sent messages, personalized videos, and shared early access to our content. Nothing came of it. My mistake? Not finding more heavy hitters like Austen. Of course, my tactics could have been refined, but I also put all my ‘influencer eggs’ in one metaphorical basket.
(P.S., Austen, I’m still holding out hope this reaches you.)
Another big ask we should have announced sooner: Branded Books. As part of our distribution strategy, we are shooting for bigger, more direct deals with Code Schools. Because our book is focused toward Code School students, the schools that provide the coding education are natural partners. Instead of merely leaning into Code Schools, Bootcamps, and coding programs as “marketing partners”, we created a Branded Book package. Custom, branded copies of the book.
The market is filled with examples of people selling a massive number of similarly priced products. The more common path however, is using varied pricing and special offerings to increase the value to certain groups.
Our intention is to provide targeted, custom offerings that would increase the value to companies while allowing us to sell hundreds of books at a time. We sold bundles since the beginning, but the offer wasn’t unique. The Branded Book had the desired impact. Conversations are underway with a handful of organizations about cobranding the book, but more complex deals take longer. It is well underway, but the sales cycle was our downfall. Planning a larger, custom offering pre-launch would have given us the head start needed to close the deal in time. Instead, they are closing after the campaign has ended. It’s still a win, but it didn’t count toward our Kickstarter goal.
Arrange Press
This was sloppy. We had zero press coverage. Nothing arranged before and nothing during the campaign.
I knew better. I had front row seats to New Story’s largest launch ever: 3D home printing. That launch was epic. Our YouTube video alone had 4,000,000+ views. Our rollout of 3D home printing was incredible, bringing in over 1 billion impressions across all channels and publications.
That’s right, billion. At the time, we had a PR team of one: Sarah Lee. Sarah did a lot of things right, and the largest was hyping up press. She worked it early and often. We had a great press kit too. It was easy to share and promote. She event built connections with individuals at organizations from Verge to Architectural Digest and Fast Company.
In reflection, I’m not sure why I skimped here. I didn’t even consult with Sarah, which would have been a simple ask. I wrote an article years ago, extolling her work on that project, yet managed to flop hard.
The power of press cannot be ignored or underestimated. Even communities as niche as Code Schools have sources that love to cover their work. It’s one of the primary investments that could have delivered outsized returns for the project.
Of course, this project was nowhere near the magnitude or impressiveness of a machine that prints an entire house, but even a fraction of the attention would have been more than enough.
Kickfinisher, not Kickstarter
I’ve heard Seth Godin, the popular author and marketing guru, mention this many times: Kickstarter is incorrectly named. It should be called Kickfinisher. It unlikely the best place to find or build an audience. Instead, it’s a great place to leverage your existing audience to ‘finish’ a series of promotional events.
We used it to announce our project. Before preorders or advertising, we used our Kickstarter campaign as our initial touchpoint. Having felt the ebb and flow of an active campaign, it seems like it would have worked better at the ‘back of the line’, not the beginning.
Instead of using Kickstarter to ignite the hype-cycle, we would have been better served to use it to add fuel to something already in motion. Of course, we have been working on the project and thinking about it for months but we only gave the public a slight head start.
Conclusion
Launching a Kickstarter isn’t simple. There are many moving parts and hundreds of details to get right. For our first campaign, it’s no surprise our experience paled in comparison to the mountain of work and investment required. Plus, the campaign is a subset of the larger project: Writing a book.
We are moving onward. Our failed Kickstarter is behind us. Attention is split between finishing the project and pre-selling the actual book. That’s right, though Kickstarter is closed, the book is available for purchase.
We hope you’ll learn from our mistakes. And if you’re in the tech space or curious, see where Code School Book goes from here.
