This post is part of our online series Crowdfunding Journal which chronicles our open crowdfunding campaign.

Check out our stats through week 3.

This post is part of our online series Crowdfunding Journal which chronicles our open crowdfunding campaign.

As of week 2, and 60% of our funding goal, here are our biggest surprises. Thinking about starting your own campaign, or just a little curious? Read on.

There are no trends; there are only random fluctuations

One thing we thought we’d see is a set of trends and patterns in pledges and other stats. Major publication coverage? We’d expect a spike, and a gradual decline.

Not only are these spikes random half of the time, but there is seemingly no reason why the second to last day shown in the image to the left was our biggest yet since the first two days. Worse, there is seemingly no reason why the following day was our worst funding day, by a wide margin, on a day when we saw more coverage than the day prior. We looked for any pattern: day of the week, holidays, etc., and found none.

Some days we raise hundreds before noon, then mum. Other days, we see nothing until the afternoon, but then it starts pouring in. Some days we see calm yet consistent pledges all day long. Some days we get tons of backers at a very low average pledge, some days we get just a few backers at a very high average pledge.

The lesson here may be to simply not obsess over the stats, the calculations, the trends, and the numbers. There are no trends, we’ve found no patterns – our time is much better spend chatting with our backers, and working on Mail Pilot.

A bug in Amazon’s payment service makes it difficult for some backers outside of the U.S. to pledge

So it turns out there’s a little bug that will lead some backers from outside of the U.S. to believe they are unable to support your campaign. Usually, this is untrue; they can in fact pledge, and there is a workaround for the issue.

We started receiving reports that some of our international fans were not allowed to support us on Kickstarter. After looking in to it, we found out that there is simply a bug and a workaround. More on that here. And, according to Kickstarter’s FAQ, “Anyone, anywhere (with a major credit card) can pledge to Kickstarter projects.”

A New York Times mention didn’t directly result in a ton of backers. A high ranking on Hacker News did.

We were ranked as high as number 3 on Hacker News in our first week, and on that day we saw over $3k in pledges flood in (our biggest day). That same week we were mentioned in David Pogue’s article on Kickstarter in the New York Times, with a link in the online version and a screenshot in the print edition, and saw just over $1k come in (one of our smallest days). That said, we are still simply honored that David Pogue checked out our project and liked it enough to include it in his article, calling Mail Pilot “Ingenious.” Needless to say, we now have quite a few copies of that day’s paper.

People can cancel or reduce their pledges

This freaked us out when we first saw it, because we had definitely did not know about this going into the campaign. Likewise, however, people can increase their pledges. In all, we’ve probably had 10 or so of our first 300 backers adjust their pledge.

You can change and add tiers during the campaign

There’s a limit to the madness, though – if a tier has been selected by at least one backer, all you can do is add a limit to it. That’s pretty big, though, especially if you need to get creative mid-campaign. You can also add tiers, which is something we’re looking at doing to try to entice some of our $5 backers. Finally, you can change everything about a tier that hasn’t been selected. We have one of these: the $5,555 tier. If we come up with a better Kickback, we could actually change this tier, and see if we can entice bigger backers.

Kickstarter’s campaign resources are very useful

Kickstarter provides project creators with plenty to do on the back end of their project. Your project dashboard has all kinds of basic statistic visualizations (we also supplement those with our own, which we will post about soon). If you’re debating which crowd-sourced funding platform to use, we give Kickstarter a huge plus for this.

We’ve gotten 41% funding from Kickstarter referrals

Despite what we’ve read, we have gotten a quarter of our funding from Kickstarter referrals (as opposed to external). Initially, it was close to 5%. As our project gained more momentum, it began to show up on the technology page, and even the discover page from time to time. It gets a huge amount of traction from these pages. For both dollars pledged and number of pledges, the technology page and popular page rank number 2 and 3, respectively.

We debated platforms

$35,000 is a lot of money

Going in to this campaign, we knew asking for $35k would be asking for a lot. It’s the smallest amount of money that could sustain our project, our development, and our team of two for half a year, so we knew we had to do it (to not shortchange our product).

We understood that we would basically need to “go viral” to be successful. Well, one week in, we we placed #3 on Hacker News, we had some of the “big dogs” on Twitter sharing our project with their 10, 20, 60 thousand followers, we’ve made an appearance in the New York Times in David Pogue’s article on Kickstarter, and now we’re starting to see blogs spread our screenshots and our message to their readership. I’d like to say we’ve “gone viral.” However, as I write this, we only have one third of our funding. This is huge to us, something worth celebrating, and we appreciate every penny that our backers have pledged to us in support. This came from huge swings in momentum. But we still have $23k and change to go. $35k is a lot of money.

Twitter is huge

After spending a day on the front page of Hacker News, word of our project hit the twittershpere is a big, big way. Neither Josh nor I had been big Twitter users beforehand. We were simply amazed at the support to come out of Twitter, and at how seriously investors and bloggers take you being tweeted by one of the Twitter heavy-weights. This amazed us. At one point in time, Twitter was the biggest source of funds to our project. We’ve had a ton of great conversations with people on Twitter about Mail Pilot. We even had our first $1k backer come from Twitter (thanks again, you know who you are!).

If you’re starting a campaign, one of our top 3 pieces of advice: do not overlook Twitter. It could make or break your campaign.

International support is huge

We’ve been blogged about in French, Swedish, and Dutch. Thanks to Google Chrome and its auto-detection of different languages, we’ve been able to read the nice things these blogs have said about us! Or, at least, what Chrome is telling us they said. Either way, we’ve been simply flattered, and have seen a number of backers come from these blogs to help support our campaign. We’ve also had a few feature requests for different localizations, which we’re bumping up in our roadmap after seeing the outpouring of support for this request.

Feature requests, comments, and messages, oh my!

It could be someone’s full-time job receiving and responding to all of the comments, feature requests, messages, tweets, and emails that we get. We wish we could respond to each and every person that reaches out to us, but we just haven’t been able to keep up. This was a big surprise – people care far more than whether or not they like your project and want to back you, they want to be a part of the process, they want to be up to speed. This is very cool, and we’ve really enjoyed the ride with our initial backers so far.

 

Thanks for reading, and we hope this has been helpful! If you enjoyed this post, consider subscribing to The Crowdfunding Journal, where we publish even more stats, experiments, and research, and be sure to check out our project page on Kickstarter!

This post is part of our online series Crowdfunding Journal which chronicles our open crowdfunding campaign.

Here’s our stats up to date as of week 2 of our campaign. As a part of our “open campaign” to help future projects, we’ve posted a PDF of them here.

If you want to look at the public-facing stats, you can find them on our Kickstarter page.

This post is part of our online series Crowdfunding Journal which chronicles our open crowdfunding campaign.

Our first week is through, and with one-third of our funding, we’ve experienced a lot in the past week. There were a couple of big surprises along the way, which we will share with you here.

People can cancel or reduce their pledges

This freaked us out when we first saw it, because we had definitely did not know about this going into the campaign. Likewise, however, people can increase their pledges. In all, we’ve probably had 10 or so of our first 300 backers adjust their pledge.

You can change and add tiers during the campaign

There’s a limit to the madness, though – if a tier has been selected by at least one backer, all you can do is add a limit to it. That’s pretty big, though, especially if you need to get creative mid-campaign. You can also add tiers, which is something we’re looking at doing to try to entice some of our $5 backers. Finally, you can change everything about a tier that hasn’t been selected. We have one of these: the $5,555 tier. If we come up with a better Kickback, we could actually change this tier, and see if we can entice bigger backers.

Kickstarter’s campaign resources are very useful

Kickstarter provides project creators with plenty to do on the back end of their project. Your project dashboard has all kinds of basic statistic visualizations (we also supplement those with our own, which we will post about soon). If you’re debating which crowd-sourced funding platform to use, we give Kickstarter a huge plus for this.

We’ve gotten 25% funding from Kickstarter referrals

Despite what we’ve read, we have gotten a quarter of our funding from Kickstarter referrals (as opposed to external). Initially, it was close to 5%. As our project gained more momentum, it began to show up on the technology page, and even the discover page from time to time. It gets a huge amount of traction from these pages.

$35,000 is a lot of money

Going in to this campaign, we knew asking for $35k would be asking for a lot. It’s the smallest amount of money that could sustain our project, our development, and our team of two for half a year, so we knew we had to do it (to not shortchange our product).

We understood that we would basically need to “go viral” to be successful. Well, one week in, we we placed #3 on Hacker News, we had some of the “big dogs” on Twitter sharing our project with their 10, 20, 60 thousand followers, we’ve made an appearance in the New York Times in David Pogue’s article on Kickstarter, and now we’re starting to see blogs spread our screenshots and our message to their readership. I’d like to say we’ve “gone viral.” However, as I write this, we only have one third of our funding. This is huge to us, something worth celebrating, and we appreciate every penny that our backers have pledged to us in support. This came from huge swings in momentum. But we still have $23k and change to go. $35k is a lot of money.

Twitter is huge

After spending a day on the front page of Hacker News, word of our project hit the twittershpere is a big, big way. Neither Josh nor I had been big Twitter users beforehand. We were simply amazed at the support to come out of Twitter, and at how seriously investors and bloggers take you being tweeted by one of the Twitter heavy-weights. This amazed us. At one point in time, Twitter was the biggest source of funds to our project. Since, it has fallen to third or so, but it still puts up huge numbers, and a ton of conversation. We even had our first $1k backer come from Twitter (thanks again, you know who you are!).

If you’re starting a campaign, one of our top 3 pieces of advice: do not overlook Twitter. It could make or break your campaign.

Feature requests, comments, and messages, oh my!

It could be someone’s full-time job receiving and responding to all of the comments, feature requests, messages, tweets, and emails that we get. We wish we could respond to each and every person that reaches out to us, but we just haven’t been able to keep up. This was a big surprise – people care far more than whether or not they like your project and want to back you, they want to be a part of the process, they want to be up to speed. This is very cool, and we’ve really enjoyed the ride with our initial backers so far.

This post is part of our online series Crowdfunding Journal which chronicles our open crowdfunding campaign.

We’ve compiled a ton of statistics in our first week. As a part of our “open campaign” to help future projects, we’ve posted a PDF of them here.

If you want to look at the public-facing stats, you can find them on our Kickstarter page.

This post is part of our online series Crowdfunding Journal which chronicles our open crowd-funding campaign.

Setting your funding goal truly is about what you need for your project and what you can realistically get. We looked in to it, and didn’t find any evidence indicating pledge goals affecting amounts pledged. The other variables of projects are what affects pledges. There’s no need to fear setting a goal that might cause pledges to go stale after it has been passed.

Here’s how we set the funding goal for Mail Pilot:

We are planning on using our raised money to start a business around our product, so our numbers may be higher than other projects. We figured out the bare minimum amount of money we would need to launch our product, and sustain operations for six months. We figured out what we would ideally want, to do the same, and we figured out a comfortable middle ground. Here’s that chart:

	Minimal Costs (6 months)	Middle Ground (6 months )	Ideal Costs (3 months)
Personnel	$9k	$20k	$20k
Added Support	$10k	$20k	$30k
Hosting	$600	$600	$400
Kickbacks	$2.5k	$5k	$10k
Legal	$3.5k	$3.5k	$19k
+20%	$30k	$59k	$93k

 

We added 20% to each total: 5% goes to Kickstarter, 4% to Amazon Payments, and we estimated 11% for taxes. Don’t forget to do this, or to include your kickbacks. Keep in mind that the items that you include as expenditures are different for every project.

This brings our viable minimum to $30k, so that’s what we’ll set our fundraising goal. It’s also nice to know what we’ve budgeted for once we hit $53k and $83k. Of course, if we (hopefully) go past even that, then we’ll have some money to save for the project’s future.

Once you’ve selected this number, you have to figure out if it is realistic. If it is, great. If it’s possible you won’t be able to raise that amount of money, then you may need to re-scope your project.

For our project, we figured $30k should be realistic. It’s going to take a lot of hard marketing and networking once our project goes live on Thursday, but it will be worth it – because we’re building something we love, and something that we hope many others will love too.

Any other tips or thoughts for choosing your goal? Post them in the comments!

This post is part of our online series Crowdfunding Journal which chronicles our open crowdfunding campaign.

The pitch video is crucial: it’s the only thing most people will look at on your Kickstarter page.  Projects without a video are statistically less successful. In this post, we’ll break open some case studies. As we continue to work on our own, we’ll post a part 2 that elaborates on this interesting part of the Kickstarter process.

For our pitch video, we looked to three videos that we admire. Here are those three videos, with takeaways under each. We’re looking to make a more professional looking video (as opposed to some satirical videos we’ve seen), so some of these takeaways may not be relevant to your own analysis.

TikTok+Lunatik

We covered this project in an earlier post.

Takeaways:

• The content should include footage of you doing your craft. You don’t often have a camera rolling the moment you’re getting something brilliant on to paper, so staging what it looks like is probably necessary.
• The content should also include footage of your product. This footage should make the product’s value immediately obvious. With no audio or text, this footage should be able to stand on its own.
• Move the video around. TikTok’s video is a good mix of person, product, and action. You don’t get bored watching it because talking is laid over footage of other things. This makes it more interesting to watch.
• Put painstaking effort in to your script. Too many videos are boring because of the words spoken. Also, when recording yourself speaking about your craft or product, speak with passion and excitement. Too many videos are boring because the creator seems bored him or herself, talking in a soft monotone voice.

The Present

Takeaways:

• The narration was clearly not read from a script. It was conversational and enthusiastic. Instead of reading verbatim from a script, it sounds as though he is explaining the idea to his friend at a bar. This infuses passion in to his tonality; you can tell that he really cares about this project.
• Highly explanatory, identifies something that the audience can connect with.
• The visuals are short clips that are flipped through very quickly. This keeps the audience’s attention.
• It only officially shows the guy at the end, with his name written next to him. There are casual clips of him on the metro, or in the warehouse goofing around. These clips are mixed in while he is talking. It connects the audience to this guy even though we didn’t hear his story, or who he is. Without boring us with any details, he made us want to cheer him on and support him.
• The video ends with a recording of him filling out the Kickstarter project form, and submitting it. We thought this was very cool.

Elevation Dock

• Video is very professional. Classic problem, solution set up. Looks great, and makes a great use of music.
• The intro detailing the problem with current docks is humorous, but it’s still professionally done.  They also don’t use any words or audio to describe this problem, but viewers clearly understand what it is.
• They only talk at the camera for a short time, then dub better audio over clips. This is great because it minimizes the amount of audio recorded with classically bad audio on a video camera.
• Does a side-by-side of the bad product and the elevation dock.

Other notes

• One thing we saw missing from many videos is a very specific call to action. We think that videos should urge viewers to support the project by pledging and also highlight what’s in it for potential backers.

This post is part of our online series Crowdfunding Journal which chronicles our open crowdfunding campaign.

TikTok+LunaTik. It’s the highest funded project ever on Kickstarter. They started with a $15,000 goal. On December 16, 2010, their project ended with a whopping $942,578 pledged. That’s almost a million dollars. What’s in their success? In our research for our own Kickstarter project, we decided to break down everything we could about TikTok+LunaTik’s campaign to figure out what went right.

The Video

TikTok’s video is nuts. Have a look at it. When you watch that video, there’s two primary things you see. First, you see sketches, drawings, and plans. The connects the audience with the creator and his process of design. Second, you see the product. The value of the thing is immediately obvious as an iPod is snapped in to place. It’s very easy to comprehend. Other than that, the video beautiful. It is framed nicely, and it is active.

The Takeaways:

• The content should include footage of you doing your craft. You don’t often have a camera rolling the moment you’re getting something brilliant on to paper, so staging what it looks like is probably necessary.
• The content should also include footage of your product. This footage should make the product’s value immediately obvious. With no audio or text, this footage should be able to stand on its own.
• Move the video around. TikTok’s video is a good mix of person, product, and action. You don’t get bored watching it because talking is laid over footage of other things. This makes it more interesting to watch.
• Put painstaking effort in to your script. Too many videos are boring because of the words spoken. Also, when recording yourself speaking about your craft or product, speak with passion and excitement. Too many videos are boring because the creator seems bored him or herself, talking in a soft monotone voice.

For further inspiration, see Kickstarter’s “Best videos of 2011”

The Network

TikTok’s creator had quite the network going in to the project. He had previously done work for Nike, helped design the Kinect, and worked with other household brands. This network is highly valuable – the more people you can personally get on to your project page that will be interested the better. This is where the momentum begins for any project.

The Takeaways:

• Discover any network connections you have. On Linkedin, you can search by company, and see if you have any third, second, or first degree connections within that company.

Self-Perpetuated Virality

Lastly, their project went viral for no other reason than it went viral. There’s no big advertising campaign or fake home-made video of something crazy. There’s no cats, no drugged toddlers, and no british child named Charlie. The project simply went viral. This was probably a product of the things listed above and other factors. What are your thoughts on their success? Leave them in the comments.

This post is part of our online series Crowdfunding Journal which chronicles our open crowdfunding campaign.

One of the first things we found out, upon researching Kickstarter, was that there are other options. They are not mentioned nearly as much as Kickstarter, and don’t have nearly as much traffic. However, they do exist. And what’s more – they present some perks that Kickstarter doesn’t. We are not yet sure which we are going to pick, but here are our notes on each of the ones that we looked in to. There are some major differences in how these platforms work that could, possibly, affect the outcome of your project.

We originally included PeerBackers and RocketHub, but did not debate them for long because they did not seem as developed as IndieGoGo and Kickstarter. We have still included them in the comparison table, however.

Basics

	Kickstarter	IndieGoGo
Campaign Duration	Max 60 Days	1 – 120 Days
Payment Processor	Amazon Payments	Credit Card PayPal
Focus	Creative	Creative Causes Entrepreneurial Partners
Funding	If successful	Can accept regardless
Platform Fee	5% if successful	4% if successful 9% if unsuccessful but accepted
Additional Payment Fee	3 to 5% (Amazon)	“Around 3%”

	PeerBackers	RocketHub
Campaign Duration	15 – 60 Days	15 – 90 Days
Payment Processor	PayPal	Credit Card PayPal
Focus	Entrepreneurial	Creative
Funding	Can accept regardless of goal	Funds regardless of goal
Platform Fee	5% if successful	4%
Additional Payment Fee	2.9% (PayPal)	4%

Kickstarter

The famous one. The coca-cola of crowd-sourced funding platforms. The benefits are obvious, the drawbacks are interesting. Keep in mind, what is a drawback to us may be a benefit for your campaign, so read through analytically:

Pros

• It’s famous. Kickstarter projects go viral. There’s a lot of people on this website. People have heard of this website.
• They have a lot of resources, like Kickstarter School.

Cons

• Unlike other platforms, Kickstarter has no options for projects being funded if the goal is not reached in time.
• Their target market does not match our own. Kickstarter focuses on creative projects, artists, etc. Our target market is primarily working professionals, entrepreneurs, etc. These don’t line up at all.

IndieGoGo

Not as well known, but it’s still been covered by media. It has a wider focus than Kickstarter (not just creative projects).

Pros

• Has an entrepreneurial section, so part of their market matches our target market
• We can accept the money if we haven’t reached the goal as long as it’s close to the goal and we can still make the kickbacks

Cons

• Not the name-brand “Kickstarter” which may or may not matter. We just wonder if conversations would go differently: “Check out project out on Kickstarter!” “You’re on Kickstarter? No way!” versus “Check out project out on IndieGoGo!” “Huh?”
• Smaller base to draw from versus Kickstarter. This may not be bad, because there’s probably proportionally fewer projects for the audience to look at. But say you got featured, being featured on Kickstarter would bring much more eyes than being featured on IndieGoGo
• Successful projects have lower average raised funds versus Kickstarter

So what do you think? Kickstarter, IndieGoGo, or another?