The most dangerous thing a creator can do is compare their project to other projects. Three years ago I was a few weeks into my first tabletop Kickstarter campaign (Viticulture). I had worked my butt off, and much to my surprise and pleasure, the project had almost reached its $25,000 funding goal. Then another tabletop […]
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What does hip surgery have to do with crowdfunding? A friend of mine is a professional organizer. People hire her to come to their homes, assess what they have vs. what they really need, and reorganize everything so it’s more compact, efficient, and easy to find. Recently she was hired by an elderly man who […]
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Recently a fellow creator, Brent Howland, reached out to me about the topic of online advertising. I wrote about the subject way back on Kickstarter Lesson #26, but that was a long time ago, and Brent brought an interesting perspective to the table: His full-time job is in online advertising at Google. I asked Brent […]
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Last week I was in the middle of a teleconference when someone brought up a Kickstarter project. I pulled up Kickstarter, searched for the project, and opened the page. Instantly, loud music blared out of my speakers. Damn autoplay. I paused the video and returned to the teleconference, hoping no one else had heard the disturbance. (Note: […]
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I recently noticed that longtime reader and commenter Mike Strickland had launched a project that he had been working on and carefully planning for a long time. I reached out to Mike to share his insights, and he proceeded to write this great guest post. Thanks Mike! *** Hello! We are Stan and Mike Strickland, […]
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Back in the day, I might have said that there is only one strategy for building backer trust and exposure through third-party reviews: Get as many reviews as possible. But when I look at crowdfunding projects today, I see a broad spectrum of review strategies, all of them with various merits. Today I’ll outline those […]
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[Update 2018: I now only use Shopify. It’s just easier to manage one platform than two.] Shoplocket is no more. Actually, Shoplocket–an e-commerce platform that I lauded in this post–will be dead to everyone as of June 30, 2015. If you used Shoplocket, this isn’t news to you. My heart sank when I heard about […]
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In this series, I highlight some of the interesting choices current crowdfunders have made regarding their project’s reward levels, stretch goals, and overall campaign design (the projects themselves, not the content or product). This isn’t meant as an endorsement of these projects (these creators did not ask for me to promote their work–I disregard all such requests); rather, […]
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This weekend I’ve been gathering feedback for a project I’m somewhat connected to (Morning Players is our European production partner, and they’re launching their first Kickstarter this week). One person mentioned that they were impressed by the shipping for the project. Morning Players operates a Kickstarter fulfillment service called Ideaspatcher that I use and recommend, […]
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True story. A frequent Kickstarter backer (we’ll call her Sally) needed to change her mailing address. So she went from project to project, manually changing it on surveys that enabled address changes and messaging creators on the others. That is, until Kickstarter suspended her account. As they told Sally, “sending the same form letter to multiple creators […]
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