Crafting a Perfect Crowdfunding Campaign, Chapter 1

An Introduction to Crowdfunding

Crowdfunding really took off a few years ago. When Kickstarter first appeared in 2009, it heralded a new age of investment. No longer did creative, capable people need to seek corporate investment to succeed; they could bring their product directly to the consumers in a process that both validated demand and generated profit without any explicit risk to the creators or investors. Crowdfunding is brilliant, because it proves the viability of a product and guarantees a short preorder monopoly for the creator.

Kickstarter’s success prompted an uprising of imitators and the resurgence of old rivals. The most famous is IndieGoGo, founded in 2008, which provides roughly the same services as Kickstarter. IndieGoGo has adapted their rules over the years to be more lenient, rather than more stringent as Kickstarter opted to do. This led to IndieGoGo’s reputation as a refuge for projects which don’t feel they’re prestigious enough for Kickstarter.

This is great news for you, the hopefully-crowdfunded startup owner! In this climate, any day could be the lucky day where you slide in under that low bar and make it big. In the make-or-break world of crowdfunding, you need to know how to stand out, take charge, and turn a profit without breaking a sweat. That’s where I come in.

In this comprehensive guide, I’ll cover every element of the ideal crowdfunding campaign for a typical consumer product. Whether it’s hosted on Kickstarter, IndieGoGo, GoFundMe, or a private website, the techniques discussed here are universal.

Part 1: The Product

Inventing a real product that solves a real problem is hard. In the era of the app store, mankind has found a pretty neat solution to just about everything. The daily problems which may have plagued the layperson 50 years ago are a distant memory, and we have reach a point where most things are cheap and effective enough that there isn’t much of a driving force to improve the solutions.

I have some excellent news, though. Crowdfunded products don’t need to be new inventions or ideas! In fact, many of the most successful campaigns in Kickstarter’s history were for veritable clones of existing products, often sold at the same price or higher. The Coolest Cooler, for instance, was pitched as a visibly poor-quality plastic cooler with an unbelievable (literally, unbelievable) number of features. Although it provided no apparent value and combined several products which had no place being tethered to each other, it raised a clean $13 million. The appeal of crowdfunding for many backers is not to own a new product, or to get a product cheaper and sooner, but rather to be “part of something big”. This special group of backers will henceforth be referred to as “rubes”. This guide attempts to paint a clear picture of the standard rube, and will show beyond a reasonable doubt why they are the single most important part of your constituency.

But back to the product. It doesn’t need to be something new or inventive or useful. The key to a successful product is to design a solution and find the problem it solves later. This line of thought avoids the awkward situation where you find that the problem you set out to solve has already been addressed by a better product. A helpful brainstorming game to play with your business partner is something I like to call “Exquisite Crowdfunder”. The rules are simple.

1. Player 1 takes a slip of paper, and out of sight of player 2, he or she writes down an exciting and industry-savvy adjective (see list below)
2. The paper is folded so as to cover the adjective but leave space for another word
3. Player 2 takes the paper, and in the remaining space writes the name of a common, mundane item.
4. The paper is unfolded, revealing a fresh and totally unpredictable new product idea
5. Up to 2 more players may be added, responsible for adding leading and trailing qualifiers to the title

This wonderful little game takes all the guesswork (and most of the work) out of product design. It even generates a concise campaign title in the process with the 4-player variant!

From here, it is up to you to flesh out the idea. Go wild with it. The key to brainstorming is to let everything flow. There are no wrong answers, so you should probably just stop at the firs thing you come up with. What is “The Original Smart Breadbox, Version 2.0”? I see it as a bread storage device with classic styling and a built-in tablet that keeps track of your bread loaves’ expiration dates, but someone else might want interpret it in a totally different way. This is why there are four players – to generate 4 times as many ideas.

Part 2: The Pitch

Often considered the most important asset a startup can have, the elevator pitch is a 30 second summary of your invention, your business, and yourself. Campaign-runners need to condense this even further into something that reads just as well in a 140 character tweet as it does in paragraph form. Just like the product itself, it is important to grab the first pitch that sounds reasonable and run with it. This being crowdfunding and not venture capitalism, you can leave out the business plan and the autobiography. People care about what you can promise, not what qualifies you to promise it.

The pitch begins with a problem statement. Since you already have a product, it is now the time to decide what problem it solves. To generate another example, let’s try this out for “the world’s first cloud-enabled paring knife”. Try to envision the struggles of your life before the DataKnife VX. Understand that while this product may not yet exist, and you may not have a clear idea of the function it performs, your job as a startup owner is to develop this idea. Using first-person language can help get the vision flowing. Let’s try some examples.

• I found myself wishing that the power of the cloud could be combined with the rustic simplicity of the common paring knife. That’s why I invented the DataKnife VX.
• Before The Cloud enhanced my paring knife, I was cutting and cleaning strawberries at only 32% efficiency. Now I can do it 100% efficiently and without any of the fatigue!
• I used to need a separate paring knife for each room in my house, but with the DataKnife VX, this single blade always knows where and when I’ll need it most.

I’m particularly fond of the last pitch, so let’s try that out. We are going to pitch a new kind of knife that tracks your movements and navigates itself to the places you are most likely to be during the day. The campaign must make this promise clearly and directly, but need not get bogged down in the details of “how” or “why”. Crowdfunding is, at its core, a platform for wonderful products that the straight-laced corporate world refuses to fund. As a wise man once said,

“Genius is often poorly understood, therefore all who are poorly understood are geniuses.”

The DataKnife VX campaign will propose a solution to the age old problem of losing knives, and finding them unavailable at the worst times. Make sure you can craft your problem statement as a question to ask potential backers. This will be important in the next section. Try starting with the phrase “have you ever…” or “how many times have you…”. For instance “How many times have you needed your paring knife, only to find that it’s suddenly disappeared?”

If you find that your pitch fits this format, and the response is an affirmative word or a positive number, you are ready to move on to part 3: Video Design. This step is a large undertaking, so be sure you’re physically, mentally and emotionally prepared.

If you found this first chapter useful, please donate to my Patreon page or consider supporting my latest Kickstarter campaign.