Kickstarter Tips
Now that my seventh successful Kickstarter is complete, here's some random tips for anyone else who wants to do one:
Launch on a Wednesday around mid-afternoon. When you launch you have about 48 hours of getting pushed harder by Kickstarter, and this is usually the window in which your pre-launch backers will back as well, so you'll get your big initial boost during that window. It'll end around mid-afternnon Friday, which will roll you right into the weekend and payday which will help keep that momentum going a little before you hit the mid-campaign lull.
End the campaign on a Sunday evening. This will make your campaign 32 days, so right in that 30dayish window that works best, but it also buys you one last payday/weekend cycle. It also means the 48 hours left reminder email that Kickstarter sends will go out on Friday evening, when more people are likely to have time to look at your project, and that reminder generally brings in a good chunk of backers as well.
You HAVE to have a pre-launch period to gather interested people before you launch. Don't make it too long, a month at most, but you can't just launch and hope. You need to have some people ready to back right away to help build momentum.
I have personally never noticed a difference in support based on what time of the year I launch.
Kickstarter itself is not going to bring you a ton of backers. I average around 20-30% of my backers supposedly coming from Kickstarter itself, but I think that number skews high because my audience tends to be more savvy about stripping out trackers on links, so for those people it defaults to saying they came from within Kickstarter rather than any of my outside posts.
Make as much of your marketing collateral ahead of time as you can. Every post you think you'll want to make, every graphic, just try and get it all done and planned before you ever launch. You can of course adapt and change and make new things, but the more you have ready to go the better, especially if your project really takes off. I always have a variety of header images ready to go, explainer images, images for the different tiers, images of different reward items, whatever I think might be helpful in explaining the project and getting people interested.
Theme your Kickstarter page to match your product. It creates a nice, cohesive experience that isn't just a wall of text. Kickstarter now lets you assign images as section headers, which is super helpful for this! Using those, or regular header text, will give you a nice menu on the side to help people navigate the page.
Your Kickstarter needs to focus on how your product will benefit your backers, not yourself. Do share some things about yourself, just make sure it is relevant and not the main focus. It's great that this is your dream project, that you put so much effort into it, but your backers need to know how your thing will be good for them more than they need every detail of your own feelings on it. You can always share those things in project updates to draw interest and keep momentum going, but on the main page especially keep it backer focused.
Those are the big things. Just wanted to toss them out there for anyone else who might be thinking about running a Kickstarter.
