61. The Truth About Crowdfunding on Kickstarter.. Hype vs. Reality Artwork

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61. The Truth About Crowdfunding on Kickstarter.. Hype vs. Reality

May 19, 2025 • Marcus and Grant • Season 2 • Episode 11

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What if I told you the truth about crowdfunding on Kickstarter? How about I go into the hype versus the reality of these campaigns? What if I was able to tell you what most creators get wrong and. What if I was to give you the Kickstarter playbook that actually works? Will stick around, because that's coming in part three. But first we need to get some things clear. part one hype versus reality. We've all seen these 3000, 5000, 10,000, percent funded Kickstarter projects. And yes, it's glamorous. And you're looking at this creator who has this simple widget, and they've raised half $1 million and you're thinking, oh my gosh, you don't even have to go into business, man. You're already rich. Well, there's a lot to discuss about that campaign. What I can tell you right now, before we get started is that funding event. That successful campaign was a highly orchestrated and expensive endeavor There's two types of people who approach Kickstarter. Okay. There's new creators, new inventors like us who don't have a lot of graphic art experience. Photography, product development, haven't really tested our product in the market. We kind of just garage or bedroom inventors starting from scratch. And then there's the other half, already functioning companies who are using Kickstarter as a great template. And playground to test their product and get preorders. When these big companies have the option to bring a new product to market, I can tell you right now they don't have the money for it upfront. Any money that they have, it's going into salaries, the owner's pockets, or back into their products that they know we're making money. So how do they validate a product? Well, you open it for preorders. Preorders don't take it from me. They get kind of sticky. Customers get frustrated when they purchase something on your website, and they thought it was going to ship to them in three days. And they missed all the many, many signs that you gave them that it was a preorder. Right? So it gets sticky and it kind of sucks. So what these companies do is they use Kickstarter as a playground, and Kickstarter inherently has some algorithms built into it that bigger companies with a lot of experience in the heavy marketing campaign, they know how to capitalize on. Okay, so if you guys ever seen that little badge called projects We love, well, it doesn't have anything to do with sustainability. It doesn't have anything to do with ergonomic design or health conscious. None of those factors. Projects we love our projects that make money. So let's focus on these big companies in these projects. We love these well-funded campaigns okay. So what these companies are doing is they're essentially treating Kickstarter like Amazon. Look closely at these projects that are 3000 plus percent funded. They will have dozens, if not hundreds, almost of bullet points and pictures about the product, life style, photos, professional photos, photos of the product as, as. And it puts the viewer or the would be backer in the mindset of yes, I can see myself having this product soon. When you and I approach a Kickstarter, we approach it giving backers the impression that we're a gamble. these big companies, they're treating it like any standard platform. They're treating their customer with a lot of respect. They're giving the product a lot of dignity, and they're going to make big conversions. Now, on the other half of that is they've probably built out an email list for months, if not half a year in advance. And this can be done with a Facebook meta campaign where they're collecting emails at 1 to $3 in email. Right. So they're building up emails. They're an existing company with existing clients, so they already have emails that they can leverage that way to drive more people to the Kickstarter. Then they're going to drive a bunch of traffic to over fund the project on day one. Why do they do that? It gains algorithmic traction. Kickstarter starts to take notice. Now, what some people will do is they'll bring on an outside marketing firm, and anybody who's run a Kickstarter knows there's plenty of outside marketing. Snakes in the grass on Kickstarter ready to take your money? Well, those only work if you're really well funded in that first 24 hours. Why? Because bad ideas don't accelerate when you throw money at them. Any ops person will tell you you don't throw money at a bad operation. And if your project is not getting funded, if you're not reaching people or through your channels, your social media, what have you, then you're not going to get that that acceleration, that traction. So there's basically 4 or 5 main agencies that will partner with backers. And they have a lot of different differences. There's agencies like gel pop okay. They're the type of agency who sees that your campaign is getting well funded in the first 24 hours, maybe 48 hours, and then they let you apply, or they'll probably approach you to accelerate what is already working. Now, why do they do that? Because it's a guaranteed nut for them. They see that you're already overfunded. They know you're going to hit your mark. They're going to charge you anywhere from 10 to 20, 30% fees for their services. And then they're going to ask you to inject ad spend through their channels, and they're going to send your project to different, tech blogs, tech magazines, websites, you name it. They're basically going to excel, create what is already working. And that can be I mean, it works, but eventually we're going to start talking about what the real margin is on these fully funded projects. Right. So Joe Pop is going to take what is already working. Say, hey, we're going to we're going to run all your ads, we're going to blah, blah, blah. So just give us $5,000 to play within ad spend and then also give us 30% of everything you make off the campaign. People say, great, these big companies, maybe they don't care. They're just testing the market. Maybe it's just a break. Even for them. what do they got to lose? They want to see will the product move when they really invest in the manufacturing and really invest in distribution? There's other agencies like kick booster and backer kit. There they all operate in slightly different ways. Some it's kind of like building a fire. Some of them will tell you to gather all the sticks and set it on fire. Some of them will gather all the sticks and set it on fire and then walk away. Some of them will gather the sticks, set it on fire and stoke it and take care of it throughout the process. But you're going to pay for all the tender, loving care that you get. So do I think any of them are good for a first time inventors? No. Now, if you've listened to the show a lot and you've followed all of our e-commerce tips, product image, tips, placement copy, so like me. For example, I would venture to say that I could launch a Kickstarter now, finally, that could get 100% funded in the first 24 hours. If you set a modest funding goal, let's say I really want to make $10,000. I'll set the funding goal like $1,200. That way I'm 100% funded maybe in the first 12 hours because I'm going to email my 17,000 subscribers. And at that point, Kickstarter is going to notice and they're going to bump you up in the listing just like Amazon, Walmart.com. They're always going to favor the people, making them the most money because Kickstarter takes, I believe it's a 5% commission on the transaction So maybe now I could set a Kickstarter campaign that could get well funded in the first 24 hours, albeit undervalued from what I really want. And then gain that natural Kickstarter algorithmic traction towards bumping me up. And I'm getting more new, fresh eyeballs on my product. Now that's free marketing for my product. But again, that doesn't come easy. That doesn't come from snapping some photos off my cell phone vertically in the garage, writing a three part description and posting it on Kickstarter, and then getting in the Reddit forums and asking people to back the project. No, targeted event. It is an orchestrated event, and you have to be 100% ready for it. So that's the hype versus the reality. So at the end of the day, is it even worth it? Yes. If you are that inventor who doesn't have all those assets that time, that money, you can still run a Kickstarter. Just know your audience. If you only have 300 friends on Facebook, if you only network with a dozen people outside of your normal circles, if you only, have a Bible study group of 12 people that it really have your back. Consider how many of them might actually pull out their wallet for you. It's probably somewhere in the range of like 10% of those people. And then just do some simple math. Odds are, most creators like us, it would be pretty tough to gain more than $3,000 off of a Kickstarter. That's kind of a that'd be kind of a leap right now.$900 Kickstarter, $1,200 Kickstarters. That could be very, very possible. And even if you don't quite hit the goal, maybe you can make up the difference yourself. Should you quit if your Kickstarter campaign doesn't go? Abso fruitlessly. Not a kid like. Look, let me tell you a quick story. When I was launching Talk Strap, my product, I told my mother, she said, do you want me to help you fund? I said, no, I don't want you to help me fund it. I'm just going to put it on there and see what happens if it doesn't get funded for the $3,200. Oh, no, I should just quit. And she goes, what are you talking about? You got to market yourself. You got to sell, sell, sell. And I didn't have that mindset yet. But she was absolutely right. You have to sell, sell, sell. I don't care how popular you are, how publicized you are. Anyone who launches a new product is going to go out there and shout it from the mountaintops. Why do you think Apple puts, you know, $15 million into a launch of a new cell phone that people are going to buy anyway, because they want even more people to buy it, they want new audiences, yada yada, yada. So now let's talk about the the real numbers on the money that these campaigns might make. Let's say a new type of utilitarian pocket knife comes out and it's very artistic, very kitschy, very fidgety, really well-made campaign. They're asking for $10,000. They get $300,000. Okay. So of that $300,000, you're going to subtract 5% to Kickstarter fees, 3% to credit card transactions. That might be stripe. And, odds are there was a marketing company attached to that who probably is going to charge a 20% fee. To get to $3,000 in funding, you probably had to spend about 20% of those dollars in ads. So 20 another add on, another 20% right there. And then you have to fulfill these orders. You have your cost of goods sold. You still have to take whatever money is left over. So we just went from 300,000 to 200,000. Let's say. And then you have to take money from there to go to your manufacturer and start to actually make this product. now you've just taken another $100,000 out of your $300,000. So now we're down to 100 grand left And then you have to fulfill you have to ship this product. Now, maybe you built shipping into your price so we can call that a break even for the sake of argument. So essentially, of that $300,000, your margin got cut down by 75%. So something like $75,000 will be left over towards profit. But I say profit lightly because that that 75 grand doesn't go in the owner's pocket. It's going to go towards employees, all the expense it took to get that campaign going to fake this product existing and do it in such an artistic way. So you probably had staff at that point. You had a lot of overhead and not everything is going to go right during the manufacturing process. Sure, your Cogs might be 100 grand, but to, you know, tooling might go wrong. So anything can happen. Or you might find out that the product just doesn't work. How many projects do you see that are delayed, delayed, delayed because somebody miss, made a mold or miss measured something, or they had a safety issue, right? did they get $300,000? No, they got some. They got some seed money. They got some funding. They paid good money for it. It was a heavy investment. And at the end of the day they got a little bit of profit and maybe some room to work to bring that product to market. All right. So that leads us into part two. What most creators get wrong Rarely when a product fails, is it the product's fault? It's almost always your fault. My fault? The creator's fault. I've been there. I've had more failed Kickstarters than successful ones. Yet I still run a $2 million a year business and grow sales off of that failed product. Right? The product didn't fail. I didn't know it at the time. I thought the product failed me, but I failed me. And here's why. I committed the four deadly sins of unfunded Kickstarter campaigns, and that is launching cold targeting everyone. Hiring the wrong people and ignoring fulfillment. Launching cold. What does that mean? Well, we talked about it a little bit ago. Launching cold means launching before you're ready, launching before you have some product validation. Kickstarter is not where you go to validate a product, not in the sense of is this a good idea? That's for neighbors, friends, family, fools, trade shows, you name it. That's the belly to belly work that you need to do before your Kickstarter campaign. Then you know how to convey that information to would be backers because they don't know you. You assume everyone understands because you explain it to a half a dozen people. Every time someone comes on your listing, they have virgin eyes and they have no idea what your invention does. If you don't have an image that explains it in a millisecond, you don't. You're not ready. That's it. The second big issue most people have is they target everyone. You don't know your target audience yet, so you get on Kickstarter thinking, oh, this is like the show Seinfeld. It's for everybody ages 18 to ages 99. Men, women. Who cares? That's not an efficient way to campaign. Let me put it to you this way. If I'm selling chocolates because everybody likes chocolates. Right? And I have one hour to sell as much merchandise as I can. I could on one hand say, well, everyone likes chocolate, so I'm going to start going door to door in my neighborhood asking to sell them chocolate. I'm not going to have a lot of success because they're going to think I'm a weirdo. They're going to get creeped out and turn me away. Now, if I spent that one hour at a Chocolate Fanatics convention and caught everybody at the door on their way in or out, I would have a much higher success rate. Even though a product is for everyone, being in the right place and marketing to the right people will greatly reduce your cost to market. So before you launch this campaign, know who your target audience is. Are they motorcycle enthusiasts? Okay, easy. Shoot a motorcycle ad, put the motorcycle. Run the motorcycle ad as a media campaign. Collect the emails of people who were interested in that motorcycle ad and clicked learn more. And now you have a curated audience ready to deliver your product. To launch your Kickstarter, send them all an email. Send them ten, 20, 30 emails over the course of a month and get them to come in and back your project by blasting your friends on Facebook. Borderline useless. Asking your mom to hit up her her networking group? Probably good for a couple bucks. But knowing your audience, knowing what they think, feel and see and what their main interests point is, every audience has one common denominator. For me it's dirt bike riders. If I can find dirt bike riders, I can find Kickstarter backers. And how do I do that? I find I make a great dirt bike video dirt bike ad, run it on meta, click, learn more, collect the email. Boom! I have them house ready to deploy. The third deadly sin is hiring the wrong help. Now, what I mean by that is probably hiring any help at all, because a lot of these operations you can do yourself, you're going to have to do yourself. You got to run lean. You're not going to make tons and tons of money off of this. So be wise about who you hire. You're going to get hit up by a lot of companies like ship Bob and like backer fulfillment, all kinds of snakes in the grass. People are going to come out of the weeds and say, hey, we see your campaign is going great. We see your 100% funded partner with us, and we'll fulfill all these orders to X, Y, and Z. Well, take it from me, just target people in the United States. Don't deal with international shipping. You're not ready for it yet. And shipped to them via USPS flat rate envelopes or flat rate boxes. Maybe your items bigger and you have to go with UPS. That's fine as long as you work that into your cost. But don't go and partner with some fulfillment center who's going to charge storage and minimum fees and complicate things. You're a garage inventor, and this is going to be a garage project for the first year, potentially. Right. So treat it as such. Don't get in over your head. Large partnerships. And I've talked to some inventors who live in apartments, and it's just not possible for them to operate out of their kitchen or their they don't even have a garage, right? Find a cheap space, a rental unit, a workspace, a friend's garage. I don't care, but do not get in over your head because yes, you're going to make a lot of money off your invention one day, but you're not going to get there. By blowing money along the trail. You have to make profit and you have to reinvest it. So be careful about who and how you hire. And really, that runs us into the fourth deadly sin, which is ignoring fulfillment. don't get caught with your pants down. A lot of times in these campaigns, the last bit of margin you have left your net is going to be something like 15 to 20%. If you miss shipping, that's your whole 15 to 20%, okay, because generally speaking, shipping is going to consume about 15 to 20% of your product costs. Do not overlook that. Thank you. So the next thing most creators get wrong is the psychology of backers. What actually makes someone pledge? What makes someone pledge is them believing they're going to get the product. Sure, you could argue people really just love what you're doing and your goal, and they just really want to see you succeed. That is somewhat true. I call them the crazy 100 and kickstarter's full of them, but it's not literally 100 people. It might only be 4 or 5 people. So I don't think that Kickstarter is just full of people who can't wait to give away their money. The organic traffic on Kickstarter is probably pretty light. The real traffic, the real backers, they come from outside in to get in on the product. And what are they thinking about? It's like the Witham rule we learned about in episode 60. What's in it for me? 90% of consumers only care about what's in it for them. We're narcissistic as humans. That's just normal. That's okay. We have to cater to that. As product developers. So running a campaign that talks about how cool your new, whatever get gizmo might make robots not good. That's a might that's a maybe running a campaign that says this is the hottest item. It's coming in six months. And if you don't act now, you're going to miss out, because I'm only making a thousand. That creates FOMO, that creates assurance, that creates confidence. And that's how backers buy. And I want to talk about the one last killer of campaigns. What most people get wrong is once you fund your campaign for a, you know,$1,000, $2,000, you need to give tender love and care to those backers. They want updates every two weeks. They want, they don't want vague timelines. They want very specific timelines as to when they're going to get the product. And it's not the end of the world if you can't meet those, as long as you communicate clearly, keeping them close will keep the money there. You're dealing with a very small amount of backers losing, three backers could be 30% of your total Kickstarter fund, right? So give them a lot of attention, a lot of care, All right, now, the moment you've all been waiting for, the Kickstarter playbook that actually works. Let's start. And step number one is you're going to validate the product before you hit Kickstarter. Now I've already talked about that at length, but to put it very clearly, make sure you understand what people might buy it and at what price they might buy it for. You're treating this as a purchase, not as a preorder. Treat this just like you would an Amazon listing, a website listing, a Walmart listing. Be ready to make that sale. Understand what that customer wants, who that group of customer is, what that one specific niche or item or toy they're all into is. Build them as an audience around that one commonality and launch to those people. Number two, is price the product for success? Now, a lot of people wonder how they should price their product on Kickstarter. They even think they have to give it away to give backers the incentive to buy it first. In my opinion, the benefit that backers have is they're the first to get it. They don't necessarily have to get it for the cheapest. If you want to knock 5 or $10 off of what you ultimately want to sell it for. Fine. Be my guest. But don't be beholden to what you priced it at at your Kickstarter. We have this complex where we think the whole world is watching every little thing, little thing we do. In reality, it's only going to be a handful of customers who notice, hey, I backed it and bought it for 75, and now you're selling it four months later on your Shopify store for 75. What gives? You just let them know you had the benefit of being the first to get the product, you you're pricing is so important to you as a business owner and anybody who harps on you about your pricing or judges you about that. They have no right and they have no understanding of how a business works. You are a business owner now. You have to be firm and strong with your pricing. If the pricing doesn't work, the business doesn't work and they never get the product anyway. You're doing them a favor by pricing for success. If you want to give them a little bit of incentive on Kickstarter and say it very literally, hey, you're getting it at 10% off, 15% off retail. That may help the Kickstarter conversion, but only do that if you have the margin to do so. Step number three is plan for that launch day momentum. All your marketing efforts should go into launch day. That doesn't mean that you only think about launch day, but your natural audience, the people you can bring in at a low cost. You should drive them on launch day and try to boost the algorithm. Get yourself 100% funded in 12 hours, 24 hours, whatever the case is, and that will give you some natural algorithmic momentum. Not enough to make you go crazy with 3,000% funding. But we'll get into that next, because step four is after that launch day momentum supplement with more campaigning. If you now only do this if you really want to go to $50,000, $100,000 and trust me, you probably don't. You probably don't want all that drama. You probably don't want all those orders. You probably don't want all that attention on a product you haven't even manufactured yet. Because take it from me, it really sucks having 75 people wait for a product that you're still going back and forth with the manufacturer on there still a him hawing about how difficult it is and the price is going to go up, up and up. Finding out that you're going to fulfill 75 orders and make no money off of all of them, and not understanding that until 45 days after you quit your campaign, that's a really tough pill to swallow. Trust me. But if you do want to go there, if your product is turbo ready, if you've launched other products before, if you're really, really ready, then you can run a campaigns driving people to the Kickstarter. The conversion rate is low. I went over this with Eddie in the discord. The conversion rate sucks. Why? When people see an ad on meta, they generally click through to something they can buy right now on someone's Etsy shop, on their Shopify store, or on Amazon. Right when they go to a Kickstarter campaign, you just cut your chances down by 90%. Because we are narcissistic people, we want things right now. So conversion rates on Kickstarter are extremely low. These agencies like gel up, kick booster and backer kit, that's why they exist, is because they have access to audiences who are accustomed to waiting for products, who maybe get a little bit of a thrill about waiting for them. So if you're fully funded in the first 24 hours, and if your product is impeccable, if you have everything figured out and you're ready to handle that much traffic, you can hit up one of these companies and they if you qualify, they will inject their services into your campaign. But again, it's probably going to be too many orders and it's probably going to be no profit. Is that really how you want to start off your business? I don't think so. Granted, you'll learn a lot in a short amount of time about running a business, but it's trial by fire, and if you fail, you fail kind of hard. And it may just, shoot your chances at success. Step five is prepare for fulfillment before launch. Understand your pricing. Understand your shipping costs. Understand what boxes your item is going to fit into. Is that a flat rate USPS? Is it an oversize U.P.S.? Understand that and test that. One thing I did was I started my Shopify store while the Kickstarter was launched, but I didn't really make it very public. It was just kind of there. I wasn't advertising it. Shopify has built in discounts, to where you can ship via USPS or UPS for a better rate than just walking into a UPS store, dropping something on the counter and saying, ship this to Dale Jennings in Missouri. That's not the right way to do it. You want to have some kind of platform, and I recommend Shopify. I'm not affiliated. I have no links. I could give a rat's butt, but have some kind of platform that gives you these discounts and the ability to ship at scale with some efficiency. Step number six is post campaign backer communication. Every two weeks, update them whether you have nothing or something. If you have nothing to say, tell them a fun fact about how you thought about the idea. Whenever you have an update, it could be the manufacturer approved, a new color, a new sample, a new widget, a new spring, whatever update you're backers. Believe it or not, it makes them feel warm inside. Maybe they don't want to hear it, maybe they don't care. But they know you're there and they know that their money is being taken care of. If you have issues, tell them transparently. Own these things. Not. Our B.S. detector is pretty strong these days. It's 2025. We've the internet's been around for a while. We've seen all the scams. So be very transparent, and you will have strong backers that won't pull their money out, and you get to retain all your profits and keep moving forward. Now here's a little bonus I want to tell you about how to plan out your video for your Kickstarter campaign, because that is really crucial. Minimum viable set up cell phone horizontal with a microphone clipped to your chest. You can find wireless microphones for probably as cheap as $50 that will Bluetooth to your phone. I use a road mic. I think it was like $150 Audio is key, and being true and honest. So when you shoot a video, consider the equipment around you. That's how the video should feel. In other words, if I was shooting a Kickstarter campaign video on a $75,000 or a $400,000 Imax film reel used to film The Dark Knight, do you really think it would feel natural sticking that in my garage and talking to it? No. If you're sitting in a garage and you're talking to an audience, it's natural that you're going to shoot on a decent cell phone or maybe a slightly upgraded little Sony camera like this. Okay, so let your equipment dictate how you curate the video. You wouldn't take a cell phone, stick it on a dolly tripod and roll it on tracks as you try to shoot some cinematic shot. Because no matter how you move that camera and how many fancy things you do, at the end of the day, the quality is that of an iPhone. So don't try to be someone you're not. Minimum viable setup. Tell people who you are quickly in 1 or 2 sentences. Tell them what you invented quickly in 1 or 2 sentences and why they need to buy it. Show them the product in the first 30s of any video is very crucial. Why am I here and what am I getting out of it? If you haven't conveyed that in the first 30s, then you're running too slow, telling long stories about background that can come into play later in the video because people don't really care who you are, they care. Is this product going to solve my problems? Now here's a little hack. Watch the videos of successful campaigns you can probably find a way for to record a screen, record it, transcribe it, and have ChatGPT break down the transcription of the video and maybe even like the shot list of the video. Steal like an artist, take their formula and apply it to your video. They're most likely going to have shot it on a fancy, Blackmagic camera. Or read 3 or 4 camera, right? That's not you. So consider the equipment. Consider the set, consider this stage and act naturally. Maybe they did a dolly shot and showed a guy woodworking with perfect lighting. Well, you're not going to get a dolly shot and you're not going to have perfect lighting, but you can have a static shot of you building in at your desk and tinkering on your cell phone in natural lighting. That's totally fine. That makes sense. Just don't lie and be someone you're not trying to outsmart your equipment or outsmart your creative skills. People are going to see through that. Videos go viral all the time on social media that are shot vertically with no editing, no filters, no nothing because they're candid and people can imagine themselves sitting in that person's shoes, All right. So there you go. That's part three the Kickstarter playbook that actually works. Now I want to finish this off with who should and who should not run Kickstarter campaigns. Who should not run Kickstarter campaigns as people who have really been working with the manufacturer diligently. They're 90% confident they can afford the product themselves. They can get the product to their garage or their apartment or their rented space, soon. And they can launch on Shopify. If that's the case, you should just go straight to Shopify and Amazon. Why? Because of conversion rates. Kickstarter is going to require a lot of marketing efforts, as we talked about. and the sad thing is 98% of your marketing efforts aren't going to convert because it's a Kickstarter campaign and they're not getting the product in 24 hours. So why would you spend all that energy marketing to something with a low conversion rate? Build out a system with a high conversion rate. Being your e-commerce, your Shopify, your Amazon that's ready to go and market and drive traffic to that. That is much better time spent and money spent than a Kickstarter campaign. So quite simply, if you can get the product and you can afford to get the product here, go straight into commerce. If there's no way you can afford to get the product here, and you just need a little bit more validation that people are going to pull out their wallets for the product. Definitely launch a Kickstarter, but do not treat it as an end all be all. It is just another tool in our tool bag of many, many tools, right? Have fun with it. Try it. Don't overestimate it. Don't set lofty goals, be modest and enjoy the ride. All right guys, that's it for today's episode. I want to thank you for joining me. If you're watching on YouTube, like and subscribe. If you're listening, follow the show and join us in the Patreon, where you get connected to the discord and all kinds of other inventors, myself included, and together will make your invention dream become a reality. All right, guys, I'll see you on the next one.