Kickstarter 101 : Lessons From My First Campaign
As I’m starting my third Kickstarter Campaign this year under the Make100 Challenge, I thought it would be fun to revisit my experiences and lessons from the past before sharing the process this time around. This will likely be a 3-part series, starting from my very first campaign from 2017.
As an artist, I’ve always avoided running my own Kickstarter campaign. Even if I knew that many visual artists ran very successful campaigns, I also knew that many more ran very unsuccessful campaigns as well. The idea of running a failed project was terrifying. But for some reason, the Make 100 Challenge from Kickstarter felt different. Perhaps it was the fact that it was initiated by Kickstarter and that the idea of challenging myself to create a series of 100 art pieces warmed me up to the idea of joining. After seeing similar projects succeed under the Make 100 umbrella, I decided to take the plunge, despite the fear of failure and the illogical shame that comes with it. One third of the way to the deadline, I learned a couple of things from five strategies I used as a beginner, in my attempt to make it a successful campaign. And I would like to share them with you. It might give you some insights if you’re thinking of creating your own campaign in the future.
STRATEGY No 1: Ignore Kickstarter Spam Messages
One thing I did not expect to get were spam messages within the Kickstarter mailing system. As soon as I hit the launch button, I received a lot of unsolicited messages from other Kickstarter accounts, selling their services to promote my campaign : a $500 campaign. I was excited to get my first few messages but became quickly disappointed when I realize they were all trying to sell me the same thing. You can imagine my frustration receiving 10 messages selling me crowdfunding campaigns services for hundreds or thousands of dollars and not one word of encouragement or question about the campaign. “What would make them think that I would want to spend thousands of dollars on a $500 campaign?” I thought, “Did they even read it?” As it turns out, most of these accounts had no activities on their profile. I’m not even sure they were real accounts. They were most likely bots. If they were real people, I don’t think they would waste their time soliciting on a $500 campaign. So be aware that this is something that’s going to happen. Maybe some are legit crowdfunding support companies, and they can offer valuable help to people running larger campaigns, but the fact that they don’t even take the time to verify that what they are offering fits with the project they are targeting don’t put them in the best light.
STRATEGY No 2: Seek Advice from fellow Kickstarters
The silver lining in receiving so many spam messages on Kickstarter was that it made me realize that I could also reach out to fellow participants and ask for advice. So I did. I reached out to a couple of successful artists who also took part in the Make 100 challenge and had surpassed their initial goal. I simply asked them if they had some advice for newbies. Some of them were kind enough to reply (interestingly all first timers as well) and they recommended to post daily on all social media platforms and email previous clients. For a lot of them, the bulk of their backers were people they already knew. The ones who seem to have more experience or have a longer career in the field seemed to be the ones who did better. One early participant was lucky to be featured on the Kickstarter newsletter and that helped boost her reach. Reach is probably one of the most important things to focus on during a campaign. If you’re lucky enough to be featured on a high traffic site, you’ll be able to reach more people. Unfortunately, I didn’t seen a lot of promotions by Kickstarter about the #Make100 project other than a post about how many creators joined and maybe a handful of posts promoting some projects under this umbrella. I would have thought that for initiating the project, they would tweet about it a lot more often.
STRATEGY No 3: Reach out to more people through podcasts
I also got a message from a former Kickstarter creator to beware of unsolicited messages selling campaign promotions at a high price. She suggested I take a look at Fiverr instead as there were more affordable options there. It’s not something that had crossed my mind so I decided to take a look and found a well-rated online radio DJ who sold ads on his show for $12USD. I figured that would not be an expensive lesson to pay if it didn’t work out, so I gave it a try. Three days later, I received the link to the show featuring my radio ad, a download of the audio version that I could use as often as I like, a posts on his Facebook account (3400+ likes), a post on his Twitter feed (44,700+ followers) and a custom Google link to track traffic coming from his posts.
It’s hard to say how much this has helped other than having a couple extra clicks from that specific URL to my page. I only got 27 clicks from it and I didn’t suspect to get much more than that unless I repost it myself. Since I had already created my own custom link, it would have defeated the purpose. The bulk of the leads coming from this ad would be by listeners searching for “100 cloud paintings” on Kickstarter, as it was the only way for his listeners to get to my page, and that’s difficult to track. Still, it’s kind of fun to have a stranger create a radio ad based on your content. It’s a genius idea on his part to fund his show through Fiverr, but I don’t think I would do this again. Another lesson is that one tweet on a social media account of 44,700 followers doesn’t make that big of a difference especially if their followers are not very engaged: Hindsight 20/20.
STRATEGY No 4: Track my own social media marketing efforts
Right at the beginning of my campaign, I decided to use a shortened Google URL across all platforms to see what kind of traffic I would be getting from my efforts. I could have used different URL for different social media platforms to get a better idea of which was more effective, but I kept it simple with just one. This link was used on Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube and in my email signatures. Basically, I used all opportunity I could find to insert that link and get people to at least go see the landing page of the campaign. It’s important to reach as many people as possible. One of the reasons why projects may fail is that they are not seen enough. At that time, I had only generated 53 clicks (+27 from the Fiverr service), which told me that I needed to work more on that aspect of my campaign. It was not being seen by enough people online and I would have to think of other strategies to get my campaign in front of the right people.
STRATEGY No 4: Track and update my Kickstarter page
I’ve only realized later during the campaign that there is a way to track traffic on my Kickstarter page using Google Analytics. In the remaining 19 days of the campaign, I was able to learn where traffic was coming from, what works and what doesn’t work. I also kept updating my page with better photos, more videos and better descriptions as I was producing the artwork.
I failed
Despite my efforts, I failed. Still, I managed to get two backers a couple hours before the deadline. Having the total amount raised be $140 instead of $0 from people I didn’t know was a nice consolation prize. It was still disappointing, but the fact that it got some traction made me think that it could be valuable and that maybe the failure didn’t have to do with the artwork, but the way I went about it.
You win or you learn.
Despite not reaching my goal for my Kickstarter project, I survived the imagined humiliation of having an unsuccessful crowdfunding project online. Who knew it wasn’t as big of a deal as I thought it would be! Don’t get me wrong, it was quite the roller coaster of oscillating between confidence and self-doubt, constantly switching between my desire to keep going vs my desire to give up. What kept me going is that I really wanted to make these paintings and I kept learning new things along the way. Besides, all of the people I admire for achieving great things failed many times before. What’s one failed project? The thing is, if you’re not failing you’re not trying hard enough. If you’re not trying hard enough, you’ll stay where you are. So I kept going and came out the other side with a handful of insights and skills that I thought would surely serve me in my current and future endeavors.
The lessons I got from pursuing this project came in the form of five personal upgrades in the following area :
- Quality: I improved my art
- Productivity: I made more art
- Creativity: I got many new ideas
- Social media: I obtained a better understanding of its impact
- Online business: I received new insights to improve my online store
Quality: I improved my art
Practice makes perfect. Although I haven’t reached the famous 10,000 hours of painting clouds yet, I am closer today than I was before the campaign. Repeating the same process of painting simple clouds on a 6x6 canvas, using various colors and shapes, gave me insights on how to best use and mix the colors to get more depth into the paintings. With practice, I came to better understand how to mix the lights and the darks to create more depth and texture. I also allowed myself to experiment with colors I may not have tried to combine before and some combinations were surprisingly complementary.
Productivity: I made more art
One of the things I kept in mind while learning about the life of Picasso is that he was very productive. He has thousands of paintings to his name. In order to become better and more successful I know I have to produce more work: pay the 10,000 hours entry fee to the Notable Artist Party. Challenges like this was a great excuse to get to it. No amount of theorizing, reading or watching instructional videos will ever come close to the effect of taking action. This project was my main focus for the month at the time. Being focused on one goal made me more productive and I probably created more paintings in that month then I ever did before: 30 paintings, that was a little more than a painting a day. The Make 100 Kickstarter challenge made me accountable and as a result, I became more productive. By the end of the first month I had 32 completed artworks to show for. It didn’t stop there. I continued to paint the 100 clouds as planned and completed all 100 paintings a month later. Little did I know, completing these painting would lead to bigger and better things in the months and years to come.
3. Creativity: I got many new ideas
Doing something for the first time forced me to think outside the box and what I’m used to. For me, thinking of new ways to bring my artwork in front of people required more creativity. It also let me to create different videos, like this one, based on suggestions from peers and ideas that emerge from various conversations about this project. It also gave me a chance to come up with new ways to present the artwork on social media, different ways to photograph my work, and different ways to describe my work.
This focused challenge also made me see my subject from a new angle and I realized that I was not only painting clouds, but I was painting thoughts or a reflection of them. The more I was diving into the “why” behind my inspiration to create these paintings, the more I was discovering opportunities to express my own thoughts and insights through my art and also it enabled others who see it, to discover more about their own thoughts through them as well. I realized that clouds are thoughts and we give them meaning depending on our own stories and experiences of life.
4. Social Media: I have a better understanding of its impact
Gary Vaynerchuk was right: Facebook trumps all social media platform at the moment. I documented all the actions I took over the course of the month (where I posted, what I posted, how many times I posted, etc) and got the results from Google Analytics regarding where the clicks came from. By far, Facebook was the most effective, followed by Instagram. I also saw the difference videos made compared to pictures. Video created spikes of interest compared to any other posts. Working on this project also made me realize that I’m not yet fully benefiting from the full capacity of social media platforms to reach the right people. I’ve barely skimmed the surface.
I also learned that while it’s great to get views they don’t equate to purchases. I was fortunate enough to have my project partially funded so I also got a bit of insight regarding where they came from. It’s far easier for someone in the Kickstarter community who has backed projects before to back your project than to get someone new in the system. Nevertheless, my click to sale ratio, based on the available data was 1%, which is good for a beginner. This means that had I been able to get the page viewed by 5000 people, I likely would have reached my goal.
As it turned out, both backers had backed projects before and I suspect that had there been a way to reach out to art backers via Kickstarter’s mailing list, this project would have gotten a better chance at being fully funded. The main issue for me was not enough views. Perhaps a 60-day campaign would have given me more time to get a better hold of the online marketing aspect of the project. Marketing is likely to be one of the most important aspects of a Kickstarter project like this.
I’ve always kept google analytics at bay because there seems to be so much data to look through, but at the same time, its valuable information tells you how your presentation and products are received by the public. It’s definitely something that I need to use more often. Throughout my campaign, I’ve learned about the benefits of using tools like Google Analytics to get an idea of what’s working and what’s not, what gets attention and what doesn’t. Starting this project with the goal of making it successful prompt me to look for avenues to spread my message and reach the right backers looking for such a project. This meant that I had to be more active online and post on a consistent basis. Using Google Analytics, I was able to see the impact of my posts.
Online Business: I have new tools to create a better online store
Participating in this project made things a little more real in terms of the process of creating a piece of artwork, selling it and shipping it to its collector. I had a few steps in the process that needed tweaking and refinement. For example, once the Kickstarter was over I was made aware that my art store on Square only accepts purchases from Canada after a client from the United States tried to purchase one of my paintings outside of the campaign. I had no idea this was even an issue. Why they would create the system that way, is beyond my comprehension, but that little bit of information got me working on alternative ways to enable clients from other countries to purchase my artwork. It’s still in the works, but I’m also using Paypal, which makes it easier. If there’s anything I learned from listening to people like Gary Vaynerchuk and Tai Lopez is that when it comes to selling items online, make it as easy as possible for any interested party to get your product.
Failing forward
All in all, this experience turned out to be very valuable to me. It was worth the disappointments. I guess, going through it made me grow a little more and I gave me a better appreciation and understanding of what it takes to succeed: repeated failures leading the way to success. The following year, I did it again. This time my project was successful. I built on my past experience and also learn some lesson that I’m applying the third time around in my current campaign. So, no matter what difficulty or obstacles lies ahead of your dreams, don’t give up.
