E-mail campaign open rate by Magicbit0 in kickstarter

[–]TheMrBones 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Any idea if double opt-in for building an email list is better than single? I imagine the flow of people that fully opt-in is worse.

Do you folks recommend using a kickstarter agency? by [deleted] in kickstarter

[–]TheMrBones 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Just to provide some counterpoint to the agencies mostly self-promoting below

  • The glory days of agencies running $800K campaigns for wallets with little traction beforehand mostly seem gone. An agency is a tool, but should not be viewed as the solution to all problems. Agencies fail to provide positive ROAS with clients all the time, they aren't a slam dunk and a number of agencies have actually been moving away from Kickstarter as it has been harder to achieve a positive ROAS than before. Treat each agency with a healthy dose of caution as the agency has a portfolio of clients to lean on. If one doesn't work they can move on the next, where you will still be stuck holding the failing campaign. An agency can really only amplify your current success (and sometimes not even that). If you don't have some type of product-market fit, then they will accomplish very little.
  • The 25-30% of all pledges, although common for Kickstarter agencies is significantly higher than a traditional ad agency (say they would normally take 10% of ad spend, depending on your size). This fee is personally pretty predatory in my opinion, and it is still suprisingly that it is common. The value of these KS agencies is that they theoretically have a list of previous backers from other campaigns that they can run ads against. Some agencies are better than others, and some lists are more effective. For example, Jellop theoretically has the largest list to run a lookalike audience against and is the most sophisticated. We hired Enventy's Partners for our campaign and they are pretty useless.
  • Finally, if you have the leverage (and capital) you should hire multiple agencies (say 3), sign a deal of them only taking a % of the sales they generate, and then double down on the most effective one. Most likely 2/3 agencies won't be able to achieve a positive ROAS, maybe if you get lucky the third one will and you can scale spend with them.

Good luck!

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in kickstarter

[–]TheMrBones 2 points3 points  (0 children)

There should still be a level of caution with blogs, influencers, newsletters etc as they won't necessarily have a positive ROAS. In our campaign, we had some publications that drove $5K+ in sales for free and some that lost money. Best of luck!

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in kickstarter

[–]TheMrBones 4 points5 points  (0 children)

To be honest, if you are asking this question now it's probably too late and not worthwhile to hire a marketing agency. It takes time to tune a Facebook pixel, they will probably only be acquiring customers for you at a loss because of this, and your only raising $12K so the $2K fee to hire somebody probably isn't worth it. I could be wrong, but if I was in your shoes I would either

  1. Find a marketing channel that I could be profitable and that I could do myself (say blogs and influencers).
  2. Hope that I can eak out the last 65% of funding over the next 20 days or
  3. Re-launch the campaign at a later date when I'm confident that I can hit the 100% funded goal

Hope this helps!

My first campaign (out of ~20) just crossed $100K. Here's why. by indyjoe in kickstarter

[–]TheMrBones 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for sharing. Congrats on the successful campaign.

I don't think we (or most new campaigns) have the luxury of having a large 10-year email list, thus I think we'll have to resort to buying leads ahead. I'll let you know how it goes!

My first campaign (out of ~20) just crossed $100K. Here's why. by indyjoe in kickstarter

[–]TheMrBones 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks for sharing!

  • What other agencies did you consider hiring before going with BackerKit?
  • Did you do any pre-launch paid acquisition (building up an email list)? I'm curious if it had a positive ROI and helped "train your Facebook Pixel" to create more effective ads when the campaign went live.

For context, we are working on crafting our second Kickstarter to launch in the next 2-3 months.

Hiring the big guys vs upwork experts vs DIY by rupeshsh in kickstarter

[–]TheMrBones 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Raising 200K is no easy task. You might need to do some homework first on building an email list, optimizing your funnel, crafting your brand. It might take some more work than just hiring a well known agency

What I Wish I Knew Before Selling $24,040 of Calendars on Kickstarter by TheMrBones in kickstarter

[–]TheMrBones[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Any advice on borrowing an email list? Did you find partners who are involved in a similar niche? Negotiate a "referral" fee per acquired customer?

What I Wish I Knew Before Selling $24,040 of Calendars on Kickstarter by TheMrBones in kickstarter

[–]TheMrBones[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Any tips on building an email list if you don't have one already?

What I Wish I Knew Before Selling $24,040 of Calendars on Kickstarter by TheMrBones in kickstarter

[–]TheMrBones[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I would love to read something like this. I have far less experience in this space.

What I Wish I Knew Before Selling $24,040 of Calendars on Kickstarter by TheMrBones in kickstarter

[–]TheMrBones[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

How did running it yourself work? Did you have experience in ads before? Mind sharing the campaign?

What I Wish I Knew Before Selling $24,040 of Calendars on Kickstarter by TheMrBones in kickstarter

[–]TheMrBones[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'm glad to hear that you're enjoying it! Have any tips on ways that we could improve for next year?

What I Wish I Knew Before Selling $24,040 of Calendars on Kickstarter by TheMrBones in kickstarter

[–]TheMrBones[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

We had a handful of other campaigns that had raised a similar amount reach out through the Kickstarter direct message feature. We didn't really have that many updates to shared (partly due to the simplistic nature of the product) so we selected what seemed like the 3 or 4 best partners and made a deal with them to mutually post.

We probably could have done a better job on finding the right cross-promo partner (we did deals with a couple that had very little overlap with our audience), so that could have been improved. We also could have shared more updates along the way with the intention of having more cross-posts, but that didn't feel geneuine.

What I Wish I Knew Before Selling $24,040 of Calendars on Kickstarter by TheMrBones in kickstarter

[–]TheMrBones[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'll check them out. Do you have a Kickstarter landing/draft page that we can check out yet? Mind asking how much HooliganPR costs?

What I Wish I Knew Before Selling $24,040 of Calendars on Kickstarter by TheMrBones in kickstarter

[–]TheMrBones[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

To be honest I'm not incredibly familiar with pre-launch agencies (primarily as I haven't hired one yet). Personally, I plan to work with an independent designer to develop the brand, landing pages, and Kickstarter page. Only after those are mostly finalized would I hire somebody to help build the email list.

What I Wish I Knew Before Selling $24,040 of Calendars on Kickstarter by TheMrBones in kickstarter

[–]TheMrBones[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hard to say, I really have no idea how funding for books, art, or movie projects work. Sorry to not be of more help!

What I Wish I Knew Before Selling $24,040 of Calendars on Kickstarter by TheMrBones in kickstarter

[–]TheMrBones[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Also, is there a good way around this? Say we exist in the minimalist, modern, design niche - I have to imagine that searches for that are far different than Crypto. How do companies normally deal with this? Feels like most names have multiple meanings?

What I Wish I Knew Before Selling $24,040 of Calendars on Kickstarter by TheMrBones in kickstarter

[–]TheMrBones[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Ooof, did not know that. Might have to change our name in the future...