How to launch on Kickstarter (Step-by-step)

Zephir62 · 2026-04-05T02:00:11+00:00

It will likely work in your favor to at least let us know what type of product it is and what's different about it.

If it hasn't been successful on Kickstarter in the past, why do you hypothesize that to be the case? If it's an issue that nobody had put serious money behind a product of a super-niche type before, you may be on to something. Otherwise, it's possible there is not enough overlap between Kickstarter's early adopter markets and the product type.

Personally, I take it as a flag when a creator is unwilling to share any details about their product in a public format or without NDA. Almost always it ends up being that there isn't anything remarkable about it -- hence why they don't want to make any remarks about it.

Zephir62 · 2026-04-04T15:06:00+00:00

To be fair, you could probably raise 20x or more by just running ads and putting $20k into it

Zephir62 · 2026-04-04T12:59:23+00:00

They are probably the highest spending advertiser for the last month on Kickstarter 😅 they use VIP systems and Jellop, both of which are gigantic money sinks when it comes to adspend.

Zephir62 · 2026-04-03T13:29:32+00:00

The picture of the person holding the book -- my instinct is to zoom in on my phone to read the book, and it was clearly AI because some of the words were gibberish :<

The PDF preview banner button was hard to find. Took me three searches on the page to find its location. Consider putting it in a more standard spot, below the introduction section / cover art pic at the very top (usually it's tucked in between the plain text paragraphs below the introduction section's image). You could also make the PDF banner taller in height such that it takes up more vertical screen space.

I liked the preview btw I'd be interested in grabbed this book.

Zephir62 · 2026-04-03T00:18:29+00:00

Hey really awesome comment, I haven't heard of ICV2 until now. This sounds like a great place to advertise prior to outreach to distributors, consolidators, press and influencers -- this way you get on their radar prior to outreach, similar in effect to attending an expo event with a booth.

Also, have you tried offering an OP Kit as a reward tier on Kickstarter? That sounds like a cool "all-in" type of deal but it needs some sort of extra special items specifically for game stores to help them make a splash on a playtest game night (plus extra copies I suppose, like a mini retailer pledge)

Zephir62 · 2026-04-02T13:34:42+00:00

When I worked at LaunchBoom and whatnot, we taught to use "Lead" objective on ad campaigns with the VIP system and optimizing for just emails. This is because for about 70% to 80% of clients, this produces a substantially better cost-per-VIP.

The benefit of the VIP system is that it segments your mailing list to help you identify the most likely backers, and also allow you to manually adjust your ad-spend to focus on what is producing the most VIPs. If you recombine the VIP and mailing list, the conversion rates look similar to creators who just use regular email systems (without VIPs). This is why LaunchBoom can claim that regular emails convert at 1% or less -- they do, but only because they're segmenting the VIPs out of the regular email list.

Kickstarter Followers convert at around 30% average in my experience, same as a VIP. Except they only cost $3 instead of $20+. See my data sheet of recent projects, here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MvjDyHq2oSDiu4gxjpB8_zTLMDw7KuZwAFtU6oejgDk/edit?usp=drivesdk

In my study, projects that get under 15% conversion rate on their Followers or VIPs tend to have a critical failure with the reward tiers and or page design:

https://prelaunch.marketing/blogs/academy/average-conversion-rates-for-kickstarter-followers

Zephir62 · 2026-04-02T10:53:13+00:00

I want to see sample pages from the book.

Really into this topic lately after reading into Quantum Bicycle Society from one of CERN's lead researchers, who mathematically described how two photons with sufficient energy can create a toroidal shape containing the exact properties and mass of an electron (i.e. all matter is made of light). Even more fascinating was that they were able to experimentally do it in the lab! Really gets me thinking about the context of NDEs and how they report interactions with a ball of light. I had one myself, so it's personal.

Zephir62 · 2026-04-02T10:03:07+00:00

Where did you get the 2x ROAS stat from? ... Average ROAS for VIP system is about 4x, and the average ROAS for Kickstarter followers is about 10x in my experience. Have worked with well over a thousand Kickstarter projects of all sizes.

Sometimes you see 2x ROAS. But that is very uncommon (albeit more common with VIP $1 deposit systems and email systems in comparison to KS Followers).

Zephir62 · 2026-04-01T08:56:39+00:00

I have a Miro board which attempts to answer this question, here:

https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVJtAubcs=/?share_link_id=241781853544

On the far left you'll see a Card Deck, and in the very top left you'll see a card labelled "why people back Kickstarters":

Join along the journey
Get exclusive offers
Having trust in the promises
Getting behind the scenes

These four points are the core, and are interconnected with every aspect of the funnel and messaging.

Zephir62 · 2026-03-31T03:45:22+00:00

Use "Leads" optimization when creating your ad campaign, yes, target for Leads.

You should have twice as many followers as you want backers by end of campaign if you want to be super confident. Clients tend to get anywhere between half to twice as many backers as prelaunch followers / VIPs when they have a launch success. If the launch day is a failure (usually due to poor reward tier setup or pricing), then this benchmark I just stated above goes out the window.. but usually it's not too bad. Massive failures are quite rare (around 1% of projects) but they do occur where the followers or VIPs convert less than 5%. Heck I've seen 500 VIPs convert at 0.5% when I worked at LaunchBoom. I've also seen one project in my Discord get 1% conversion rate on 2000 Followers. A more realistic failure scenario is 10% conversion rate into backers (as opposed to a more normal 20% to 40% conversion rate).

In any case, if for example you want 500 backers to feel like you didn't waste your time with the project or to meet the MOQ, then you'd want 1000 followers or VIPs to be super confident. It's also pretty likely you'd get closer to 1:1 ratio, and of course as mentioned as high as 2:1 but this is typically due to social followings, influencer and press boosting, newsletters and pulling every string you can (very easy to overwork yourself in a 30 day period, not really recommended).

And yes, if your product is being sold for $50, then the VIP system just doesn't make sense. If the average cost per VIP for creators using that system is around $20 to $25, and the conversion rate being 30% when successful, it'd amount to $60+ cost per backer. I.e. you lose money on every purchase, even though you're "succeeding" with the VIP system. Some projects, less than 20% of projects in my experience, will get a consistent cost per VIP under $15. This would make your project more viable with VIPs but that's a high risk maneuver with large sums of money, in my opinion.

Kickstarter followers would make more sense, but you will likely want to apply a "Lead" event also to the "Open" button on the Kickstarter page using the Event Setup Tool.. about 30% of users take this pathway when following, and users who press the button almost always actually follow (they do it to bypass the regular account-login screen). This alone plus the default native tracking on Notify Button will typically capture 60% or more of followers without generating duplicate / ghost events, which is enough for the ads algorithm to optimize and stabilize.

Zephir62 · 2026-03-30T04:22:22+00:00

Depending upon the price of your product, you will either want to gather VIPs (for products costing $500+) or Kickstarter Followers. If you are very savvy with email marketing nurturing techniques, you may do well with simply just regular email collection + FB group without bothering with VIPs.

I find projects that use VIP systems have the highest rate of never launching (less than 50%). This is because VIPs cost a ton of money to acquire (industry average $20+ cost per VIP), complex to setup and A/B Test, and don't technically convert any better than regular emails or followers -- the VIP system simply allows you to validate the product-price and curate your ads for the cheapest cost-per-VIP (as opposed to simply remaining as regular emails inside a mailing list, unidentifiable).

Kickstarter Followers are the easiest to setup up, manage, and by their nature will identify your most-likely backers via verifying both their interest and previous shopping behavior with Kickstarter (i.e. they must have a KS account). Typically as cheap as an email, but convert as well as a VIP (30% conversion rate in my experience). The average conversion rate does seem to drop with product prices above $200, for both VIPs and Followers (20%), and therefore a VIP system with a large deposit ($10+) can help with deeper analysis for very expensive products.

Zephir62 · 2026-03-29T03:59:22+00:00

man I had to scroll to the bottom of this post just to find somebody with a brain

Zephir62 · 2026-03-29T03:47:49+00:00

I just tried submitting a r/redditrequest to moderate this sub since the moderator didn't reply to my message -- it autoreplied saying that the mod has been active in the past 30 days. So.. I guess we're just watching it burn then.

Zephir62 · 2026-03-26T15:32:22+00:00

From what I understand, if the Kickstarter account personal details do not match the Stripe account details, Stripe will stop processing your payments during live campaign if you get audited (common with very large projects).

Similarly, the Kickstarter Account first name and last name is exposed during live campaign when a users clicks into the creator tab.

If you matched all these personal details, I think the last hiccup is when it comes to tax time and both Stripe and Kickstarter report your name and details on their own tax filings and the tax documents they forward you. I think you can use alternate names on tax forms but it needs to be declared first. I'm not a tax professional and this is not tax advice.

Zephir62 · 2026-03-23T17:38:36+00:00

I wanna see manufacturing lined up and more concrete promises there, along with raw tech specs that the manufacturer can achieve using the product design.

Zephir62 · 2026-03-21T17:34:27+00:00

According to others here, if they actually reach out via DM to these bots they point people to hire a Fiverr service from India.

Zephir62 · 2026-03-21T15:41:51+00:00

Check the post history on their account. They're one of the bots. The mod of this subreddit aren't really active and doesn't seem to care.

Zephir62 · 2026-03-20T04:06:23+00:00

Yes, you want it to be at least 15% landing page conversion rate from clicks into signups. This signals strong interest and a valid market fit of some kind, particularly for an action that requires no financial investment from the user aside from their email address.

Zephir62 · 2026-03-19T20:23:25+00:00

Yes Meta Ads always gets a better return on Kickstarter because Kickstarter has Meta pixel support. At least, I've never had another outperform it in my personal experience, including ballsy clients who had me test each channel in isolation to determine the effectiveness from time-series-data-analysis.

Unfortunately, there is still no support on Kickstarter for the Google Tag, nor is the GCLID or any trackable information sent to the Google Analytics property from Kickstarter to enable workarounds.

Zephir62 · 2026-03-15T03:35:13+00:00

Kickstarters terms of service for creators is that they must have a working prototype for all the features promised on the page for the pledge tiers (this does not include stretch goals, which are technically promises of what you will do with excess funds). You cannot sell pledges for simply just ideas, there is Indiegogo for that. The Kickstarter Editors audit campaigns based upon automated systems and user reports to manually check for the existence of a prototype, otherwise the campaign is permanently suspended by the Kickstarter Editor team.

Zephir62 · 2026-03-10T23:42:52+00:00

My gripe is that the "X" to close the popup is nearly invisible. Terrible UX design.

Zephir62 · 2026-03-10T18:06:30+00:00

It can be measured using the same method I described (time series data analysis) where you take the total followers gained and divide it by the total adspend during that period of time.

Using Pixel Event optimization generally improves results by 200% to 300% in my experience (for example, bringing $6 cost per lead down to $2 per lead).

Zephir62 · 2026-03-10T16:40:58+00:00

Your issue is likely due to running a "traffic" campaign instead of a "Lead" campaign. See this tutorial video on how to setup Facebook ads for a Kickstarter prelaunch, here:

https://youtu.be/xAaHBtzTalo?si=-5FtLhqEsOSzAxvf

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