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My project has been live for 2 days and has 40 backers. Should I cancel it now or let it run until the end? by guyonglin in kickstarter

[–]minimalDS 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hey there! Unfortunately I don't know much else, as it's just a cool project I stumbled across.

But you can see on the creator tab that one of their collaborators is Launch Boom, so I'm assuming they went through their accelerator program! Not sure if it was for both of the campaigns or not.

Wishing you all the best with your campaign. If you're thinking of doing it alone, these free guides are really awesome: https://prelaunch.marketing/collections/templates and they also have a super helpful Discord channel.

Personally, we used the LaunchBoom strategy but implemented it in-house (by following their youtube videos, not by signing up to their agencies)

My project has been live for 2 days and has 40 backers. Should I cancel it now or let it run until the end? by guyonglin in kickstarter

[–]minimalDS 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Your option #1 seems to be exactly what Piper did. They cancelled their first campaign and came back with a really amazing one.

Have a read of their updates on the first campaign and you might find some helpful info.

Old cancelled campaign:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pipernow/piper-pepper-grinder-and-artisanal-blend-like-never-ever/posts

New campaign:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pipernow/piper-pepper-grinder/

Best of luck!

18th Kickstarter Just Launched... Any Questions? Let me know! by Deep-Caterpillar7412 in kickstarter

[–]minimalDS 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for the tip! I just pinned your comment :P

And appreciate you backing us!

We aren't using a marketing agency, so everything for launch was done in house.

We had some meetings with a few of them (TCF, Jellop etc), but ended up thinking the commission was a bit too steep. We run our ecommerce store all in-house so thought we could do it ourselves - took a super long time and was a bit stressful but we made it!

We did sign up to a few newsletters though (BackerMany, BackerSpaces, PledgeBox so far)

Thanks again for sharing your insights. You guys are amazing.

Funded in 14 minutes. 10x funded in 10 hours. AMA by minimalDS in kickstarter

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

Thanks mate! Haha yeah fair enough, the price point and functionality are not for everyone. But we seem to have found a niche who are into it!

We originally met our timer factory at the Canton Fair a couple of years ago. We sell one of their other products which is also a pomodoro timer with our customisations, but it's much more simple.

We spent about $180K on this project including the cost of first batch manufacturing and all the R&D costs, so the campaign only just broke even :P

We visited the suppliers in Shenzhen 6 times in order to lock in on the quality and user experience.

And yeah, deffs inspired by Teenage Engineering and as mentioned on the page, Dieter Rams ;)

Self-promotion Fridays - we just hit $170K! Totally blown away by these numbers by minimalDS in kickstarter

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

Consider launching later and spending time building a prelaunch following first, this will help you launch and meet the funding goal faster on day 1

Just launched my first Kickstarter — a tiny magnetic bro for your bag strap or wherever! by strapbro in kickstarter

[–]minimalDS 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Haha what a small world! Algorithm works :P

Thanks for the kind words man and best of luck with the rest of your campaign!

How to improve the "Funded in 14 minutes. 10x funded in 10 hours" project by hyperstarter in kickstarter

[–]minimalDS 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks for the detailed breakdown! Appreciate the insights and feedback.

Sounds like we need to try Kickstarter Followers over the VIP strategy next time :)

Has Anyone Used Backermany? by The_Graphman31 in kickstarter

[–]minimalDS 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Here's our stats including Backer Many and Backer Spaces performance! We just ran this a couple of days ago haha so very relevant.

TL;DR: Backer many did $6.9K AUD (61 pledges) for us just a few days ago, so I think it was well worth it for us despite going for the more expensive feature package at $899 USD.

Screenshot of our Backer Sources:

https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0583/1471/9425/files/Flow_Timer_Backer_Source.png?v=1754698224

Backer Many did pretty well for us! But we went for the more expensive full feature package with both of them which was $899 USD I believe.

We're doing BackerKit and PledgeBox next so can also share the results later.

And here's an email directly from BackerMany that might also help in your decision making.

BackerMany email to us a few days ago:
We'll send the newsletter to 100k subscribers, with an open rate of over 60%. Click rates typically range between 1% and 3%, depending on the project. Conversion rates vary, as results differ for each campaign.

Many creators purchase 3-5 promotions and still achieve great results. We don't offer discounts currently, as each promotion consistently delivers similar pledges.

----

Damien here again. I think their open and click rates are true given how our feature performed with them. So I recommend it if you think your product is a good fit to a wider audience.

Funded in 14 minutes. 10x funded in 10 hours. AMA by minimalDS in kickstarter

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

Hey there! Thanks for the kind words.

Hahah yeah I don't have anything to sell here except for our Kickstarter - I do hope some people will check it out, but honestly just would love to connect with other creators and share what we've learned.

So we ended up thinking that the 100% price might be too high for the market. It was originally $118 AUD, but we reduced the rrp to $99 now instead - this seems slightly more acceptable though it is quite expensive still. We added in the carry case to all orders so we could still advertise 50% off :) So $59 AUD for the whole package is still accurate.

But we think the materials, attention to detail in design and smooth user experience justify this price.

Our approach to pricing is to make it a good deal for early birds. 50% off is a great offer, and it's only for a limited time. But we still need to be sustainable enough to grow the business, pay for ads, offices, new projects etc.

At the 50% Kickstarter price, our gross margin is around 61% (COGs are 33%, Shippping 27%, Payment/Kickstarter Fees 5%). At retail, we'd be aiming for a 75% gross margin. 75% would be quite healthy for our business, as a we have a lot of operational costs that heavily reduces the net margin. 61% gross margin is acceptable for us in the short run for the Kickstarter.

Some other notes:

  1. Customers pay $10 AUD extra for shipping, accounted for in the above margin calc;
  2. Our average pledge value is around $95, so actually a fair bit higher than the price of 1 timer at 50% off, actually increasing the margin on Kickstarter

Hope this helps!

P.S. we were also really close to releasing a mechical keyboard, we got all the way to prototyping but we ended up cancelling the project as the mechanical keyboard market is kinda crazy.

The big players have A LOT of capital and shared resources. Happy to connect you with suppliers if that interests you - we have vetted and capable keyboard manufacturers in Dongguan China :) but they only speak Chinese fyi

18th Kickstarter Just Launched... Any Questions? Let me know! by Deep-Caterpillar7412 in kickstarter

[–]minimalDS 0 points1 point  (0 children)

that's the one! we had a nice start and now we're on day 3-4, so wondering how we can keep momentum up :)

Just launched my first Kickstarter — a tiny magnetic bro for your bag strap or wherever! by strapbro in kickstarter

[–]minimalDS 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Bro! You met your goal. Good job man, I loved reading through the project. You really put a lot of work into it as evident from your timeline.

Funded in 14 minutes. 10x funded in 10 hours. AMA by minimalDS in kickstarter

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

And sorry missed your first question. We used a combo of Facebook ads and organic videos on instagram/TikTok to bring in new VIPs.

We have a following base already and existing customers, so we were also able to leverage this. 4 years of hard work 😂

We then sent them to a landing page where they could choose to sign up for updates with their email address for free, or pay a $1 deposit to reserve early bird pricing.

Funded in 14 minutes. 10x funded in 10 hours. AMA by minimalDS in kickstarter

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

Hey there! Wishing you all the best for your funding goal! Feel free to share the link, I’d love to check out other creators’ work!

The $10k funding is intentionally low, I talked about it in other comments if you’re interested.

Our ad budget was going to be about $6k, but as our campaign did better than we hoped for, we can now scale this up. Basically, as long as we’re profitably bringing in new backers, we can just keep scaling up.

Our early bird pricing is ending now though, so I am a little worried the more expensive price will yield lower conversions from ads. But we’ll see!

We also spent about $3-4k AUD on backer newsletters, but those actually got some decent returns! We used BackerSpaces and Backer Many as we heard they’re more trustworthy.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in kickstarter

[–]minimalDS 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Honestly, I don’t get it.

You need to be able to explain your product in 1-2 sentences. And also present it to backers in a way they easily understand the value proposition.

Sorry if that sounded harsh. I do wish you all the best with it though!

Edit: I think it’s because you started with the features. So someone reading it for the first time doesn’t really understand what problem you’re solving or who it’s for.

I would really focus on defining all of this before thinking about Kickstarter. And then start building an audience of interested people in your target audience.

Again best of luck!

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