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Tackling Kickstarter. July 10.2017 Launch Date (7)

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I'm opening up behind the scenes to my Kickstarter launch as an open case study for the STM Community. My hope is that other people can learn from my mistakes, wins & the process of launching a Kickstarter.


Kickstarter is a unique platform with respect to ecommerce. The best way to look at Kickstarter is as a pre-sales platform. You create marketing materials, build an audience & launch a campaign for 30 days (can be more or less). If you reach your funding goal (mine is $20,000 in 30 days) then you keep all the money raised, if you fail to reach your goal, you get nothing.

In my introduction post I mentioned that I'm partnering up with a former coworker of mine who owns an advertising agency. He had the original idea for Slango, a party game based on Slang words. We've been working on this idea together since March and are approaching our launch date.

Here is some of the things I've learned this far. I'll update this post as the Kickstarter launches.

Here's links to our website & social accounts if you want to learn more about Slango. I want to keep this post focused on Kickstarter & the launch process.
Slango Website
Slango Facebook
Slango Twitter

Kickstarter Basics
Kickstarter is a crowdfunding platform where people give money to see products come to life and receive those products once they're made.

The advantages of Kickstarter are

1. Low cost of entry. Depending on someones skill set, they could launch with as little as $500 invested.
2. Kickstarter has a ton of traffic. The platform has raised over 3 billion since inception.
3. Initial funding for a sustainable business. If you get pricing right and are successful, you'll have the operating capital to maintain a business.

Kickstarter Tips
These tips are from what I've read and what I have figured out this far.

These will increase your chances of success.

1. Invest in quality content. High quality video & graphics will be needed. Not just for marketing but the Kickstarter page too. You'll be competing against all the other products in your category for a pledgers attention, make sure you stand out.
2. Invest in building your audience early. We got a late start but we're focused on building our Facebook followers & email list. We're using Facebook page like ads and Facebook lead gen ads. These seem to be working good so far. The bigger your audience, the better.
3. Target people who already know what Kickstarter is. It's a unique platform and not everyone has heard of it, or is comfortable with crowd sourcing a product. Your chance of success will increase if you don't have to educate your audience on what Kickstarter is.
4. Social, email, affiliate & PR will be the best sources of traffic for your Kickstarter. Try to maximize the number of traffic sources out of the gate.
5. The Kickstarter algorithm favors products that do well out of the gate. If you get an initial boost in funding, your chance of increasing rank in their algorithm increases. They only get paid on successful Kickstarters, so they favor products that are doing well.

Mistakes Made This Far (1 week before launch)
I've made a few mistakes along the way so far. The biggest being we started building our audience two weeks before launching. I think 30 days before targeted launch day is best. We changed our box design & logo after creating initial marketing materials. Everything had to be swapped out which added to our costs.


I'll be keeping an eye on this thread but if you have any Kickstarter questions, I'll do my best to answer them.

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Cool stuff - looking forward to hearing how you get on!

How big is your audience at this point? 2 weeks to build an audience is tight, no question, but doable if you've got the skillz and time, and your product idea is hot.

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Our audience right now is:
Facebook Followers - 540
Twitter Followers - 76
Email Subscribers - 185

We're spending $200/day to build these lists up. Right now we're focusing on Facebook Followers and email subscribers. We estimate we'll have 1k Facebook Followers, 350 emails & 100 Twitter followers on our launch day.

We're getting Facebook Followers for $1.15/follower & emails at $4/email using Facebook lead gen ads.

Our targeting has been focused on 20-30 Male & Female with interests of Kickstarter AND Card Games.

We've got several thousand bookmarked for Facebook & Twitter ads once we go launch. We're spending half of it in the first two days to try and ride the Kickstarter algorithm to success.

We noticed a dramatic improvement in our Follower rate & Email signup rate when we changed from adcopy about the game to pure promotional adcopy. Stuff like "The Hot New Party Game Launching Soon On Kickstarter" has worked a lot better than adcopy about gameplay & whatnot. It appears so far that the click-baity & promotional copy is the way to go.

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Are you active on Reddit too? That'd definitely be an early port of call for me if I was launching something like a card game. A successful thread there can drive a **lot** of traffic.

https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/ is probably the place I'd start. They're focused on more "nerdy" board games, but they've had positively-received threads about party games in the past.

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That's a solid recommendation. Neither myself or my co-founder are active on Reddit. That'd be an awesome community to tap into but I'd hate to create an account with the sole purpose of posting about Slango. I might be able to get a buddy of mine who is active on Reddit to post about it.

Thanks for sharing that part of the forum. I honestly didn't even think about Reddit as a traffic source but it's definitely a solid one.

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Thanks for sharing the insights, obscure_marketer! I've got a few questions for you:
1. Where will you print your game and how much does it cost you?
2. How do you target people who like partying / board games? I assume you tapped on Cards Against Humanity audience? Anything else?

Good luck with your campaign!

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Have you guys tried any direct FB ads --> Kickstarter LP? If so, how did you configure tracking?

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