What We Learned Raising $1.5M on Kickstarter in 2017 | Hacker News Reader

What We Learned Raising $1.5M on Kickstarter in 2017

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106 pointstdrnd29 comments

I would gauge success on Kickstarter not by raising money but delivering product to the people who trusted you.

Kickstarter could do a better job of framing what it is you are "buying". I imagine that many people don't quite get the premise fully.

definitely. funding enables to take the second step, which is the hardest part.

Kickstarter is a funding platform, so it makes sense to mean "successfully funded project" when you say "successful on Kickstarter". Just like you might say that you were "successful in your company's second round of funding" even if your company later folds and the investors lose most of their money.

Typically, if you're patient, you can get the same product 1-2 years later for (sometimes) fractions of the KS price(s). Granted, you might miss out on some add-on swag, but the core product remains the same.

I find KS to be more about what kind of potential collector's item might one get by investing in an idea - at least in the things I'm interested in. For some, the collector's item (e.g. a custom art print that comes with a game) is worth the expense. For many others, patience is key. So many times successful products that make it to the marketplace are sold after the fact for very reasonable prices.

KS is brilliant at playing at our emotions and opening our wallets. I've gone down this path a few times with retro games.

I used to be an avid supporter of kickstarter in 2013-14, however, I've experienced too many products which over promise and under deliver.

Now, I would rather pay the 10% more for a product after reviews come out than be an early adopter because in the long run it saves me money from buying bad quality products.

I think a lot of people are starting to realize this, and kickstarter itself is losing credibility.

too many products which over promise and under deliver.

Either that or people are just buying and re-branding stuff from Alibaba.

It's a tough one. Kickstarter incentivizes over-promising. If you don't over-promise, you don't go viral and you lose out to others who do.

>Now, I would rather pay the 10% more for a product after reviews

I always thought the point of Kickstarter was to help an early stage company by throwing a few bucks their way and getting a small (cheap) reward for it. Instead it turned into a pre-order system where backers expect heavy discounts on the final product. This can easily become disastrous for hardware kickstarters. Not only are you taking on liability at an early phase of development (when you really have no idea what it will take to take the idea to production), given how easy hardware products can incur cost-overruns, those companies will incur a heavy loss on the final product. Ideally early backers should expect to pay a heavy premium on kick-starter 'pre-orders'.

I always thought that backers were paying a lower price because in a sense they were bearing a lot more risk than later buyers.

I.e. lots of quirks will be fixed after the kickstarter version precisely because lots of experience is gained after you actually try to produce something at scale.

I agree that in the beginning the original idea could have been for people to be able to buy product X (usually not existing yet) plus some small reward thanking you for your support.

However after a while people started realizing that scaling production for widget X is actually much harder than it looks at first, and since a lot of kickstarters underestimated the challenge they kind of lost the "faith" of the backers.

Could it be then that as a "community" of sorts things evolved such that, since as a backer I know that the amount of failure is high, I expect a heavy discount in exchange for the higher perceived risk and so kickstarters who don't do that just don't get off the ground?

On the other hand, I think Kickstarter suffers from the same problem as Steam's Early Access games: development stagnation over time.

Lots of products I've seen, and even some that I've backed have some kind of app, and so even if you got the hardware piece as expected and you loved it, you still rely on the app being updated at least to fix current bugs but ideally also to introduce missing promised features (if any). But what happens when the kickstarters feel like doing something else now, or just feel like the project ran long enough that they don't want to work on it anymore, it was too stressful/dissapoiting, etc?

So aside from the different opinions on when exactly is a product maker ethically able to be "off the hook" for its creation, in hindsight it seems obvious that there's definitely an "unspoken" risk regarding the kickstarters' commitment, that backers might assume will be indefinite when in reality is usually more limited than even a couple of years.

In the end this causes a feedback loop such that as a creator you need to promise a low pre-order price, which might in turn not be profitable enough to actually deliver the product as promised, causing the backers to feel frustrated when the delivery date doesn't materialize (I've waited 2+ years and even longer for software projects), further causing them to distrust new projects and finally making them demand a very attractive price because it's considered an unsafe bet, which turns into a low pre-order price...

>I always thought that backers were paying a lower price because in a sense they were bearing a lot more risk than later buyers

If that's the attitude and that's how backers see themselves, then the backers are just setting up the startup for failure. There's a reason why most startups don't go for debt financing and if they do, it's usually out of desperation.

>I expect a heavy discount in exchange for the higher perceived risk and so kickstarters who don't do that just don't get off the ground?

Sure. That's how payday lenders make their money. Doesn't mean it's good for borrower to use them.

Not sure if I would call it an attitude, but I can certainly understand people that got burned more than once having a lower tolerance for risk. I.e. why should I keep on having faith in Kickstarter projects if they keep failing on me?

The answer could be product/creator fandom or maybe trust in the creator's team ability to successfully deliver something really cool, so a discount is not expected e.g. The Oatmeal seems to have delivered twice IIRC and so backers' confidence in him is high, thus they would probably not blink twice backing a third project even if there's zero discount on it.

But the answer might lie on the other side as well. e.g. Godus' fans loosing faith in a creator due to lack of promises delivered. So if Peter Molyneux launches a kickstarter project again, people would probably just be willing to "bet" very little money (if at all), because you are likely to get nothing, or very little, in return.

How is that unreasonable?

All sales and marketing tends to incentivize over-promising, especially if selling to an audience who are not domain experts.

>Now, I would rather pay the 10% more for a product after reviews come out than be an early adopter...

I think maybe this misses the point of kickstarter a bit. Its not really a place to "buy products". Its a place to fund a wild dream and see what happens. When I back a project, the product is secondary. I like to watch the process. Its entertainment. Hint: You'll get lots more backers like me if you seem extremely transparent and post project updates often. If I want products, its Amazon.com. I'm here for the journey. Some projects are triumphs, some tragedies. Don't hide it if it turns out the latter. I paid to ride along, even if its a tear-jerker.

Yeah, you may get more specifically looking for the journey or process, but you lose the other 90% of funders, as they soon realize that few kickstarters actually pan out.

It's been interesting with this being our third project. The community feel has definitely changed. Even the messages and comments we've received over time have shifted. People seem less interested in the journey and more interested in what they get.

The beauty of kickstarter is in boardgames imo. New, fun games come out regularly from funder backing on KS.

Yes, it's a lot better for small creative projects where the work has been done and it just needs to fund a print run.

I've learned that graphs with unlabelled vertical axes tell the reader less than nothing.

It tells you a lot about what the person who made the graph thinks about their audience's sophistication.

It usually tells you they are trying to frame the data in a way to support a specific view instead, instead of basing their view off the actual conclusions the data provides.

good feedback. can add that. just graphed actual data they provided us to see what we could learn. it helped us to better understand the trends beyond our own projects and talking to other creators.

Off shoot topic but does anyone know if there are any tips or best practices for a socially awkward dude to make a kick starter?

Make a good prototype, be honest about what it does, be realistic (= slightly pessimistic) about what you can do with the money you're trying to raise.

I don't think social skills matter as much as those.

Don't you have to be exciting and likeable in the video?

Nah, just pay some cute girls to be that while you narrate.

Ed:

I may have phrased it snarkishly, but that's honest advice -- if you're not good on camera, find a film student to help direct brief bits you're in (so you perform better, are framed well, etc) and get other students to do most of the on camera work.

There's a reason most marketing materials use professional actors, and if your strength isn't presentation, you should too. There are lots of students looking for portfolio work (at very reasonable prices).

Depends on your product and audience I would guess. Another tip could be to hire someone.

I don't know why you're getting downvoted because this is a real problem for so many people, i.e. the whole "you must have a video where you talk to the camera".

Be genuine and sincere. My three Kickstarters have been successfully funded and my video was made with Windows Movie Maker, me talking, and a quick pan of my prototype.

I'm not asking for hundreds of thousands of dollars. I'm reasonable in my rewards, my pricing, and my funding amount.

My last 3 campaigns were for $2500 (raised 10,000), $3000 (raised ~$5700), and my current one is for $5000 and I'm currently at ~$6300.

The best thing I have found is to just keep people in the loop. Even if nothing has changed, I make an update every week to let the backers know I'm still around.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1985705009/piplay-porta...

Very good! Will be re-reading periodically to work out how best we should manage a campaign if we wake up our draft one!

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