Our Journey To Empower A Thousand New Kickpreneurs | Hacker News Reader

Our Journey To Empower A Thousand New Kickpreneurs

kickpreneur.com

32 pointsbound0087 comments

I took a look at the kickstarter stat page and I was pleasantly surprised to find that they have a 44% success rate at funding projects. I expected that to be much lower. Tech projects have a 34% success rate which still seems high to me, but it is interesting to note that this is the second worst success rate.

I would be interested in what makes a kickstarter campaign click. The other side of the coin which is equally important is to find out what makes a campaign fail and the lessons that come out of that. Could you please also interview some folks that were unable to reach their pledge and how they felt they could have amended their approach ?

http://www.kickstarter.com/help/stats

Awesome, thanks. Yes, we actually have some interviews scheduled with failed Kickstarters. The most common reason for failed campaigns is simply that people haven't prepared enough or prepared ineffectively.

Do you have a network of interested prospects? Can you get their attention?

Most successful Kickstarters created lists of people who to reach out to, by which means, on which date, with notes on what to say and what their desired outcome was.

Timing is critical. You want to have things in place before launching.

Many failed Kickstarters didn't do that. They just created their project, and then plastered their Twitter and Facebook audience with "Here's our Kickstarter, please back us". And they overestimated the amount of backers that would come via Kickstarter itself.

That sounds scarily similar to 'build it and they will come' :) Thanks for sharing that.

Hey, Ramin here one of the founders at Kickpreneur.com. We actually wanted to make this a Show HN post to hear your feedback :) Excited to hear what you guys think...

What's the most surprising thing you've learned so far from interviewing people?

There were many surprises, but one repeating theme was: how to promote a Kickstarter project long before your Kickstarter project actually goes life, and that there are really lots of ways to do that.

For example, Amanda Palmer drummed up support on Twitter by drawing little sketches of people who tweeted their pics to her. It was a very personal way of relating to them, and it established a really strong bond with people who were then later willing to back her Kickstarter

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