A few weeks back I went to an event in Shoreditch hosted by Kickstarter, and as my piece on the UK Crowdfunding Association event seemed to go down quite well I thought I'd share some thoughts from this too.
I'm a fan of kickstarter. I think it's a good platform for crowdfunding, but all to often we hear only about the great success stories that come out of kickstarter and not the immense hard work that goes into preparing for these campaigns.
Also we don't often hear the actual statistics behind kickstarter and the number of campaigns that fail too, but in this relatively short session the team at kickstarter shared some interesting numbers, and whilst much of this was already in the public domain, it is still interesting stuff.
The session was basically a panel Q&A with someone from Kano, which raised $1.5m, Sam Labs, which was still running at the time and ended up raising around £125k, and a couple of other campaigns too.
I was most interested in Sam Labs and Kano though. They both talked a lot about the preparation they'd put into their campaigns up front, how much they'd researched press contacts and social media influencers well in advance of starting the campaign. They both also talked about pre-funding campaigns and making sure that people were prep'd to come in from the moment the campaign launches.
Lastly, there was some good stuff about how to structure a campaign. That most campaigns succeed at around 5-7 reward tiers and runs for 30 days. This might sound sort of obvious, but it all makes good sense.
There's a science to crowdfunding, and probably an art too, but the more information you can get about how to run your campaign, about what works and what doesn't, the better. As such, these kind of events are excellent and help to provide context and very useful information about what works and what doesn't.
If crowdfunding is something you're considering for your product you should consider getting along to some of these soon.
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