5 lessons from our failed Kickstarter campaign

I think crowdfunding campaigns are wonderful. Entrepreneurs, artists and creatives can use a website like Kickstarter to get projects funded that might otherwise have neer seen the light of day, or to take preorders to derisk a new product. The success stories really are astounding: The Coolest Cooler got over $13 million, the Solar Roadways project raised $2.2 million, and the Soma water filter creators published the famous article "Hacking Kickstarter: How to Raise $100,000 in Ten Days".

Still, the chances of success are slim. Of all Kickstarter campaigns launched, about 40% are successful. Of those, 70% raise less than $10,000. Few have the runaway success we've seen in the previous examples I've mentioned.

An unsuccessful campaign is a huge time sink. If your campaign is 30 days long, the Kickstarter can easily turn into the only thing you focus on for those 30 days, plus the several weeks of preparation before the campaign even begins.

That's what happened to us. We ran an unsuccessful 40 day campaign. We were trying for $30,000 and made it just shy of $14,000. With at least three weeks of preparation leading up to it, we easily sank two months trying to make it work. While it wasn't the only thing we worked on in those two months, it was certainly our priority. We also wouldn't call it a complete failure- we made many connections from our initiative that might pan out in ways we don't expect. Regardless, we didn't reach our funding goal, which we really would have liked to do. We did learn a few lessons from our campaign that we want to share.

5 Lessons from our failed Kickstarter Campaign

1. Your Kickstarter will take up most of your workdays before and during the campaign. I can't stress how much this took us off guard. I wish someone had told us this earlier in the process. Plan on planning the campaign to a T, and improvising a whole lot once the campaign actually starts. It will be a lot of time. Get used to it.
2. Kickstarter is not a good fit for early stage projects. The more we looked, the more we saw that successful projects were already finished, and the inventors are just looking for preorders. Humans are creatures of short attention span- we don't want to have to wait a year to see something finished. In our case, I think this drastically limited our chances. Most all who saw our Kickstarter page and the video agreed that it was a great idea, and they'd like to support it, but...
   Trying another Kickstarter with a finished product, I foresee it being MUCH more successful. It's much easier to buy in to a product when you can see it functioning as intended, and you don't have to be convinced that it can and will be built.
3. Expensive products, especially if they're not finished, are a tough sell. This was the second big issue we had going against us. Our product isn't a $50 widget but rather a complex $1,000 piece of machinery. You might make a $50 impulse purchase, you don't make $1,000 impulse purchase. You think about it for a while. And by the time you decide, the Kickstarter may be over. Or, more likely, you'll have decided that you'll spend the $1,000 when the product is ready and you'll feel like the $1,000 was well spent.
   We were hoping to get at least one preorder from our Kickstarter campaign. Looking back, this was very unlikely. It is difficult to imagine someone putting $1,000 down on a preorder for a product that won't exist for at least a year.
4. "Social impact" products or projects benefiting others are a tough sell as well.
   The final issue we had going against us was that as a social business, we were essentially asking visitors to our Kickstarter page to make a charitable contribution. Sure, maybe they were getting some cool (and overpriced) swag in return, but for the most part the visitors to our page weren't wheelchair users. They wouldn't be using the product for themselves or buying it for a friend.
   On the other hand, you can look at something that's very successful like the Coolest, mentioned above. It's easy to see why it garnered so much public support: you can easily imagine yourself and your friends taking one to the beach. It's harder as a visitor to the Kickstarter page to imagine a wheelchair user suddenly being able to sit at a countertop, or see over people's shoulders at a concert.
   Not convinced? Typical projects have a success rate of about 40%, as I mentioned above. But of 18 wheelchair projects in the technology and design categories, only 2 were successful. That's about an 11% success rate, a quarter of the average. And the two that were successful had relatively tiny funding goals- $5,000 and $1,500. 
5. News sources may not pick up your campaign, social media virality may elude you, and you may find yourself unglamorously spending your last campaign days desperately trying last minute strategies to garner contributions.
   We were disillusioned by the low payoff of our news media and social media efforts. Even local media sources didn't seem interested in what we were working on. Strategies including advertisements, live events, and celebrity endorsements just didn't pan out. Probably about 70% of our contributors were friends, family, and connections we already knew. It was frustrating. I do wish we had been more prepared for the ups and downs of the campaign.
   

This article isn't meant to dampen anyone's spirits or enthusiasms for a Kickstarter campaign. Instead, we hope to give you a balanced view and share our experience so that you can make a better decision about whether a crowdfunding campaign is the right strategy for your venture at its current stage.

Feel free to share your thoughts, comments and experience with us!
Dillon Dakota Carroll
Levaté LLC