Originally posted on Live Fee and Start
Your campaign is now live, congratulations!
The next 48 hours are going to be super hard and crazy. No doubt, you will have many moments of questioning how you ever got yourself into this mess. But hey, you did it!
Now is the most important part: hit your goal on the first day, or die trying. Yes, you read that right. Your goal should be to raise all the money you asked for on day one.
Why, you ask? Because all Kickstarter campaigns show exactly where a project stands. There is this little green bar that shows how much of your funds you have raised. You will learn to loathe this little green bar. It shows people that your project either will be successful or will never be. If you get through the first 72 hours and your little green bar is still sitting at 10% full, you are in trouble. If it is 100% full, you are golden. People want to be part of successful projects, and that little green bar is the barometer they use to judge your campaign. The best way to mitigate this whole problem is just to fill the green bar fully on day one.
Ok, so what if you don’t get to 100% on day one? It’s not the end of the world. However, you will have a much bigger uphill climb during your campaign.
That also raises another question that we get asked a lot: How do I choose my funding goal? It is a tough one. It’s a balance of asking for just enough money that you realistically think you can get very early in your campaign. At the same time, you will be on the hook to make whatever it is you dreamed up, so make sure you have enough funding to do so. It’s impossible to answer this generically, so I would just recommend making sure you do your homework up-front to know what it will really cost to create your product.
The first 72 hours of any campaign is a firestorm of craziness. You need to be sending out emails to everyone you know, and ask them to share it with everyone they know. Basically, beg anyone you can find to give you money. Reach out to every reporter/journalist you can find and pitch your story. Ninety-nine percent of them will probably ignore you, but just keep plugging away.
Once you hit the one-week mark, things will start to slow down. You will get fewer pledges per day and less media coverage. This is when you need to start attending those live events you planned out and doing cross-promotion. We usually look for similar or complimentary campaigns and reach out to them and see if they will share our project, and we will do the same. You can even have special deals although this can sometimes be logistically challenging. Either way, the next few weeks of your campaign will be grueling as you try to scrounge for more people, so have some things planned out. We usually send a weekly update to all the backers to keep them in the loop.
The last few days are when things go back to firestorm craziness. We like to attend a live event this last week to try and get as much promotion as possible. You can reach out to friends and family that were on the fence before or haven’t quite figured out how to use Kickstarter yet. Put fliers on cars and be creative. Do whatever you think will get the most traffic to your Kickstarter page. This is the time to be shameless.
It is especially important for you to know that once your campaign is over, you will never be able to change your campaign page again. So, if you need to make any last minute changes, do so before the clock hits zero.
Finally, your campaign will be over, and you can sleep again without checking your backer count every five minutes.
You’re done, congratulations! Now the hard work really begins.