A successful Kickstarter is really about having a dead zone strategy that keeps people engaged and brings in more people every week of the campaign. The dead zone is the time between the first 3-5 days of your campaign and the last 3-5 days of your campaign when interest and excitement wanes.
A big launch is important, but a campaign is really won or lost in the 2-3 weeks between the big launch and the big finale. If you’ve done it right, you’ll get 50% of your funds in the first week of your campaign, and then 25% of your total raise in the last week of the campaign. However, how much you end up making is heavily tied to how much you make during the middle of your campaign.
I am always doing collaborations with other campaigns, opening up rewards and closing them down, and trying to create little waves throughout my campaign every single week. I’ve now run a bunch with TONS of emails and a nearly infinite supply of backer swaps, and until now at least, there is still a spike at the end, but I end up with $2-3K more per week in the middle than I would have if I didn’t keep doing those things throughout the weeks.
People always talk about having a BIG first three days, and YES, that is phase ONE, but phase TWO is equally important, and usually is the difference between a moderate success and a huge one.
It’s not super hard to have a dead zone strategy.
It involves reaching out to other campaigns to arrange backer update swaps with them (you can see an example
here) where you send an update with information on their project and they do the same for your project in their update. Look for people which campaigns around your level of funding, and then try to add somewhere between 1-6 into an update. The more you add into each update, the more you have to push each campaign and give people a reason to click. Remember, this is about BOTH of you winning, so do the best job you can making the project enticing.
A good dead zone strategy also involves doing weekly “prize packs” which open at the beginning of the week and close at the end of the week, so you always have some sort of offer going on. I like to arrange prize packs with other authors that all backers get that back by a second date while ALSO mixing those with stretch goals. It means I have reasons to reach out to backers and new people all the time with new information.
It gives ME control, instead of the other way around. Having a plan for how you’ll draw excitement every week is CRITICAL to your campaign. If you don’t feel like doing that, then there is nothing wrong with having a 10 or 17 day campaign instead of a full month in order to naturally have less of a dead zone.
You can also run ads, or do challenges, or something else fun, but I have find the above two strategies work best for me.
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