56 – Kickstarter Tips with Jenni Kowal

Laura

0:04
Hi, this is Laura Lee Griffin.

Nikki

0:06
And this is Nikki May with the Startist Society, inspiring you to stop getting in your own way and start building an art biz and life that you love.

Laura

0:15
We are artists who believe strongly in the power of community, accountability, following your intuition, taking small actionable steps and breaking down the barriers of fear and procrastination that keep you stuck.

Nikki

0:30
Follow along with us on our creative business journey as we encourage you on yours.

So if you listened to last week’s episode, we interviewed Jenni Kowal of Anytime Creative. And we talked to her specifically about her Kickstarter campaign for her Self Care Adventure Cards. And we wanted to add some extra tips for you on getting started with your own Kickstarter campaign. So we asked Jenni to give us just a few tips, we’re also going to offer as a download on our show notes page. So Jenni, let’s get started with some specific tips about getting started with Kickstarter.

Jenni

1:13
Thank you for having me, I’d love to share more tips.

Laura

1:17
So what is tip number one, Jenni?

Jenni

1:20
If you’ve never made a Kickstarter before, I really recommend researching other campaigns that are in your niche and outside of your niche. So if you’re a photographer, you can look at other you know, photo books or print campaigns. But if you want to look at other campaigns that have performed really well and take notes of like what they did specifically that caught your eye that is going to help you craft the page, craft your design and the video as well.

Laura

1:49
Oh, that’s great advice.

Nikki

1:50
And this Kickstarter give you a way to see like, can you sort things by like, what are the most successful campaigns to kind of see that kind of thing?

Jenni

1:58
I believe that you can, and there’s different categories that you can filter by so you can you know, what is the best in technology? What is the best in art?

Nikki

2:09
Cool.

Jenni

2:10
So yeah, like, there are a lot of features there. And I would just recommend not getting too copycat about them, but really just notice, what lights you up about the campaign.

Laura

2:21
Yeah, it’s sort of like you were talking about Steal Like an Artist. It’s where you take inspiration from multiple different places, we talked about that in the last episode a little bit. And then you kind of put them all in a bag and shake them up and see what comes out. So that you can get like the best pieces out of everything and then compile it into your own original thing.

Nikki

2:42
Yeah, steal like an artist, not like a slime ball.

Jenni

2:46
I like that.

Nikki

2:49
You can all quote me on that. All right, what else? What else have you got for us?

Jenni

2:54
Okay, so the video is very important. Don’t skip this, try to have good lighting. If you can have audio, you know, professionally, that’s great, audio is very important. But if you don’t have professional audio, just make sure you’re doing it in a place that you can hear it without like a huge echo. I’m saying this because I’ve done this before. And it can be kind of embarrassing to look back at my videos. But if you move forward, just understanding that the video can be under 90 seconds, it doesn’t have to be long, really introduce what you’re selling, and why it’s going to make a difference in someone’s life. And you can also add videos like in the page itself. So if you wanted to do like a demonstration video, you can also put that embedded into the Kickstarter story page.

Laura

3:45
Alright, tip number three…

Jenni

3:47
Utilize your pre-launch time. So once you’ve set a date for your Kickstarter, and how long you want the duration to be, which, you know, other secret tip, probably under 30 days. Utilize that time before the launch to really get people excited and tell them about the product. Maybe do some sort of Facebook freebie where you might do like a free giveaway or have people come join your group and have like a three day challenge, something to get people excited about your niche and then when the launch starts, you’ll be having people already ready to buy. And also reach out to your network, ask people to share it, really celebrate it and just know that it might be uncomfortable. But this is your baby, you want it out there. And if you can get as many eyes on it in the first couple days, it will be successful.

Laura

4:46
Now you mentioned a three day challenge and I don’t think in the last episode, you actually told us what the challenge was that you ran. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Jenni

4:53
Okay, so in my niche, which is self care and creativity, I did a three day challenge which was about Building your self care roadmap. So we really, every day we got into something different about what you could uncover about yourself. I had journal prompts, I had videos explaining it. And in the challenge, people could submit their answers to me. And they were entered to win a giveaway of the product itself. And I also did a coaching call for the people that submitted their homework. So, you know, you can have all different types of rewards. But depending on what you offer, you can make it anything you’d like.

Nikki

5:31
And it’s just all about building excitement around your product. And those people who were in the challenge and got into it are going to be more likely to share with everybody.

Jenni

5:41
Yeah, that’s exactly what happened.

Laura

5:43
Awesome.

Nikki

5:45
And what’s tip number four?

Jenni

5:46
Okay, so you can choose your rewards tiers. So basically, you know, people can donate $5 and get a sticker or, you know, whatever the cost of the product is, but you don’t have to go crazy with them. So, you know, if someone’s going to spend $100, and you’re giving them everything under the sun, it might get a little complicated in the back end, because you do have to manage that. So for myself, personally, I didn’t have any crazy rewards tiers, I just had kind of pre-sale pricing to get in at the first 50 backers, and then I also discounted for bulk purchases. So you don’t have to go crazy and really just decide from the get go what they’ll be. And you can always add a surprise later. But I would say keep it simple.

Laura

6:33
Especially if you’re just getting started, it can be intimidating, right? So keeping it simple for yourself, the first go around totally makes sense.

Nikki

6:40
Do they have a recommended number of tiers?

Jenni

6:43
I’m not sure off the top of my head, but I would say keep it like less than six. Just keep it simple. And then like I said, you can have a limit to them. So if you only want 50 people to buy it, then that will get grayed out once they hit that tier, like once they hit the limit.

Nikki

7:02
Right.

Laura

7:03
How about tip number five.

Jenni

7:05
So tip number five would be, you can have stretch goals as well. But also decide ahead of time if you’re going to complete them. So a stretch goal is if you sell like $500 of your product, that means you’re going to unlock another like level of your product. So for me, I was able to throw in bookmarks to my self care cards. But I had decided ahead of time that it was going to happen no matter what so I could really get them produced. Another example for stretch goals would be a different color or a different, you know, texture on if you’re selling cards or anything like that. So it just gets people excited about like when you hit another tier, not a tier, but when you unlock another level of your kind of goal amount, you can then announce that to your Instagram, you can send a Kickstarter message to all your backers. And that just gets people more hyped and that they get an extra thing in their product.

Laura

8:06
Oh right, so you get to enhance the product that they already bought and so they’re getting like an added bonus kind of thing.

Jenni

8:13
Exactly, yeah.

Laura

8:13
Yes, that’s cool.

Nikki

8:15
Yeah. And I believe we have one bonus tip, tip number six.

Jenni

8:21
So my last tip would be to make sure that your audience stays updated. So like I was saying, with the stretch goals, you can kind of announce that something is happening with a Kickstarter weekly. So if your campaign is a month long, I would aim to have or updates throughout it, as well as maybe at least monthly if you’re going into production afterwards. So that way that ensures kind of trust in your backers and making sure that they know that something’s happening behind the scenes, and they have given you their money after the campaign is fully funded, and they want to know that their products coming. And this is going to be kind of a different audience than people that you might just get someone on your website. So really treat it like they are these special, you know, first adopters of your product and keep them updated with celebrations and they’re there to have an awesome time with you.

Nikki

9:17
That makes total sense because, well, it’s the same advice that you give when you’re talking about growing an email list is that you don’t want to stop sending updates and let people forget about you. I’ve done that with Kickstarter campaigns where I’ve backed somebody, and then once the Kickstarter campaign is over, they don’t send any updates and you’re like, well, is my product getting to get made? Am I ever going to get this? And then sometimes a year goes by you haven’t heard from them and all of a sudden you get something I’m like, Oh, I totally forgot about that.

Laura

9:48
Well, I have a question about that. Like how do people communicate in Kickstarter? Once somebody signs up, you’re able to email them directly through Kickstarter?

Jenni

9:57
Yeah, there is like a little update platform. form. So you have an option to update everybody, like as a public feed. So I could just make like a post that you could find if you’re not a backer, and that person can see it.

Nikki

10:11
Yeah, it’s almost like a blog post.

Jenni

10:12
And then you can also have backer only updates. So you can say, hey, like, you know, this is in production and we’ll, we’ll be giving you more details. You can also micromanage it down to like if they bought a certain tier. So if they say they bought something that didn’t require shipping, but you need to tell people that needed the shipping, then you can just like target them directly. And then it just goes through the Kickstarter platform. As long as they have their email account set up, they’ll get them.

Laura

10:43
Okay. So it’ll go as an email to them not they don’t have to be logged into Kickstarter to be able to see the updates that they actually get an email pushed out to them. Okay, that’s cool.

Jenni

10:53
And one other thing I did was, on my Instagram, I added people as backers that were close friends, like I there’s a close friends feature, and you just kind of see a little green circle. So I made that only for people that I that were following me that I knew were backers. And that was another way to kind of give little updates here and there. Because that made them feel special too.

Nikki

11:15
Yeah, that’s a really smart way to use that option on Instagram.

Laura

11:20
Jenni, these have been some great tips for us for Kickstarter campaigns. I know I’ve always been super intimidated by it and like how to get started and you’ve made it seem a lot more accessible. And so that might be something I’ll try out in the future. I don’t know about you, Nikki.

Nikki

11:36
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve actually started to set up a Kickstarter campaign. I have a couple of products that I’ve wanted to do. And then it just gets terrifying and I’ve stopped so I mean, you’re kind of our hero right now, Jenni.

Jenni

11:53
I’m happy I get help. It’s really it’s not as bad as you think it’s just another platform for launching something and you know really getting those pre-sales going to validate your product.

Nikki

12:04
To get a downloadable PDF of Jenni’s Kickstarter tips, go to startistsociety.com/kickstartertips.

Laura

12:13
Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next week.