5 LESSONS LEARNED FROM OUR KICKSTARTER
Want to know how to succeed in a Kickstarter campaign?
Then why not learn from where we went wrong.
Although we didn’t reach our funding goal, we learned a lot from running our Kickstarter. These are lessons we learned that we will be implementing in our next years Kickstarter. This Kickstarter is yet to be announced, but will be one of the most unique and exciting projects we have seen in a number of years
But for now, I am going to talk to you about 5 Kickstarter lessons learned, that you can use to help you be more effective in your Kickstarter. Also, how we will be incorporating these into our next big project. You will just have to keep an eye on our social media for when the next big project is going to be announced.
1. Location-Based Projects Are Very Difficult to Obtain Funding For
If we are using location as a main factor in our Kickstarter campaign, we may struggle. This is largely because Kickstarter is a global crowdfunding platform that allows people from all over the world to invest in your company. In light of this, there are a number of things we need to think about if we are going to launch a location-based campaign.
1a. Don’t just have local Kickstarter rewards
Although it will be great to have vouchers and coupons for people to come and visit your venue, not everyone will be able to.
This type of reward is the easiest form of reward for you to supply, but isn’t any good for people who live too far away that they wouldn’t be able to visit. You end up excluding these people from actually being able to gain anything from investing in your project.
With Kickstarter, this is not the best. Instead, we want to create Kickstarter rewards that can be redeemed by people from all over the world. In reflection, this is where we went wrong. Our rewards were focused on providing vouchers for the actual soft play escape room. Although they sold well, they didn’t have the same pull as something that people in the USA, Canada and other countries could invest in. Largely because they wouldn’t have been able to come.
1b. If you need to pick a location, pick somewhere that is easily accessible
There are many interesting projects out there that do get funding even though they are in a reasonably inaccessible area. Nevertheless, our campaign was in Portsmouth, United Kingdom. This is a city not well visited by international people and not a city you would visit on a holiday to the UK.
So, where would you go? London.So, we want to make sure that we are going to build that project in London, Edinburgh for example. Why you ask? Because these are cities that have lots of national and international visitors. As such, this broadens our reach of potential investors. Our lesson learned form this: our next project is going to be based in London.
2. Kickstarter Rewards Must Be Diverse and Adaptable
Your rewards are the lifeblood of your campaign. So we need to make that we are getting as much feedback on those rewards before we launch our campaign. Launch surveys, polls, join gamer groups, do whatever you can to reach people and get feedback.
We also need to make sure we incentivise that feedback too. Although people love to give their opinions, people also love companies that give a special thanks for consumers giving their opinion. When we have collected this feedback, show your backers that you are listening.
Implement the changes and spread the word about what you have changed and why. Congratulate certain people on making amazing suggestions. Because they will. Although we did receive a lot of feedback prior to and during the campaign, we didn’t shout about the changes as much as we should of.
Next time, we will be getting our potential backers involved with every step of the process to generate hype and build engagement in the campaign.
3. Some Backers Don’t Know They Won’t Get Charged Straight Away
Many people approached in person and said that they are waiting for payday before they invest. Of which we responded: “you will not get charged unless we succeed”. This struck a chord with our backers, as they were worried they would lose their money. Make sure all of your potential backers know this fact.
This is especially true if you go down the “all or nothing” route. This could actually make the difference between hitting your target and not.
4. You Need to Create Strong, Viral Content
Shareability is key. You must lots of unique, interesting and valuable content prior to the campaign launch. This doesn’t mean just your Kickstarter video and writing the page for the campaign. This means sending out memes, mini videos, short interviews, anything that can build hype. One type of content that we regretted not doing was raising intrigue. We tended to tell everybody everything before launching.
At the time, we thought this was the best idea. Raise hype to raise funds. This isn’t necessarily the case. We want to raise hype in small groups and trust them with the knowledge. These will turn into your campaign ambassadors and will help you spread the word once the campaign is launched. If you trust them with a piece of information, they will trust you. This can be a really neat way of making a huge impact upon launch of the campaign and grabbing those backers early.
5. Do Not Pitch The Project As An Escape Room
There are quite a few Kickstarter projects about building a new escape room. Many of which are nothing new. Not a groundbreaking or unique, just a straight-up escape room. What we thought with our project is that we are creating a disrupting escape room. An escape room which people from all over the UK would want to travel specifically to. Although this is the case, we think our downfall was advertising it as an escape room.
As there are so many escape rooms now, people do not need to back potential projects. They can just pick any one of the existing escape rooms and just go. They don’t need to wait.
Although our next Kickstarter project won’t be an escape room, we want to make sure that we don’t compare the projects. We will not be advertising it as such. It will something completely different. Follow our social media for information coming out on what it is.
So, What Will We Do Next?
I really hope you have learned from where we went wrong and can implement these into your future projects. It is important that the entertainments community works together in establishing how we can crate these amazing projects we want to create.
We are creative people with unique ideas, and we all want each other to succeed. We all want to provide unique entertaining experiences that show off our creativity and innovation.
What Can You Do?
Make sure you follow us on Facebook to see what things we have up our sleeve very soon. Announcements for a brand new escape room is only a month or two away. Make sure you are first in line to play our new and exciting next escape room.