🔍 How To Get a Kickstarter Campaign Funded In 22 Minutes

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Have you backed any projects on Kickstarter? Do you feel a special connection with these brands over others?

Although more suitable for some products than others, crowdfunding can be greatly beneficial for brands. Other than funding, it helps to validate product market fit. It can be an effective marketing channel to attract and build a community.

I followed the brand Poplight in their Kickstarter crowdfunding journey. It’s a wall light brand that got fully funded in 22 mins and reached $100k in funding in just one week.

Their promotion partner is an agency called Jellop which is behind some of the most funded Kickstarter campaigns for brands like Peak Design, Pebble Watch, and Exploding Kitten. Researching those  Kickstarter brands’ playbooks and Poplight’s, we found some common thread strategies. 

Three months before the Kickstarter campaign started, Poplight already had a well-designed live landing page and started creating content on social media as if it were a launched brand.

Through consistent content uploading, they share their brand story and product demos to gradually accumulate an audience. Luckily, Poplight had a video that went viral on TikTok before launch. It might sound too good to be true but if you do some research, you know it’s not impossible to go viral on TikTok in 3 months.

Poplight also uses paid ads to drive traffic to the landing page (how I discovered them). According to the founder of Peak Design, what the Kickstarter agency helped them to do with the paid ads campaign is not only targeting people interested in your type of product but also those familiar with Kickstarter campaigns and have been backers of Kickstarter campaigns before. This is important to ensure the users you acquire wouldn’t drop off at the end of the funnel due to unfamiliarity with Kickstarter.

Both organic and paid marketing tactics are used to drive people to their landing page for them to collect an email list before launch.

It’s almost a no-brainer to collect an email list before launch to make sure you reach your fund goal on time (Kickstarter has a funding all-or-nothing policy), especially for those without a huge following already online.

Poplight took one step further.

Before launch, they offer people VIP seats with the best discount and exclusive perks by putting down a $1 deposit. According to launch boom, another crowdfunding agency, people that put down a $1 deposit are 30x more likely to buy on average, which definitely is one of the main drivers for Poplight reaching its funding goal in 22mins.

This also helps Poplight to gauge the actual demand-invaluable insight for setting up funding goals and production planning.

Another advantage of offering the $1 VIP tier is for brands to distinguish between those who are most interested in purchasing from those who are more top of the funnel. Then learn from them.

For the VIP tier, Poplights send out emails asking to learn more about their best potential customers, who they are, why they love to use the product, what the questions are, etc.

Apart from informing product strategies, the objections and questions collected from customers can also be used to feed the content pipeline. This creates content that is most likely to have a high engagement and share rate.

After the campaign starts, don’t just sit back and watch. Poplight focuses on using its backers the spread the word:

• Hosted launch party for local fans
• Released a stretch goal to get backers to come back
• Asked backers for referrals
• Continuously to create quality content, give media something to talk about and backers something to share about

Poplight is still in the midst of its Kickstarter campaign. We did read some insights from the Peak design founder Peter Dering about strategy towards the end of the Kickstarter campaign.

According to Dering, it's effective to use paid ads toward the end of the campaign to generate a last push for demand. This approach can create a sense of urgency and lead to high conversion rates, similar to what is typically seen at the start of the campaign.

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I hope that this will be a valuable addition to your marketing toolkit! I am off to plan a trip somewhere with my partner in the next few months (with an easel board in my Arc browser 😃). Spring and Summer (good weather) slip by so fast; no time for procrastination.

We out.

Alex & Chi