How to run a successful Kickstarter during lockdown
The team sat in silence on our group call, trying to digest the news we had received. It was the middle of March 2020, only a few days after International Women’s Day when we had excitedly hit the launch button on our Kickstarter campaign and now the UK was to go into Covid-19 lockdown for the first time ever. Although we had experienced a great start to our campaign, hitting 30% of target within the first 3 days, we knew that every contribution counted. With lockdown came uncertainty and a natural reduction in household spend - meaning a smaller pool of backers we could tap into. Given that 61.3% of Kickstarters fail to reach their crowdfunding target, we knew we had an uphill battle on our hands.
To get through, we knew we had to pull together - drawing on our respective strengths and stretching to help one another out in a way that is typical of startups. It was a pretty intense time which we have been thinking about a lot recently. Here are our top reflections on running a successful Kickstarter campaign (first time around!), in spite of lockdown:
Is there even a market for this?
It has been said many times but we’ll say it again. Before you get started, do your research. It is important to understand if your product already exists, who your competition is and how you can differentiate your offering. For example, we found that 26% of girls in the UK didn't know what to do when they started their period. Furthermore, when researching the market for first period gifts, we were struck by how little existed. We were determined to create a product that brought more celebration, knowledge and empowerment to such a pivotal moment. This is how Girlhood: The Story was born. The team put a lot of love and care into its content and design. We wanted to create a high-end product but it was important to us that it remained accessible to many. Speaking to various suppliers, we learned quickly that we would have to order large quantities of our journal in order to get the quality we wanted, at an accessible price point. We decided that a Kickstarter campaign would be the best way for us to raise funding upfront and get an idea of demand, before we incurred production costs.
Don’t over-engineer it!
If your crowdfunding attempt fails, don’t be discouraged. It may not be the idea itself but instead something about the approach which you can tweak. There are a ton of online resources to help you set up and run a successful crowdfunding campaign. Be sure to tap into existing resources wherever possible, many of which have been put together by people who have gone through it themselves before. Also, ask others (ideally within your target audience) to share their feedback and perspectives on your product. Use their insights to shape your offering. Once your Kickstarter campaign ends, you are able to send a survey to your backers requesting details to fulfil their orders. We treat every opportunity as one for feedback and therefore provided a free form box so our backers could provide us with feedback. It is in part due to the feedback we received via the surveys that we are bringing our second journal to market in November, Sisterhood: The Journal - this time for adults. Lastly, keep your campaign simple and the number of rewards offered down to a minimum. This will make it easier to consolidate your survey results (you create a survey per reward offered) and will also make it easier when it comes to fulfilment (ask Maria to share what fulfilling journal orders solo, with a four month old baby, while self-isolating looks like!).
Network, network, network. Put your idea out there.
This might be the most important but most underrated contributing factor to a successful campaign. Your network is full of people who believe in you. They will be happy to back you or if they can’t (we were in full lockdown, let’s not forget), to connect you to others who might be able to instead. We were very deliberate about warming our network up before launching the Kickstarter to let them know our intentions and to share a sneak preview of our product. Our network was instrumental in opening doors for us through intros or through the sharing of our Kickstarter on their social networks. Don’t be afraid to reach out to strangers who might be well-placed to support you with advice, ideas or introductions. Sweat your network. It takes work but is worth it. On a related note, it can be really tempting to keep your idea to yourself. Perhaps you’re afraid of revealing the idea because someone might steal it (NB: if your intellectual property can be protected through a patent, it is worth securing one, for sure). Or perhaps you’re afraid that people will not take you or your idea seriously. What we found is that sharing our idea with others enabled us to tweak and shape it - creating a better product. We were also able to ask for help but more importantly, people were able to offer us help and to connect us to others because they bought our narrative and loved our idea.
Double or nothing?
In hindsight, we’re still not 100% sure whether we would advocate for a last minute doubling of a Kickstarter target the day before launch or not. On the one hand, it was so stressful dealing with the challenge of asking people to part with their hard-earned cash during the uncertainty of lockdown. On the other hand, it pushed us really to dig deep… to put in the extra work, to be resourceful. The idea of thousands of kids stuck at home during lockdown, dealing with their periods for the first time… isolated, away from their usual support networks, was such powerful motivation to push on. Set an ambitious (but achievable) target for your campaign. You can take the edge off by putting stretch targets / incentives in place while keeping your initial target within reach. If you are able to give back in some way, do. We pledged to give a share of the funds raised to a charity - Bloody Good Period (BGP). Ensuring there is greater access to period products is a cause close to our hearts. We were also very grateful that BGP helped to spread our message with their CEO contributing her own story to our journal.
