A Few Kickstarter Tips

I have received a lot of questions from the Kickstarter community asking for tips, so I will be compiling a lot of them and posting them here.

My tip for today is to not rush into the launch. We set a launch date about 2 weeks out once we had Kickstarter approval so that we could do a lot of prep work. Below are the pre-launch items we did.

• Made a trailer video as a teaser.
  • This is really simple using iMovie on iPad. If you don't have it, I highly recommend it. All of our videos are done on my iPad.
  • If you haven't seen it, you can check it out at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3oK1mw5Cjg
• Contacted blogs to work out launch day articles.
  • We were able to get a few that were excited about the project and commit to a post on the launch day.
  • A good starting point if you don't have existing contacts are the Top 100 lists on technorati.com.
• Sent out a Press Release announcing the product and the launch date
  • Use a PR site like prweb.com or similar and find someone who knows the ins and outs of writing PR to help you out.
• Set a Social Media schedule for the days leading up to the launch
  • Using a tool like Gremln.com, you can easily do simultaneous posts everywhere and schedule the posts.
  • We kept the posts teasers right up until the day before where we revealed the project images. Just make sure you keep it interesting, odd, humorous, etc...you need to just catch their eye at this point. Our main posts were shots of stick figure Bob with a captions like 'Bob is coming May 7 only on #kickstarter'.
  • Make sure you keep all of your hashtags consistent.
• Line up those friends and family that can pledge when/if you need them to. We were fortunate that we didn't need them to. You don't need to ask them to pledge immediately when you launch. Wait a little while to see if you pick up any traction without them.