Hacking Kickstarter

How to Raise $100K in 10 Days

The below is written by Mike Del Ponte, one of the founders

of Soma, a startup I advise (FB/IG/TW: @somawater,

drinksoma.com). He raised $100K on Kickstarter in 10 days,

and I asked him to share some of the best tools and tricks

you can use to replicate his success.

Note that “VA” in the below refers to “virtual assistant,” which

he finds through Upwork or Zirtual.

Enter Mike

How many times have you dreamt of launching a new

product, only to let your dream fall to the wayside?

I don’t have the money to even get started! What if it fails?

In the past, these excuses held some weight, as bringing a

new product to market could be incredibly expensive.

Oftentimes, you had to prototype, build, and then hope the

world wanted what you were selling. If not, you could end up

with a warehouse full of debt: unsellable inventory.

Now, there are new options. Crowdfunding platforms like

Kickstarter and Indiegogo allow you to introduce (test) a new

product before you start manufacturing, removing a huge

amount of risk. If people like what you’re proposing, you can

pull in thousands or even millions of dollars to fund your

dream. At the very worst, you were able to test your idea

without investing much time or money.

But planning and running a Kickstarter campaign is often

done in a haphazard fashion.

To prepare for ours, we didn’t want to leave anything to

chance, so we interviewed 15 of the top-earning Kickstarter

creators.

I’ve worked with PR firms that charge $20K a month and

spend 3 months planning a launch. Follow our advice—based

on what we learned—and there’s a good chance you’ll get

better results without spending anything.

Using virtual assistants, growth-hacking techniques, and

principles from Tim’s books, we raised more than $100K in

less than 10 days. Having accomplished our goal with almost

30 days to spare, we were able to relax for the holidays.

Here are just a few of the non-obvious keys we learned.

Find the MED for Kickstarter Traffic

If you want to raise a lot of money on Kickstarter, you need

to drive a lot of traffic to your project. And you want that

traffic to be comprised of prospective backers of your project.

Applying the concept of MED (“minimum effective dose” from

The 4-Hour Body

), we knew we needed to discover and focus

on the best traffic sources.

My friend Clay Hebert is a Kickstarter expert. One of the

things he taught me is a simple trick using bit.ly tracking. Bit.ly

is a link shortening service used by millions of people . . . and

Kickstarter. If you add a + to the end of any bit.ly URL, you

can see stats related to that link. For example: Here are stats

for the shortlink Kickstarter generated for our campaign:

http://kck.st/VjAFva+

[

TF: This will blow your mind. Go to any Kickstarter project,

click on Share, and pick a social network, like Twitter. A

pre-populated tweet will appear with a shortlink. Copy and

paste the link alone into a new tab, add + to the end, and hit

Return. Voilà.]

To discover the top referral sources, we gave our VA a list

of Kickstarter projects similar to ours and asked her to list the

referrers for each project. Based on this data, we decided to

focus all of our attention on just two goals:

Getting coverage on the right blogs

Activating our networks to create buzz on Facebook, Twitter,

and email

We knew that if we did this, we would be listed in

Kickstarter’s Popular Projects sections, which is how you get

people who are browsing Kickstarter to check out and back

your project.

Find Relevant Bloggers Using Google Images

Start by looking at who covered Kickstarter projects similar to

yours. You can do this by using a simple Google Images hack.

If you drag and drop any image file into the search bar at

images.google.com, you’ll be shown every website that has ever

posted that image. Pretty cool, huh?

Here’s the process your VA will use:

Find 10 Kickstarter projects similar to yours, and for each,

do the following:

Right-click and save-to-desktop 2 to 3 images.

Drag and drop each image file from your desktop into the

Google Images search bar.

Review blogs listed on the results page to see which might

be relevant to your project.

Fill out the following fields in a Media List spreadsheet which

you create: publication, URL, first and last name of the

writer, and links to relevant posts by that writer.

You now have dozens of blogs that have a high probability

of relevance, all neatly organized in a spreadsheet. Your VA

can find more sites like the ones in your media list by

searching SimilarSites.com.

Research Site Traffic on SimilarWeb.com or Alexa.com

Bigger is not always better, but it is helpful to know the size of

each blog’s readership. Have your VA research how many

unique monthly visitors each blog has and add that data to

your spreadsheet.

TF: I personally use the SimilarWeb Chrome extension.

Identify Relationships on Facebook

This may be the most important part of your PR efforts. For

us, 8 out of 10 valuable blog posts resulted from relationships.

When we pitched a blogger without a relationship, less than 1%

even responded. With introductions, our success rate was over

50%.

How do you identify relationships? Facebook. Have your VA

log in to your Facebook account, search for bloggers in your

media list, and add mutual friends to your spreadsheet. You

can also search on professional networks like LinkedIn.

Use the Right Tools

TextExpander allows you to paste any saved message—whether

it’s a phone number or a two-page email—into any document

or text field, simply by typing an abbreviation. This is extremely

helpful for repetitive outreach. It’s a must-have app that

probably saved us 1 to 2 hours a day in typing.

One tool that we did not use, but should have, is

Boomerang, a Gmail plug-in that allows you to schedule emails.

We crafted emails to our influencers and in-the-know friends

the day of our launch, using TextExpander, then slightly

customized each one. What we should have done is written

and saved these personalized emails a few days before we

launched. That way, we could have scheduled them to be

automatically sent by Boomerang the second we launched. This

would have freed up many valuable hours on launch day.