When the World Kelped Out — And What I Learned about Crowdfunding
Since Kickstarter launched in 2009, I’ve backed dozens of campaigns in the spirit of supporting creation. I’ve received glowing orbs that tell me how I slept last night, and apps that remind me of my dreams; I’ve helped save hat factories, received dope workout gear, and been promised pools in Williamsburg. It was an incredible feeling to be a supporting part of so many great causes so easily.
I’ve been a storyteller (journalist then marketer) and community builder (Second Home, Sandbox, Summit, and more) during my career. So, when I started my first consumer company AKUA last year, I was excited to finally launch my very own crowdfunding campaign and tap into my skills as a marketer and community builder.
To share our story meaningfully in the way that so many other great companies had done before us took a lot of work and we learned so much in the process.
Since successfully Kickstarting Kelp Jerky, I’ve gotten dozens of emails asking to hop on calls to share my best practices and tips for crowdfunding. Instead, I’m going to scale myself and write about my experience and what I learned for all of you! If you have any specific questions after reading this, shoot me an email cbm@akua.co.
CHOOSING TO CROWDFUND
We chose to crowdfund our first product Kelp Jerky by AKUA to build our early community of customers, to get ourselves out there to media and investors, and hold ourselves accountable to our early adopters.
In terms of timing, we set our campaign launch about 3 months before we felt we’d be ready to launch Kelp Jerky on our own website and gave ourselves an extra 3 months of padding — which we’re using every inch of now! While we were crowdfunding publicly, we were also actively raising private capital in the background from angel investors and small family funds.
CHOOSING A PLATFORM
For our first crowdfunding campaign, we chose PieShell — a food and beverage-focused crowdfunding platform. PieShell’s stepping-stone model felt safe and so it was a training-wheels type of experience to get our crowdfunding feet wet with a small industry-relevant audience and limited exposure, providing us with valuable education before launching to a wider audience. We prepared over the course of three months and campaigned for one month in late 2017, raising just over $10,000 (mostly from friends, family, and food industry folks).
When it came time to rebrand in 2018 (from Beyond the Shoreline to AKUA) and officially launch via a major crowdfunding platform to the world, we debated Kickstarter vs. Indiegogo. Both companies had reached out wanting to help us raise funds on their platforms (when we make money they make money!). We polled a few friends on Facebook, asking for advice. Most people said something along the lines of “Launch on Kickstarter and do subsequent projects on Indiegogo.”
We then learned about Indiegogo’s InDemand, a platform that allows successful Kickstarters to keep fundraising after their end date (we’re doing that now but more on this later).
We went with our gut and chose Kickstarter for launch.
PREPARATION
We were fortunate enough to work directly with Kickstarter’s internal team in the months leading up to our launch. They provided us with high-level introductions to other successful food creators like the founder of Cosmik Ice Cream and they even translated our page into Japanese to launch us to their international community there!
In the months leading up to our Kickstarter campaign, I interviewed no less than 30 humans (friends and friends of friends) who had successfully launched crowdfunding campaigns. I asked hundreds of questions and took copious notes and then turned those notes into checklists. I didn’t stop asking people for their tips until the week before we launched when I received some of the most valuable advice Thank you Satya Twena, John Wiseman, Andrew Gallery, and Mike Del Ponte, who wrote the bible on hacking Kickstarter over on Tim Ferris’s blog!
Your Campaign and Video
Writing and editing the copy for our campaign page took a solid week. Kickstarter allows you to share your campaign before it’s live to get feedback, so be sure to send it to a handful of your smartest friends and family members.
Hot tip: Press credentials and quotes from famous people matter more than you think so put them near the top!
Pricing
Figuring out our pricing and a strategy for our prize tiers took the most time and attention. For our lowest-priced tier, we offered a $5 digital cookbook. The most important tier is your lowest priced tier that still gets your funder the core product — in our case, a 3-pack of Kelp Jerky. This was our $25 tier for a 3-pack of Kelp Jerky. We hosted an Early Bird version for $20 that sold out for the first 50 people in 24 hours. Toward the end of the campaign, we ended up selling out of this tier with 500 backers at the $25 level so we included a final “Late-Bird” $26 level for a 3-pack at the very end.
For shipping costs, we were nervous about losing money. So we factored in some padding that worked in our favor because the amount that funders pay for shipping goes toward your public funding amount. If someone has committed $25 in their minds to buy Kelp Jerky, most will not cancel because of $7 shipping. However, it also worked against us as high shipping costs, particularly to our northern neighbors in Canada, was our #1 complaint in the comments, messages, and via email.
The Video
We created our video for less than $1,000 — most of which went to buying stock video and a videographer on Cape Cod. Writing our video concept took a solid few days. Shooting and editing our video with a few friends (mostly the amazing Josh Robertson to whom I owe a lot of Kelp Jerky) took about four weeks.
One thing we forgot to do properly was to cut our video so it could be used as our Kickstarter video, as well as an Indiegogo InDemand video (if you go that route), and a brand video that’s evergreen. We hacked this together after the fact but it’s best done before.
Social Media
Ensure that your social media profiles (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram) are all set up properly to announce your campaign. Build your following as much as you can before your launch by posting content and following all of your friends, family, and people who follow similar brands.
Shout out something relevant from your channels every day during your campaign that’s targeted toward those channels. We also ran ads across Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram for the entirety of the campaign. For us, Instagram was the most relevant community building platform while Facebook was the highest for conversions.
Hot tip: I use Canva to create beautifully branded assets without expensive design software.
PR + Media
Create a media release (here’s ours) and share it in a nice email to all of the food journalists you know (and even those you don’t know!) before your campaign launches. Here’s a presentation I created a few years ago about PR for your Startup.
Hot tip: We used MuckRack to access a long list of food journalists.
Our amazing social media intern Megan Ezell helped us identify and email about 100 influencers in the lead up to the campaign. For influencers and media, we offered samples to everyone, which we mailed out or hand delivered (by our co-founder Matt Lebo!) with cards and stickers before and during the campaign.
Our media and influencer outreach was a lot less successful than I had hoped. We got some decent press, but the media are growing tired of writing about Kickstarter campaigns. And influencers are increasingly looking to monetize their time and support.
T-24 HOURS TO LAUNCH
The night before our campaign launched, I sent an email to 100 of my closest friends and family who I believed would be the most likely to back us. The excerpted copy below was from a piece of advice that my awesome friend John Wiseman gave me, who successfully launched his drink brand Curious Elixirs on Kickstarter.
It’s so crucial that we raise at least $10,000 in the first 24 hours of our campaign. If we do, we have a 90% chance of succeeding in our final goal ($25k). If we don’t, we have a 60% chance of failure.
No one wants their friends to fail!
THE LAUNCH
On the morning of March 6th, 2018, I sprung out of bed at 7am, made myself a Four Sigmatic mushroom coffee, sat down at my computer, gave our campaign one more read, and hit the Publish Now button. And just like that, Kelp Jerky was live on Kickstarter!
I sent the link in a follow-up email to the core group of 100 that I’d given the heads up the day prior. I asked them to pledge and share the campaign, which they did! We also got picked up by Kickstarter’s algorithms (more on this magic later) and received quite a few donations via their New Projects section.
After we hit the $5k mark for funding, I sent an email announcing our Kickstarter to AKUA’s mailing list of 8,000 humans. We then promoted the campaign publicly on iMessage, Facebook (and Messenger), Instagram, and Twitter from our brand’s channels as well as our personal accounts.
That night, my co-founder Morgan-Lea Fogg and I hosted our launch party at the new Habitas House in Venice Beach. We had a room for seaweed facials, food by Chef Ester Hillebrand, and endless wine and kombucha from our beverage sponsors. When guests arrived, they were asked whether or not they’d already contributed to the campaign. For those who’d contributed, we gave them an “I Kelped Out” sticker to wear. I emailed everyone prior to the party and after the party asking them to contribute (~40% did).
CAMPAIGNING
Is a pain! Campaigning is time consuming and asking people for money every day gets tiresome. So make sure you believe in your project as if it’s your first-born child!
Using Kicktraq’s data, you can see the funding curve of every Kickstarter campaign. Check out ours below. The first 24 hours are SO CRUCIAL. You have to find a way to build momentum going into the launch and create a frenzy during that short span of time. This is primarily to tickle Kickstarter’s algorithms so you get picked up on pages like “Products We Love”. It also helps to get the media’s attention.
We hit our goal of $25,000 within the first 28 hours. We intentionally set our our public goal at a number we felt comfortable hitting but we didn’t think we’d hit it that fast! It’s key to let a lower goal than you think you might hit to ensure success — remember Kickstarter is all or nothing.
But you also don’t want to set a goal that’s too low because momentum will usually slow after you’ve succeeded. Our internal goal was $50,000, which we hit about halfway through the campaign.
After we hit our goal, we first thanked our backers. Then we had to think of some stretch goals to keep people interested and reward our early backers.
At AKUA, we are building an online membership portal for Kelp Jerky with different tiers for our customers. As a gesture of gratitude, we let every funder who got us to $50,000 know that they would be in the most elite group of our “Kelp Club” when it launches. We announced further stretch goals here to help us get to $100,000 (which we didn’t hit).
We probably could’ve done a better job here of coming up with more creative stretch goals… but honestly, more money just means more Kelp Jerky for more people, and isn’t that exciting enough!?
Hitting our goal so fast also got us the attention of some uninvited “crowdfunding experts” and agencies wanting to help us boost our campaign into the six figures.
Out of curiosity (red pill? blue pill? both pills!), we chose to work with Funded Today specifically to help us with cross promotions, which happen when successful Kickstarter or Indiegogo campaigns share each other’s campaigns with their respective audiences. We put one of these together on our own that did quite well. If you scroll to the bottom of this post, you’ll see what it looked like when we did cross promotions with Funded Today.
Overall, we found our experience with Funded Today to be pretty spammy from start to finish. In terms of where we netted out, Funded Today cost about $4k (set up fee + % of pledges) and drove about $4k worth of pledges our way. Of course, when you account for the cost to fulfill those pledges, we didn’t win here.
We also also didn’t lose. We learned a lot from the experience and potentially reached new customers who will buy Kelp Jerky again and again. There are great crowdfunding agencies and PR companies out there to guide you through the process. We decided to do all of our own marketing from the start and then halfway through our campaign (after getting aggressively tracked down by these numerous agencies), we admittedly got a little caught up in the shiny object syndrome of 6-figure promises.
For your own analytics, Kickstarter’s dashboard is awesome. You can see data about your video plays, most popular funding tiers, and traffic data. Their dashboard allows you to make tracking links so you can see which types of outreach are working well. For example, when we knew someone was going to feature us in a newsletter or we were running Facebook ads, we sent them a custom URL and then we could see how many pledges came through that URL.
Here’s a screenshot of our dashboard that shows you how powerful Kickstarter was for us as a platform for driving pledges vs. just our own efforts.
Hot tip: We used a custom Bit.ly link to track who was clicking on our project (e.g. http://bit.ly/kelpjerkyonkickstarter) through our own marketing efforts.
The Mid-Campaign Party
To activate our New York community and keep the momentum going, we hosted a mid-campaign party. We called it our NYC launch party, and we planned it for March 21, 2018. The Earth decided to snowstorm that first day of spring but, thankfully, we had over 400 RSVPs so we had a final turnout of about 80 humans. A few of our funders showed up too, including a few whom I had never met, which was awesome!
We drunk on mezcal (thanks to Will Horowitz), danced to a semi-famous DJ, and devoured bowls of BBQ Kelp Jerky. We used the same tactics from the LA party — asking folks to donate before and after the party and giving them stickers at the door.
THE FINALE
We picked up quite a few key placements in the media during our last week (Treehugger and Forbes), which helped with our last week of momentum. We also sent out one final email to our mailing list and made strong pushes across social media.
On Sunday morning, April 8th, I woke up and, just like that, our Kickstarter was over, frozen in time — a beautiful memento of a job well done. 1,324 backers had pledged $71,141 to help bring Kelp Jerky to life.
We are so proud of our accomplishments and so grateful to Kickstarter for creating such a positive platform to share our mission with the world.
Towards the end of the campaign, Indiegogo reached out and asked us if we’d like to continue to take Pre-Orders for Kelp Jerky on their InDemand platform. We said yes and started working on porting over our information there. We raised prices across the board so that our Kickstarter community feels special. We will also be mailing our Kickstarter funders their Kelp Jerky before anyone else — as promised!
You can spend $400k and make a million dollars on Kickstarter. We chose to be pretty lean and we’re over the moon with our results. It’s an incredibly cool platform and I would recommend our experience to any creator who’s keen to get their idea to market.
I hope you found this article helpful, thanks for reading until the end. We’d love if you pre-ordered your Kelp Jerky on IndieGogo today!
