How to raise a half million on Kickstarter

This is the first in a series of three posts about David Beck’s highly successful Kickstarter campaign

IDEA Hub Director Maia Donohue recently interviewed David Beck, Game Designer for the board game Distilled, and highly successful Kickstarter fundraiser. David had the idea for the game but needed the funding to get the prototypes and initial supply of games created. David chose to use Kickstarter, but that is just one of many crowdfunding platforms that helps entrepreneurs develop a community of funders before you build the product.

David’s minimum goal was to raise $18,000 to cover his initial costs but hoped to raise $50,000 to $100,000. He initially considered investing about $5,000 but ended up investing about $25,000 in pre-campaign promotion and spent 18 months doing the prep work. His work paid off and his 8060 backers pledged $549,573 to help bring this project to life.

Kickstarter success does not require investing a big chunk money. Maia used Kickstarter to fund publishing his startup mentor book, spending just $1,000 he

was able to raise $18,000 to cover initial printing, promotion and mailing costs. There is no perfect answer. You’ll want to invest just enough to convince people you have a great product.

How did he do it and what did is cost?

1. He worked with 20+ social media content creators, some of them were paid, to help promote the campaign and the game. He invested about $5,000 on social media influencers.

2. He invested $2,000 in creating and shipping out 20 prototype games.

3. He spent about $5,000 of that on Facebook advertising.

4. His Facebook page grew to have 1,000 followers.

5. He created a newsletter and developed a mailing list of 2,000 subscribers.

6. He had a professional video created and built a website and robust Kickstarter page with a tiered reward system inclu

ding stretch goals. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/paversongames/distilled

Key advice:

· Homemade videos can work, but more polished videos, websites and materials may lead to a bigger payoff.

·

Physical products, such as board games, do well. Low priced items do not. Super expensive items, like video games that take 50 people to make do not.