Did you hear about that cooler that raised $13 Million? What about the potato salad that raised $55,000? If those guys did it, surely you can raise $10,000 or at least $5,000 for your business venture, right?

Probably not.

Only about 40% of Kickstarter’s projects actually raise the amount of funds that they request. Thinking of using Indigogo instead? A mere 9% of their projects raise 100% of the funds that they are seeking. So what is one thing that that you can do to dramatically increase the chances that your project will be funded?

Build the bridge before you need it.

Contrary to what many would-be Kickstarter millionaires think, a successfully-funded campaign starts long before you click the “Activate” button. Take my company’s most recent crowdfunding campaign for instance. We were able to raise almost $30,000 in only 30 days, but how did we do it? We did it by building a community of people who were interested in our product and cultivating that community. Most crowdfunding projects fail to do this and as a result they don’t raise the money they need to get started.

Our first crowdfunding project raised almost $30,000

We actually started about 4 months prior to the start of our project by picking the social media platform that would be most effective in getting out our message. In our case, this was Instagram. Yours may be Facebook, Twitter or Snapchat. Next, we began to build a community that would be likely to purchase our product by posting things that they enjoy, some posts were directly related to our product, and some were not. A great reference for sucessfully using social media to market is Gary Vaynerchuk’s book Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook.

Give your self six months to one year to build a following for your product PRIOR to launching your crowdfunding project.

In addition to building a community online, I recommend creating a landing page to collect the email addresses of people who are interested in what you have to offer. You can now contact them directly and establish the trust necessary to turn those curious followers into customers.

If you’re like most entrepreneurs you want your project to start yesterday, but patience is key to executing your project with ease. When you take the time to build a following for your project prior to it’s release, you will build an email list of 100 — 1000 people who are informed, excited and ready to be the first to supporters of your new venture. As a result of using this technique our new watch company, Talley & Twine, is thriving and shipping our watches all over the world.