Between late May 2016 and July 2017, we ran a Kickstarter campaign transforming us from being just an idea to a start-up company. Now Enda manufactures running shoes in Kenya and distributes them around the world. We did it with the help of Kickstarter backers, volunteers, friends, and family.

Our first shoes: the Enda Iten. You can order them on our website.

We cannot say “thank you” enough to all the people who chipped in in one form or another to make Enda a reality.

As the recipients of such overwhelming generosity, we want to make sure we’re paying it forward as much as we can. We have learned many lessons along the way, some tougher than others! We hope this post will provide insight into the process of running a successful campaign and then creating a new product.

Simple advice for a Kickstarter campaign

Overall, our advice would be to look at the following three variables, and do everything you can to maximise each of those variables:

Traffic: How many people you can get to your page (from emails, social media, earned media coverage and adverts)? Conversion: What % of those people will contribute to your campaign? This will be different depending on the source of traffic: friends receiving emails have a higher conversion rate than people coming from a news article. Value: How much can you get each person to contribute?

These three variables come together in a simple formula to help you calculate what you’ll be able to achieve with your campaign:

Depending on what you’re doing with your crowdfunding campaign, how you approach each of these variables will be different. But here’s some are some of the tactics we used to maximise each of these variables.

Traffic

Our most important initial traffic was a long time in the making. As we built the company, we not only created relevant in-bound content, but also solicited and received feedback from a lot of people. We produced blog posts about Kenyan running, surveyed people about our logo as well as what name we should give to our debut shoe model, and surveyed runners about what they would want in a running shoe. All of this helped build an audience on social media and, more importantly, on email.

We then started asking people to sign up to support our Kickstarter campaign the moment it launched. We offered a small “early-bird” discount, so people who signed up would have a chance to snag a better price.

Our second chunk of traffic came from leveraging our existing audience to reach more people. We constantly messaged backers about sharing the campaign with their friends and created a referral rewards programme for backers who brought in their friends. The referral rewards programme served as a thank you to the people who were willing to make an extra effort to find more backers for our campaign.

Our third big slice of traffic came from media. Before the campaign even started, we approached several journalists offering them different exclusive angles of how they could tell the story of the campaign.

The first big article about us, in Fast Company

The story you tell, and how you tell it, is critical in helping you know which specific media outlets to target. Naturally, we targeted mainstream media but also deliberately targeted running blogs and gear websites, which gave us audience with runners and who would want to try out our shoes and thereby support our Kickstarter campaign.

The best advice we can give about getting media is to remember: journalists are humans with jobs to do. Don’t send them press releases like they are some publication robots. Their goal is to inform and entertain their audiences, so communicate with them with an empathetic understanding of the challenges they face in doing their job and help them as quickly and easily see how your story will be interesting to their audience.

Finally, we’d be negligent if we didn’t mention platform traffic. Kickstarter as a platform certainly referred a fair number of backers to us through their own editorial and algorithmic recommendations. We weren’t counting on this, but it was a nice boost and a good reason to chose Kickstarter for your campaign. It did also help that based on our product, story and generated interest, we were recognized as both Kickstarter ‘Projects We Love’ as well as ‘Project of the Day’. The latter gave us a chance to be on Kickstarter’s homepage for a day.

Conversion

This can feel like as much an art as it is a science. Since you only have one landing page to play with, you can’t really test to optimise for better conversion rates. So focus on having a fantastic story and video which:

shows personality

inspires the audience

convinces backers they want the product

gives a sense of what the creation journey looks like

Having a quality video also makes a great difference in connecting to customers. Projects with videos generally do better than those without, but the quality of video is also very important. We’d estimate 50% of our effort going into the campaign was in creating a great video.

The video from our Kickstarter campaign.

Once you have a great video, the next thing is to listen to your audiences and make adjustments to address the barriers you’re hearing that might be stopping people from buying. For example: in our case, people were asking about sizing, so we added content to help people find the right sizing.

Overall, the Kickstarter page needs to have as much information as possible. Part of the reason people back a Kickstarter project is to be part of creating something new. So as we edited and revised page content we just kept on adding in more and more.

Value

The advice Kickstarter gives is that most people give around $20 so offering a great reward at the $20 level drives more contributions. We’re sure Kickstarter have great data to back up this advice, but we thought about it differently: we wanted to nudge people to increase their contribution. So we offered a nice reward (an Enda Bracelet) for a small contribution, but then a t-shirt and a bracelet for about the cost of two bracelets.

Of course the main show of our whole campaign were our shoes, so we focused on getting people to order a pair. Or two. We gave discounts on multiple pairs, and added in a “money can’t buy” reward of specially numbered shoes, which were our first shoes of the production run. By creating a collector’s item like this, we gave people a chance to buy into something special and also a good reason to increase their contribution.

FAQs

Maximising those three variables was the core of our strategy, and as we went along, we made our tactical decisions by asking ourselves what were the best ways to increase traffic, conversion rate, or contribution size.

However, of the questions we’ve had from people after the campaign are about those individual tactical choices, so here are answers to 4 of the most common questions we get about our campaign:

1. Did you hire PR specialists for your campaign?

No. We didn’t hire any outside PR help. Professional PR certainly has it’s place, but for a relatively small campaign, it’s perfectly possible for the creators of the campaign to manage a number of media contacts.

When you launch a Kickstarter campaign, a lot of PR and marketing firms will get in touch offering services. At some point, it did feel a bit as though they were like vultures trying to prey on desperate entrepreneurs who were stressed about hitting their goal. If you’re going to use a PR or marketing firm, make sure to figure out who you want to work with in advance, and ignore the multitude of solicitations you get mid-campaign.

2. Did you advertise on paid social media? If yes, which platform(s) and also, which platform worked best for you? And what was your budget?

Yes. We did try out some paid advertising on social media. We found our ads brought in new followers on Instagram, did practically nothing on Twitter, and netted some sales on Facebook.

We didn’t spend much money on the campaigns, but if we had a larger budget, we’d have invested it on Facebook so as to drill down into the audiences that were successfully converting to sales. Honestly though, considering the time it takes doing this, you might find it is better to focus more on producing new and better content to engage your base and have them spread the message to their friends. Kickstarter campaigns are exciting, so word of mouth tactics can be especially powerful during this brief window of time.

3. How did you keep momentum?

Campaigns are bound to slow down in the middle. The spike at the start of ours was largely due to the fact that we told our email list exactly when we would launch the campaign and also let them know we would offer discounted shoes for the first people to contribute. This helped drive a strong initial surge.

The surge actually helped keep momentum since it helped create buzz on social media, showed the press we were a credible campaign worth covering, and likely played a role in being selected as the Kickstarter ‘Project of the Day’ on the day we hit our funding goal. Beyond that: we organized a running event one week after launching the campaign, and created a referral rewards programme, which drove about 10% of our total contributions.

The main thing to remember: momentum will slow down mid-campaign. Stay focused and keep working to churn out content and drive people to your campaign. Don’t get desperate. You need to remember your backers are with you because they want you to succeed, and desperation makes potential backers doubt you will.

4. What would you change about the way you handled your campaign, given the chance?

Some pictures from our event, one week into the campaign.

First, we would wait longer to run the campaign. We felt a great deal of urgency to get started and we thought (perhaps rightly) that running the campaign ahead of the Olympics would get us a bit more media. We could have waited longer, built up our supporter list, and lined up more media for the launch of the campaign.

Second, we would do more live events. We had one small running event, which generated a great deal of media and social media posts about the campaign. If we had done 2–3 more events in different locations, we could have generated more enthusiasm and garnered more media coverage.