Your First Kickstarter Campaign

Step by Step Guide to Launching a Successful Crowdfunding Project

By: Vilius Stanislovaitis

Narrated by: Russell Newton

Sixty-three percent of Kickstarter campaigns fail. Do this one thing, and you’ll be among the 37 percent who succeed.

The one thing is pre-launch. Ask any crowdfunding creator, and they will confirm that it is the key to success.

You will learn how to prepare for your first crowdfunding campaign and do a pre-launch with a minimal budget by using personal efforts and delegating some work to others.

This audiobook is for Kickstarter newbies and first-time creators. It will teach and show you how to collect potential backers early, in advance, and how to plan a Kickstarter campaign from start to finish with the aim of ensuring that you get fully funded.

You will understand the basics of crowdfunding, the main differences between the two most popular reward-based crowdfunding platforms: Kickstarter and Indiegogo, how to turn your idea, passion, or skill into a product, and how to evaluate if there’s a market demand for it.

The core part of this book is about preparation for the crowdfunding campaign:

• How to set crowdfunding goals and why it is important to set a low goal
• How to analyze similar campaigns
• How to define your target audience
• How to gather your crowd using free methods
• How to create a landing page that turns visitors into subscribers
• What are the best tools to build landing pages
• How to integrate your landing page with your mailing list
• How to “warm up” leads with automated email sequence
• How to engage your audience
• How to run Facebook Ads to collect leads
• How to use “smoke testing” method to see if someone buys your product
• What is a pre-launch funnel and what stages it has
• Conversion rates that you can expect
• How to do media and influencer outreach
• How to submit your video to viral video publishers

You will also learn and be exposed to best practices when it comes to selecting attractive project images, how to create a title that sells, how to build engaging project video, and how to brainstorm ideas for your rewards.

Finally, the book explains how to launch and manage a Kickstarter campaign, when it’s live:

• Reasons why project launch timing is important
• The steps you need to do during the launch day
• Preparation for refusing offers
• Communication with backers (project updates and direct messages)
• Stretching goals
• Get traffic from Kickstarter (“Projects we love,” trending, popularity rankings)
• Last days of your project
• Wrap-up and action plan

©2019 Vilius Stanislovaitis (P)2019 Vilius Stanislovaitis

Well Structured and Informative

This book follows a very logical progression of every little detail you might need to know when starting your first kickstarter campaign

Brilliant! The science behind Crowdfunding!

I recommend this book to anyone who will run a crowdfunding campaign!

Almost finished the book and already changed fundamental parts of our crowdfunding campaign!

Long story short, this book its all about the science behind crowdfunding, the best tools and tactics that someone can use.

Will definitely listen to it twice, before we launch our campaign!

Excellent guide

My only recommendation is to not get the audible version for several reasons: it's like drinking from a firehose, and you will want to go back over chapters and parts multiple times which is much more difficult with an audiobook. I am going to be purchasing the physical copy soon.

On the book: if you do any amount of searching for other information on kickstarter 95% is thinly veiled (or bare faced) advertisement for a firm's services. This is one of the rare resources that isn't the author's attempt to get you to convert to using an agency. He goes through the process himself and also takes the time to fact check and compare different methods and ideas you can use while crowdsourcing. He also compiled takeaways from many other interviews with companies that used kickstarter. The author has a very friendly and approachable manner and responds to emailed questions as well. One of the best business books I've read in a while as it is informative, to the point, well researched, and very comprehensive.

A very helpful book and nice listening

I have read/heard quite a few articles/audiobooks about Kickstarter / Indiegogo crowdfunding and this one was the most in depth resource of information I found. It was useful especially for what I have been looking for = how to prepare and to launch a campaign from an unsupported country by Kickstarter using a limited budget and time. The information of how to acquire backers and how to get in touch with the influencers are very useful and are discussed in details.

The author shares quite a lot of experiences and interview of successful and unsuccessful campaigns. That really helped to create a good overview and to prepare for the campaign. It contains helpful information about how to create a campaign from a country unsupported by Kickstarter platform.

The book is separated in phases important for the campaign, step by step, so it is easy to follow and to implement. It definitely worth reading if you are preparing for a campaign for the first time.

Thorough yet simple read.

Vilius holds your hand through the entire planning process for a crowdfunding campaign. His free list of resources is an invaluable bonus.

was this read by a bot

felt that the audio was very bot like. could get over it to pay attention.

Really weak sauce

This book I guess could be helpful for someone who has no experience with digital marketing or Kickstarter, but for me it was a snooze.

I’m a marketer and wanted to read this book to see ways I can specifically launch a Kickstarter, things like dos and donts, effective ads, better ways to launch to your list, hacks, but this was so basic I learned barley anything.

I’m launching a Kickstarter this year and was kinda disappointed.