O vercome the Kickstarter Trust Hump
The first major hurdle every Kickstarter faces is something I like to call the “Trust Hump.”
Your Kickstarter is awesome, what you’re trying to do is amazing and what you’re offering backers is unparalleled. So why don’t people jump on board?
Trust Hump: the awkward phase between the launch of your Kickstarter and your first 50 backers.
Once you hit 50, you are “over the hump.” New visitors see that there are people out there who believe in you. Instead of feeling concern that they might be the only one foolish enough to fall for your con, they’ll feel compelled to jump on the bandwagon with everyone else.
To hit 50+ backers in the first day and jump the Trust Hump, you need a pre-campaign push to find potential backers before your Kickstarter has even begun. All you need is a simple website that quickly pitches what you’re raising money for, with CTAs that compel visitors to subscribe to a newsletter and follow you on social media.
To guarantee 50 backers you should be shooting for a minimum of 500 pre-campaign subscribers. Depending on how talented you are at PR, start at least a month before the Kickstarter launch.
As people join your list and your social networking feeds, keep their interest stoked. Tease potential limited reward tiers that only the first 50 people will have the opportunity to back. Job #1 of a pre-campaign is to get attention. Job #2 is holding on to it until:
Launch Day
Now you have a list of 500 interested people ready and waiting to be unleashed on your project. To these people, the fact that no one else has backed you yet is a feature not a danger sign. They are there for the purpose of being first. Keep them informed leading up to the day of the event and celebrate their contributions so the rest of the world can see.
From then on out, everyone who discovers your Kickstarter will see a project well on it’s way to being successfully funded. You’ll have their trust. If you’ve done the work outlined above, you will have earned it.
Nick Cotton is a project manager based out of Los Angeles, California. He’s got a background in the entertainment industry, and uses his talent at online messaging to extol the virtues of content marketing, interactive fiction and sentences measuring 280 characters or less.
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