Frazier Kickstarter Campaign

Hello, I'm Brendan Frazier, a serial entrepreneur grossing over 200 million in sales and always on the lookout for new products launching on Kickstarter.

Below is a transcript of an interview I did together with Steve and Michael a while back. It's full of interesting tips if you are running or planning on running a Kickstarter or Indiegogo campaign.

Interview transcript

We go back, I don't know 5 years or something, and they contacted me last year and said, hey, we're launching this Kickstarter Campaign, and we've got this jacket and it's heated. So we reached out to several Kickstarter marketing agencies, and signed up with BoostYourCampaign. We started working on a Kickstarter pre-launch marketing campaign together, and that worked out. The campaign got published last November, and the Kickstarter went really well.

How did you get the idea that you wanted to put this on Kickstarter in the first place rather than just do it? Did you have any prior experience with Kickstarter before?

Zero.

Okay, and did you have the product before you were launching the Kickstarter thing? Had you already gotten manufacturing all set up and ready to go?

Yes. Barely. We had a prototype sample, and that was ... The cool thing about Kickstarter is you don't have to have the manufacturing set up prior. You just need to have a working prototype, and that's the point of Kickstarter is you fund it and at the end you have the money to go manufacture. So, we had a working prototype at the time. We didn't have a PP line or an EP line set up in production, but the sample I did make.

When you went to launch the Kickstarter Campaign, did you have any idea that it would get as big as it did, that it would go over a million? Was that something you were hoping for, shooting for, or what was your goal? What were you thinking would come out of it?

We knew it was going to be relatively big. We weren't sure if we were going to hit the million dollar mark, but we were confident it was going to be a sizeable Kickstarter launch.

Because you had validated it before.

Because we had validated it beforehand. Correct.

Can you go into some more depth on how you did that validation and how other people can do it for their own products?

Yeah, absolutely. So we talk about ... A lot of business people talk about validation. We have customer surveys. We have these test groups. We have all these different things, and the problem with most customer validation methods is that they don't get the costumer to actually pull out their wallet. A lot of times surveys are filled with non-customers or your questionnaire groups or whatever are just family or friends that are just being nice. These people aren't really paying customers.

The way that I set up my customer validation method is I build a three page fake website. Page number one is like a long sales page where you're trying to get people interested with the features and aspects of either your service or product, and in between each little point that you're describing, you put a learn more button. And then when people click on the learn more button, it goes to a product description page, big product, and the main point is a big buy button with the price of your service. You're trying to get people to click on the buy button. When they hit the buy button they go to the final page, which says something like, sorry, we're having technical difficulties. Sorry, we're out of stock.

And so you put Google Analytics on all three of these pages with the conversion codes, conversion pixels on that third page, and you drive in this organic, well not organic, but PPC traffic, paper click traffic to that first page, and you fine tune the marketing that creates positive ROI to the third page, and as soon as you can discover that, you just dump the gasoline on. Or, because this is just a concept and an idea, then you go and you make the product.

With the first business I started, we convinced the investor pre-launch, pre-anything, to give us 1.2 million dollar because we could bring in all this data and say hey, we don't have a product, but we know this thing will sell and here's why. The main point is it gets people to pull out their credit card. They hit the buy button, they're anticipating to buy ...

They think they're going to buy.

So, you set up that website. You have people that were ready to buy, ready to pullout their wallet. Why go to Kickstarter. Why not just start selling through the website then?

What happens with Kickstarter is Kickstarter has a backer group. It has a following, a tribe behind it. And when you tap into the algorithm of Kickstarter and boost in its organic searches, instead of paying for a push to your own website where you're maybe spending fifty dollars to acquire a customer, when you spend that fifty dollars on Kickstarter to push, it opens up the algorithm on Kickstarter, which makes ... For fifty bucks your getting four customers, five customers, because you're tapping into the algorithms, a following of Kickstarter.

So you use Kickstarter as a marketing tool.

Absolutely.

Interesting. So going back to prep before, because you said it's important to get off to that fast start at the beginning to hit those algorithms, so with social media and such, what could somebody be doing before the campaign launches to quickly build up their social media to get that ready so that the day you launch you're ready to go?

BoostYourCampaign did a fantastic job setting up stuff and running a successful Facebook ads campaign for our Kickstarter. Our Facebook ads and just improving that over time. We had several little tricks we learned to just keep those running really well.

There's an awesome app. It's called untorch.com. U-n-t-o-r-c-h .com. What it does is it facilitates a viral email spread and what you do is you start a campaign on Facebook and say, hey, I'm going to give away a hoodie this week for anybody ... So you make a post that says "Free hoodie giveaway." Or free whatever giveaway. And they click in and it goes to a landing page and it says something to the fact of you can win a free hoodie if you share this with five other people. They sign up. They share it with five other people. Those five people get the same exact message that hey, you can win a free hoodie if you share with five people, and so this app called untorch.com, it facilitates that whole process of spreading it out really quick and then about in ten days we have about fifteen hundred email signups that we could then use to, hey, you guys we're starting ... Tell them about our Kickstarter launch. Of course all of our family and friends.

There's this Gmail extract tool that you can pull out all the emails that everybody's ever sent to you. We did that, but we got slapped by Kickstarter for spamming. But, we got a lot of conversions doing it too. So, I would do it once and then repent later.

Cool. Now, you're in the campaign and one thing I've heard is that the ideal length ... I just read this in some article, that the ideal length of a Kickstarter Campaign is like thirty to thirty five days, and somebody was saying you don't want it to take off and then have kind of this slow period. What was the path of your growth on Kickstarter? Did it ever slow down, or was it constantly growing?

Maybe that's a good point too, and I'd never thought about this before until now, but maybe that's the reason why people say thirty to thirty five is because ... We actually had a marketing budget, so we had money to spend toward a marketing budget, where most people coming into Kickstarter don't have a lot of budget. And so when that's the case, yeah, you want to ride ... Because a lot of times you will see a hockey stick at the end because once again, there's scarcity and urgency the campaign is ending. But when you do die down, remember the Kickstarter algorithm, the first thing that it take in is pledges per hour. It seems to be on the hourly basis because you can see stuff shifting every hour in the category. If your pledges slow down then you will drop in the category in the organic search.

Thirty days for somebody on a limited budget is probably good because you're just fighting to get it out there to keep the pledges moving so you stay in the organic and hopefully get an organic boost that keeps you rising.

One of the other things that has been mentioned in a lot of articles is the importance of having a video. Can you talk more about the video that you produced and how important you feel that was for your campaign?

The Kickstarter image peaks is the first impression. The title seems to draw people in, and the video seems to seal the deal. When you're doing your Kickstarter video ... This is coming from Jon and it seemed to work. It was his theory, that we don't want to come off super refined. We want to look unprofessionally refined. We don't want to look like this stale corporation of any kind. We want to look like a garage startup. Some kind of cool garage startup. You have this young Indie hip group that's on Kickstarter, so when you do your Kickstarter video, I recommend presenting the problem. You want to tell people what the problem is out there that you're trying to solve.

Once you feel like people understand, once you've elaborated enough on the problem, then you bring in your product that solves the problem and you go through feature advantage benefit throughout the whole video, making sure that when you're in the video, you're showing the advantages and the feature through the benefit inside of a lifestyle of them actually using it. So they can actually see.

Let's talk about transitioning from the campaign to what happens after the campaign. What are some of the mistakes people make when they're wrapping up their campaign and ending it and, I mean, I backed something three years ago for 200 dollars US. I still haven't gotten the product. That's a mistake in my opinion. But, what are other mistakes that companies on Kickstarter make?

Manufacturing and sourcing and building a product in a foreign country or even domestically, is hard. It's like anything that can possibly go wrong will go wrong. Therefore, plan for everything to go wrong. That's hard because most Kickstarters don't have ... Luckily I had done a startup before. I lived in China. I ate, slept, lived at factories, set up manufacturing lines. It is hard, and for example, if you're building a product that requires a mold of any kind. If you mess up your mold, a lot of time that's a ten thousand dollar redo fee, and the molds cost fifty to a hundred thousand, sometimes even more.

A startup has really got to plan for the worst and as they go to China or any country that they're sourcing from domestically, you need to do your homework. Talking about before starting the Kickstarter, you need to do your homework. You need to reach out to factories. You need to figure out what your costs are going to be, what you think the estimated FOB two port price is going to be. You need to figure out what the customs are going to be not just to America but twenty plus different countries. We're paying for not doing enough research on that part. Canadians, for example, they have a GST tax, they have a VAT tax, they have a sales tax, they have a provincial tax, and that all happens upon arrival. So, if they paid a hundred fifty and they're paying another sixty bucks in taxes that we didn't anticipate. So they're way mad.

You mentioned some of these partners you've worked with. Different software and shipping and logistics. Are there any other partners or things you used out there that you'd say you've got to use this or this was great for u

We hired a Kickstarter marketing firm, BoostYourCampaign takes only a small fee compared to the other agencies we contacted.

Like Josh's article talks about, you want to make as much money as humanly possible, and if you actually look at boostyourcampaign, they have an article very similar to ... The founder says about the same thing. It's a PR play. You want to make as much money as possible. Boostyourcampaign is amazing. I think they're probably the best firm out there for Kickstarters because what they do is every group they work with, they keep those lookalike audiences. So they have hundreds and hundreds of lookalike audiences that when a new campaign comes in, they just match it up with these lookalike audiences that they've build for other coat companies and other outdoor companies, and then run your campaign against that crowd and they just knock it out of the park for you. In ten days we worked with them, we raised a half a million dollars.

Cool. Well, this is awesome. Now, what type of projects do you think can really apply everything that you're talking about. It worked for you, but there are products out there that are just bad products to begin with, but there are probably a lot of good products out there that just they don't do this the right way and so they just don't succeed for that reason, but what do you see this being most successful with? What type of product?

Technology products, design/fashion products, film. Seems like film and video are really great for Kickstarter. Gaming, games, whether board or actual video games seem to do really well on Kickstarter. And that design includes watches, different sort of fashion apparel. That's a pretty broad category, but definitely technology, design, fashion, and the other ones that I mentioned.

Thanks for tuning in and we'll be in touch.

• end of transcript from our live interview.