Successful Kickstarter Campaign - Raising $5M+ for UVMask

How much should your campaign raise in the first 48 hours?

Is $5k enough? $100k?

Your only goal, in the beginning, is to cross your initial funding target and then keep the momentum going throughout the entire campaign.

"How do you hit your initial funding target?"

If your product costs $200 and your initial funding goal is $20k, you need 100 people to back you on the first day.

And if only 2% of your subscribers convert — that’s a lowballed safe estimate — you’ll need 5,000 subscribers before you launch!

So, how did we manage to raise $100k in the first 48 hours — and on to $5.5M within several months — with just one week to prepare both the launch and pre-launch?

Learn all the strategies we used to achieve 48-hour success in Creator Club.

In June of last year, a few months into the global pandemic, at the height of disruptions to manufacturing and shipping, Boz Zou reached out to us for help with his UVMask’s pre-launch campaign.

The catch — we only had 2 weeks until the campaign would go live!

Our Ads, Copywriting, and Visual Departments got together to understand the product from every angle:

We analyzed its Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

We drilled down on the ideal target customer

We honed in on the key Reasons To Believe (RTBs)

We developed a powerful insight

During those 2 weeks, we managed to capture 2,000 leads... 

Now all we had to do was launch our Kickstarter Campaign!

When I woke up the next morning to see how UVMask was doing, I was not surprised to see we had already crossed the $50k milestone.

And within the first 48 hours, we hit 6-figures!

A new campaign, from a new creator, with a brand new concept…

The first 72 hours are always critical, so you need to make sure you gain enough momentum.

In UVMask's case, we relied mostly on Facebook ads, our own community, and the Kickstarter algorithm which instantly picked us up because of the record-breaking action.

Here’s the breakdown for the first 24 hours:

That’s a 5% conversion rate — or 1 out of every 20 visitors to the page!

The average order value was rather high at $161. And the funding per visitor was also high at close to $8.

That went on to be our most successful campaign to date with over $5.5M raised — and the 15th most successful campaign in its category on Kickstarter… ever!

Before we get into some of the hacks that allowed us to raise $5M in under 2 months, think about this simple question:

You have a winter jacket. Delivery will take 6 months.

When do you launch?

1. Summer (winter delivery)
2. Winter (summer delivery)

 It's a winter jacket, people are going to use it in winter... 

They're smart enough to realize that they won't receive it in time to use it if you launch in winter, no?

They'll understand that they will enjoy a nice warm winter if they buy it in summer, right?

Wrong!

People in summer aren't thinking about winter jackets. They're suffering from the heat. They want to be cool!

That's why when the Coolest Cooler — a cool icebox — first launched in December, it failed. Nobody had that problem in winter...

But when they re-launched in summer, they raised a record-breaking $13M!

The billionaire-investor Bill Gross sheds some light on why in a must-watch talk on Why Startups Succeed.

 Similarly, we launched UVMask in the midst of a global pandemic where literally everyone on Earth was in dire need of the best protection. 

Launch when people are thinking about the problem you’re solving. Not earlier. Not later.

But timing isn't everything. 

Let me share some of the lesser-known hacks that we used to raise $3M for UVMask:

Facebook Advertising 

How much do you need to spend to raise $3M? What are the returns on investment?

It was by no means cheap. 

Then again… no risk, no reward!

With the help of the Sprint Crowdfunders' Fund, we spent over a quarter of a million dollars on Facebook ads!

And thanks to tight preparation, we had our first sale from ads just an hour after the launch.

On the second day, we held an average ROAS (return on ad spend) of 9 — that’s $9 earned for every $1 spent!

Of course, all our ads had “Just Launched” badges — as it is important to let people know that they can get the early bird deal if they back early.

Well… at least that’s what we thought:

Notice anything?

No?

Read it again… 

Yep! UVMask “Just Lunched”!

Whoops!

Did we turn it off? Nope!

 Instead, this silly mistake brought us most of our early advertising results.

When the ad went live, a lot of people were eager to “correct” us. Nobody could resist correcting our mistake… 

And as comments are one of the highest forms of engagement, Facebook’s algorithms showed it to more people. And we noticed some abnormally high conversion rates!

So instead of turning it off, we started to join the jokers in the comments and began making our own jokes too.

It’s always good to own your mistakes and make fun of them, especially when they’re the reason for great results!

Broad TargetingDust, pathogens, viruses, and pollution are universal.

And realizing that gave us an idea to broaden our targeting not only to related interests/topics but also to those only tangentially related at first sight.

How did we find these interests?

Google Analytics!

Checking out our Audience’s Affinity and Other Interests helped us discover directions that we hadn’t even thought of. 

We sorted out all the sources according to Transactions and carefully checked out which source had the highest eCommerce conversion rate.

The best performing interests were News, Business and Finance, Cooking, and Astronomy — yes, we were as surprised as you about the last one!

So we went ahead and created ads on Facebook targeting people with those interests which helped to keep the momentum going.