$4M on Kickstarter? Yes! ☀️

Hi all!☀️

While it’s summer here in Italy and most people are off for vacation, we spent the month of July advising the team at Vaonis, the people behind the huge Kickstarter success of Hestia - Turn Your Smartphone Into A Smart Telescope.

How did it go?

Well…

• $4,126,786 in funding

• 13,975 backers

• 40.560% funded

• $479,000 raised on Day 1

• 443 backers per day on average

• 33 comments per day on the Kickstarter page on average

Here the 6 most important takeaways.

1️⃣ Alert your pre-existing community first

To feed a sense of ownership, you should always let your community members know about your launch date, pricing, and other details before anyone else. Make them feel special, and they will reward you by pledging to your campaign as soon as it launches.

2️⃣ Share your Kickstarter pre-launch page

Share your Kickstarter pre-launch page at least 2 weeks before your launch date, possibly the same day you announce your launch date.

A pre-launch page with 1,000 subscribers will create a ton of urgency and social proof, even before your product launches.

3️⃣ More visuals, better results The team had created tons of visuals for their pre-launch ads, so that we got to the launch date, being aware of which visual would have had better performance driving traffic to the campaign. This also helped drive conversions through the several newsletter features we organized during the campaign.

4️⃣ Use an actual event to create urgency Next year, on April 8th, North America will experience one of the biggest solar eclipses ever. The entire communication from the Vaonis team has been based on the excitement for this upcoming event - and this helped a lot in making the campaign's messaging solid and understandable.

5️⃣ Use Add-ons to increase your Average Order Value

Rewards are great, but add-ons can give you a boost. Empowering your backers to improve their product experience by including.

We suggested the Vaonis team to include add-ons with their rewards, and most part of the backers included them in their order.

6️⃣ Increase your Magic Ranking by including surveys for Stretch Goals

As shown in the photo below, we focus on engaging the backer community to get more organic exposure.

How do we do it?

> We set 2 alternative stretch goals

> We post an update for the backers to choose which one they want to unlock first

> Ask them to vote just by typing "A" or "B" in the comments

👉 And get this level of engagement in return (970 comments on an update in 2 days)

This has huge impact on the Magic Ranking of the campaign!

And, of course, there’s much more…

But hopefully, these takeaways will help your next crowdfunding campaign.

**

Best of luck on your crowdfunding journey - towards $4M!

Sincerely,



Andrea