A couple of weeks ago I was given a Premium trial of Krowdster. As I’ve been working on the Kickstarter campaign for Cooking 4 Change, I’ve decided to put the product through it’s paces.
You can see what I had to say about using Krowdster for researching your crowdfunding campaign here. Today I’m going to show you what happened when we ran the campaign through Krowdster leading up to launch.
Using Big Data
Krowdster has analysed tens of thousands of campaigns over several crowdfunding platforms, including Kickstarter, Indiegogo, Rockethub and Pozible.
It analyses successful campaigns, and looks for common factors. Then it checks that your own project is nailing those factors.
The problem with Big Data, however, is that it doesn’t consider the nuances of your campaign. Some rules are made to be bent or even broken entirely. There is no one-size-fits-all list of things to tick off. Different projects will have different tricks up their sleeves.
Campaigns that meet NONE of the requirements can fund if you have passion, and a high-value network.
The one thing Big Data can’t look at is the quality of your networks. A person with 100,000 followers on Twitter may find it harder to fund than a person with only 100 friends on Facebook. The number of potential backers is less important than your connection to them, and their belief in your goals.
I’ve got my own list
Part of what I do myself is optimise campaigns. I have my own list of things that I expect to be in any crowdfunding campaign. It’s 52 points long. It’s more extensive than Krowdster and is based on anecdotal evidence AND big data.
I ran the project through my own list before it went through the Krowdster analytic tool. It scored 48/52.
The 4 things it failed to do according to my list, we’re OK with. They either do not apply to this project, or we can justify the decision to not meet them.
The same thing applies to Krowdster, so let’s look at the journey.
5 May – First Draft Complete
This was the day we had the project in it’s rough configuration. We were still missing a couple of images, but for the most part, we were ready to roll. I put it through Krowdster and it gave us a couple of places to improve.
Krowdster looks at nine major factors. We scored 6/9.
What we had right:
- Title was long enough
- We had a video
- Description was long enough
- Images were found in the description
- We had enough rewards
- The duration of the campaign
What we needed to improve:
The items the Cooking 4 Change project needed to improve according to Krowdster
What we did:
We weren’t going to change the goal. This is the place where Big Data gets it wrong.
Big Data can’t look at our project page and know our promotional budget. It also can’t know the fact that a huge network is sitting behind this project (the project itself involves over 100 Kiwi celebrities, many of which have agreed to help with promotion).
To us, $28,000 is a completely achievable number based on what we know about our project.
We did decide to take Krowdster’s advice in regards to connecting Facebook and adding a website. These are easy enough to do, and if they increase our chances, are worth doing.
14 May – Launch Day
Today is the day we launch. We’re currently scoring 8/9 on Krowdster.
Please note I have distorted the specific information as this won’t be helpful for YOUR project, and it’s intellectual property owned and sold by Krowdster.
Krowdster’s campaign optimiser for the Cooking 4 Change campaign on launch day
Benchmark Statistics
Krowdster also provides some benchmark statistics. These look at other campaigns in our category and provide some data about them. This could give you some good base statistics to work from, but don’t put too much meaning into them. The Benchmark Statistics also suffer the big problem with Big Data: they don’t take your project fully into account.
Our category is Publishing. This project aims to produce a cookbook filled with the recipes and cooking stories of 101 Kiwi celebrities.
Krowdster’s data looks at every project in our category and provides aggregate and averaged data over all of them. That means the data we are supplied includes data from amateur novelists, colouring in books, non-fiction books, coffee table books… it’s not specifically targeted at celebrity cookbooks – or even just cookbooks.
What I discovered is that Publishing is not a very popular category. Only 18.84% of Publishing projects succeed.
Krowdster also gives me a look at some other stats. Once again, I have blurred out the specific data.
Krowdster‘s benchmark statistics for the Publishing category
Take Away Points
There are dozens of checks you can do on your crowdfunding project. If you have bought the Krowdster Premium Account for promotion purposes, you may find it useful to run your project through the Optimiser.
Big Data is very helpful for quick benchmarking, but Krowdster can only tell you so much.
Your individual circumstances may mean you can justify decisions to do something different. In the case of this campaign, we have a strong network that means we are confident with our $28,000 goal.
The link below is an affiliate link. This post is provided freely in the hopes that if you choose to join Krowdster, you will do so via this link.
It provides a ‘kickback’ to me if you choose to upgrade – at absolutely no extra cost to you.
You are under no obligation to use the link, but if this article was helpful, it would be nice if you did.
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