Most people thinking about crowdfunding stumble across Tim Ferriss’ ‘Hacking Kickstarter‘ article. One of the most important notes in that article is that you need to contact the people who will back your campaign, and you need to do that effectively and immediately.
Ferriss (the king of outsourcing) found that he had to painstakingly comb his own exported list of gmail contacts, narrowing them down into key groups like ‘friends’, ‘family’ and ‘influencers’. Having run my own campaign recently, I can confirm that doing this job yourself kinda sucks.
Enter Velocity Kick. This is a service designed to make it really easy to find the contact addresses for the people you know. It combines the Twitter, Facebook, Salesforce, LinkedIn and email contacts for your entire team. At the other end, it spits out easy-to-use email lists like ‘family’, ‘top influencers’ and ‘close friends’. These lists can be used to create targeted email campaigns to generate that all-important early push.
As creator Josh Baylin explains, platforms like Kickstarter are really great for the campaign itself, but pretty terrible for all the other stuff it takes to run a successful campaign. The problem is, no-one is helping to make the promotion easy, or provide analytics on which promotional efforts are working, and which aren’t. It’s this gap in the market where Velocity Kick is aimed.
Velocity Kick are currently seeking funding on software-focussed crowdfunding platform, Ramen. Baylin believes there is a real market with professional crowdfunding organisations and consultants, as well as the serious creators running their own campaigns. Their reward levels include integration with crowdfunding platforms, and custom solutions for incubators. And don’t even worry about that excruciating wait you get with so many crowdfunding projects. Velocity Kick is hoping to be up and running to backers within 30 days of the campaign closing.
For me, this was a no-brainer. Without a doubt, email was the most effective method I used to get my message out to my backers. I am a total convert to the email push. Over half of my backers (and around 80% of my final funds) came from emails sent in the first 24 hours. The rest came from a combination of Twitter, Facebook, and in-person conversations. Make no mistake about it: the 20% of my funds from other sources was the hardest bit to get.
This tool will seriously reduce the amount of time my coaching clients have to spend sorting out emails. It will simply and quickly provide lists of people to approach for early funds. It’s these early funds which work so effectively to encourage second and third tier backers to take a punt on an interesting idea, and get your project over the line.
If all this makes sense to you as well, there are 5 more days left on the Velocity Kick campaign. Watch the video below, then help make this great idea a reality!
