Is Your Product Cut out for Crowdfunding Success?

As a digital marketing agency, we’d love nothing more than to boat with successful client projects that we coordinated. But this is not always the case. While not many marketers will admit this, we’re prepared to: some campaigns fail. Sometimes it’s the marketer’s fault, sometimes it’s the product fault. But when it comes to crowdfunding success, a savvy marketer can recognize a winner from the very beginning.

We all heard the extraordinary crowdfunding success stories: products that raised 100 times the amount they asked for and went on to live happily ever after. What you don’t hear too much about is the failed projects – and there’s a lot of them! Between 69 and 89% of projects depending on the platform fail to reach their goals.

Granted, there are a lot of marketing mistakes involved, but even more products that shouldn’t be on crowdfunding platforms in the first place. No matter how well you are at hacking the GoGo factor or at promoting your campaign on either Kickstarter or Indiegogo, if the product is not suitable, it will never achieve the sought-after crowdfunding success.

Take a look at the checklist below in order to determine whether your product is suitable for crowdfunding or not:

1. Is Your Product Innovative Enough?

And I’m not just talking about adding an LED timer to a toaster. I’m talking about something truly innovative, like a scooter that you can ride for four days on a single charge. The scooter itself is not an innovation, but a battery that lasts that long is definitely a great feature.

Try to be honest with yourself so that you can, in turn, be honest with your target audience. In order to build a product that will achieve crowdfunding success, you should have spent most of your product development time in research. Did you?

2. Is Your Product Responding to a Current Need or Want?

This is a tough one, but bear with me. Try to think about your promotional campaign. Who would you target on social media? Who would you address your crowdfunding pitch to? Outline your buyer persona from a socio-demographic perspective and then move a bit forward.

Is your buyer persona willing to spend money on the gadget you’re crowdfunding? Do they hang out on crowdfunding platforms? Are they early adopters? You may think that you can reach anyone given the power of Internet promotion, but that’s not true. For instance, if you’ve just invented the crochet needles that improve your speed by 10x, that’s definitely a great product. But it will never achieve crowdfunding success.

3. Is Your Product Development almost Completed?

This is one of the biggest paradoxes of crowdfunding: in order to win people’s trust, your product has to be almost ready to ship, which kind of defeats the whole purpose of raising money for it, doesn’t it? On fact, Kickstarter won’t even let you use computer-generated renderings in your pitch’s video and photos. It has to be the actual product. On Indiegogo, you can use whatever you want, but this is one of the reasons why competition is much higher on this platform.

While this seems counterintuitive, it’s just the way things are. And there is some logic behind this and behind Kickstarter’s decision to allow you to show the actual product only. First off, there’s the matter of liability: the final product may look completely different than the schematics which will, obviously, enrage your backers. Secondly, backers won’t like to wait for two years for your product to reach their doorstep. By that time, something better might already be mainstream.

Not sure whether your product will reach crowdfunding success? We’ve analyzed and participated in hundreds of campaigns and we’d be happy to give you an honest feedback.