Lessons

Lesson Info

Launch

So this launch section is a little bit shorter because if you've done all of the planning and all the building correctly, watching is sort of press the button and you still have to manage it. And like I said, the 30 days of your launch of your Kickstarter project is going to seem like a full time job. You shouldn't. You know, I've never seen anyone Launcher project and then go on vacation and come back to a funded project. Um, but if you do everything ahead of time, the launch would be a little bit less stressful. So we're gonna talk about some specific tips and then walk through the creation of an actual project. So how do you ensure a big pop on launch day? You mentioned earlier that the world is very, very noisy, right? And we all know social media is noisy. But to cut through that noise, there are some specific things you can do, um, and ensure a big launch. We covered in the earlier sections how important it is to get your project 100% funded in the 1st 7 days of the 1st 10 days. ...

Like there's lots of reasons why that's very important. And so to cut through the noise unlatched insure Big pop. One trick is called the bartender trick. And so I grew up in the Midwest. Who here has ever bar tended at, like a coin operated pool table bar popcorn, peanuts on the floor? Anyone? Never. Okay, a couple of half came back. Um, so you guys know the bartender trick and I couldn't. I couldn't find a great image online of this, but the way it works for those of you who haven't done that before, the bar opens for the evening. There's a big glass fish bowl and you reach into your own pocket with your own money. And you put $20 of your own singles in there because it signals to the people then who come to the bar all night. That's what you're supposed to do. They don't know it's your money. They just see that. Oh, when I get a drink, here's this fish bowl full of cash. That's what you're supposed to do. So you know, the way the data proves out if you don't do that, if you like, I'm keeping my $20. You get it at the end of the day anyway. But if you don't do that, people order drinks and likewise, their fish bowl in the fire. But if they see all the singles, then they contribute. Kickstarter works the same way. So you want to call your friends, call your rich uncle, um and really, really launch big on the first day with the bartender trick. So you want to, you know, a good section of your planning phase should be especially for friends and family and people that you can really get to commit. Right? Because your college roommate haven't talked to in 10 years. It's tough to get him to say Yeah, definitely give you money. But, you know, if your uncle etcetera, etcetera, you gotta be like when we launched. I need you to contribute one hour after that or two hours after that. It should really go big on the first day. This also, we can talk about Kickstarter featuring you in different places. This also impacts what they see is trending some of Kickstarter site and where they put you Although you shouldn't count on it. Some of that is algorithmic based. So, you know, um, trending this week. Most active most number backers. Um, funding, etcetera. You want to show up in their data, And to do that, you want, you know, they want to see basically their systems. Comptel, if this is a hot project out of the gate and it's gonna get funded. So just like the want truck thing, I'm thrilled that everyone's already taking action and doing that. I kind of can't stress this enough. You should actually have. And I should maybe make this a tab in the Excel sheet under the friends and family. She almost have, like, a dollar level. That's like, What are you committing to like? Mom? I'm serious. I need you know what do you do? What you thrown in 50 bucks? Okay, Mom's good for 50. And add that up. You should know you should not be surprised when you know, like you're gonna be 25% funded at the end of the first day. And then like I said, that helps toe start. The snowball of the press story gives people things to do. Maybe Kickstarter features us. Hey, this one's definitely gonna get funded. It's 25% in a day that kind of thing. So get sort of hard verbal commitments from your friends. I might need to set up Grandma's Amazon payments account like these kind of things, but it's like a snowplow plowing all the snow ahead of time so that you're ready when you want. You have a really, really big day. It is important for momentum for press again, backer confidence. Somebody sees it on day two and 25% funded like Well, this is definitely got 29 more days to hit the last 25% of men, right? Um, and again, the 1st 77 to 10 days or critical. This is super important. And it's kind of like one of those like, Yeah, yeah, yeah, I want to do it on the first day, but I don't see many people actually say Mom, 50 bucks, Grandma. 25 bucks like Does this make sense to everybody? It's like take action, get get commitments. I know it's sometimes it's hard, but you can just explain this to him, right? Sending your copy of this class and say This is why it's so important that we have a really big funding day. This makes sense any questions in the chat or good call. So how do you cut through the noise? You mentioned it earlier. Twitter's noisy place on Twitter in general, on social media. I like to say it's only noisy because you make it noisy. Your car radio would be noisy if you turned on all the stations at the same time. So if you follow people on Twitter and try to read your main stream, of course it's noisy. But if you let's say, build a Twitter list of I have a Twitter list, just angels and veces I'm not even raising money, but I just want to see what they tweet. So it's like That's like a station on my radio. So when I tuned into that, I'm only seeing those 10 or 12 people, and they don't tweet that much. So in a given day, I can catch up on their 10 or 12 person every tweet that they dio in a day so you could build Twitter lists this thing about, um, uh, you know, identifying the tribe far ahead of time. I would have a Twitter like like we talked about the sub tribes. If you're on Twitter, I would have a Twitter list of, you know, um, military families and all the sub tribes that you talked about spend time over a few months finding them and seeing where they are and what they tweet about. Because just like commenting on the blogged, you kind of become into their world. So you cut through the noise. You can also use a tool called Thunderclap. Thunderclap is a really interesting tool. So the way Facebook works specifically and Twitter. But Facebook has something called a drink. And what Facebook's a drink is is It's the algorithm that Facebook uses to decide what content to show you from your friends. So if I post something not all of my Facebook friends see it, I posted and it goes into the Facebook page rank algorithm, and then they decide sort of whether to do it, and it stays in there and they decide when to post it. If I post a link, Um, and my friend Jeff may or may not see it, depending on a drink. But if I post it and 17 of Jeffs friends also posted, they're gonna show it to Jeff because Facebook's a drink. It's a pretty smart algorithm, and it says if 17 of just Jeff's friends posted this link, then it must be relevant to him, right? That's they have all the data and they can figure this stuff out. Thunderclap is a simple tool that back to kind of the snowplow analogy is it stacks up the content. And so when you get people to agree to talk about her, share your project. If that sort of sprinkled over time tweets here tweets their Facebook post here, you might never overcome a drink. But if that all goes on one day, I don't if you guys have, you know, Gangnam style or any anything that, like a bunch of your friends, posted or tweeted it on that day, that overcame the noise and came into your stream because so many people, so many of your friends, talked about it. Thunderclap allows you to sort of collect this commitment to talk about her, to tweet or post her share your watch and batches it up so that you can release it on launch day. So it's a way to, um, and for a while, Twitter didn't allow it because they thought was breaking the A P I, but her breaking the terms of service. But then eventually they did allowed. So thunderclap is a really interesting way to send it to people and say, I love your support. If you sign up here Thunderclap, basic, they have toe takes a few clicks. Thunderclap Thunderclap has to authenticate their twitter and or Facebook. But if you're like, yeah, I'm in, I'll support you. The favor you can ask them is tweeting post about it before then. But if you sign up through thunderclap, they will sort of release the rubber band on launch day. And then you'll overcome Facebook a drink, and all of their friends will see it. It seems pretty, a little bit geeky and kind of Ah, um, maybe not that big a deal, but it's it's a big deal toe. Have your friends shared on Facebook, and I only have Facebook decide to show it to five of their 1000 friends versus overcoming that by because a lot of people share it. Does that make sense? This is an example of what Thunderclap looks like. Um, what's interesting is the logo banner. Tom Below is something that we're going to talk about in a second just happens to also be on the site. So we talked about conversion right before Conversion rate is the percentage of people that come to your page that give you a reward. So again, simple math. 100 people visit your Kickstarter project. 10 people contribute. You have a 10% conversion. So it's important to increase the conversion rate. We talked previously about how to increase your average backer contribution from the 10 or the 25 down to the 50 of the 75 with the no brainer level in this slippery funnel. This to increase social proof and conversion rate, you should build a logo banner with press hits and ideally, testimonials. And this is this Takes some time and it and it can be tricky to do. Um, but an example of what this looks like it is. And you guys have probably seen this on certain Kickstarter projects. If the videos here, right below the video is kind of a larger text, sub headlines sub paragraph and then below that. Sometimes you'll see something that looks like this. So it says as seen on fast company on the next Web broadcast, the famine nine on you. What this does is the value of this is not the press hits that it gets you. The idea is that this is the press that happened before the project, and this press can be about you or your prior projects. So you had mentioned you want a bunch of awards for your prior films and things like that. Yeah, you're for yes. So you want the reef, and I really write the award winning, you know, where else have you seen? You know, things like that. So Sundance, etcetera, Um, what are the logos that helped give you what's called social proof? Right. And you see that? Just like on, um, thunderclap, They know this. So they say, Yeah, as featured in Forbes Fast company, matchable Wired Rolling Stone. Whether people consciously think about it or subconsciously think about it, that automatically makes people think they're legit or they're more legit. So you want to do the same thing, and this is a reason to think about maybe, you know, and again, you can use my crack. You can use these other tools. Um, it's interesting. Sites like Forbes and some of these other places that used to be so exclusive because it was print when you were cutting down trees and shipping magazines to people. But now you know, many people blogged for Forbes. They're in the same world as you know, business insider and mashable and TechCrunch like if they don't post six times an hour, they are losing the race because somebody else is posting that much. So Huffington Post is a good example. Huffington Post It used to be really, really prestigious to sort of write for the Huffington Post. It sounds very right, regal and now lots. People write for the Huffington Post. It doesn't mean it's bad. Doesn't mean any given article is bad, but it's not that exclusive to do it anymore. So another thing you can do you know well in advance, like right now, are this weekend or next week is figure out. Think about which logos makes sense back to the tribes and back to the sub tribes, which are the logos that they respect, right? Some people don't even know what fast company is. My grand would be like faster. What a fast car. But it means something in a certain tribe, right? Same with mashable's him without. So as you think about your tribes and the sub tribes and those men diagrams and those bubbles, what are the outlets that they respect? So, like for the autism, what are the logos for your project? That would be interesting to have been, you know, posted on I got a Huffington Post. Parents sure. Thinking Person's guide to autism. Blawg. Sure, parents magazine, Whole parents tribe. Right. So you know, now you can have some more home mark, which is how do I write for having a post parents magazine? Because again, this logo banner that doesn't have to be about your Kickstarter project has been featured there. You should and work with the designer to be ready to kind of refresh the logo banner. If good magazine picks it up, you want to be ableto if you know, refresh that and put good magazine on there. But this could be all the places where if you've written one guest log post for Huffington Post, you have been seen in having both parents in parents magazine. Maybe this is separate topic, but would it be better for me to write for huffingtonpost parents or to try and get a reporter from Huffingtonpost to write about my project or about me or about my practice, I would say whatever's easier because either way you get the logo. And either way, they're not sending the traffic. So I mean, think about what's more valuable for you, too, Um, things like this. You know, The misconception here is that press drives traffic, tons of trafficking backers it can, especially if you craft a really great, you know, like Soma was such a well crafted story and pricing everything else that I'm sure, actually, Mike writes about this on the Tim Ferriss Post called Hacking Kickstarter. He talks about how we got coverage in all these places. All those all those logos like, except for maybe Rolling Stone. I think someone was featured in. They got the most traffic and backers from good good dot I asked her good magazine, and so it was more relevant to what they were trying to accomplish. And once you see their video, you're kind of that is more relevant than like, you know, mashable. It's not a social media thing. And Forbes fast company, they're not so the You want to make a longer press list. Think about, you know, go back to your tribes, go back to your list of sub tribes and envy them and said, You like you probably know. So for your project and these military families, what are logos, where they would see it and be like, Oh, wow, they were featured there. Each of the services has their own. Maxine. There's the National Guard magazine, the Marine magazine Perfect. There's military times there's and then, like more on the birth side. There's the improved birth dot org's huge right now, as well as there's AH foundation called Operation Special Delivery. Because what they're called that they focus on giving well. They focus on doulas birth partners for people whose husbands were deployed So it might be something could get into and say, Hey, pictures, air just as important as a do. Yeah, definitely, you know, kind of jump off of their tribe, right? Right. And so there's no one hard and fast rule as faras. Basically, let's let's just assume I'm not picking on huffingtonpost parents, but let's just assume that you think based on the traffic that they generally generate that the the uptick in conversion and trust and social proof from having that logo there is bigger than the 500 clicks they might send you in five backers. So then, right that block post. Now, Now, if there's a good dad I asked or operation Special delivery or whatever where you're like Oh, they're they're the lifehacker of this, they're really gonna send me a lot of traffic. Like people in this world, Lifehacker tends to like the people that read life record. They want to go try the thing and do the thing. They're super early adopters. So APs that launch with, like, a promo code, they do really, really well in life after more than national, more than TechCrunch, right? So again, I go back to the tribes and sub tribes and this could be another Starbucks trick. Go by for how much? $5 Starbucks cards love to buy a coffee. You know, first you got to find those tribes. You could maybe do an email survey and say, What are the five you know, media publications that you respect the most, And then you have a You know, that just gives you the names and logos. Now you have your work cut out and say, How do I get a blogger on Huffington Post parents? How do I get a piece in parents magazine? Right. One really great service for this that I don't have a slide for its called Haro H a r o help a reporter out. Have you guys heard of this? So So hard was really interesting. Carro is an email list that connects journalists with sources. So, um, you know, we all look at huffingtonpost mashable on all this stuff. Like, if they cover us like, wow, it's so amazing. But what is sort of unknown as they need you, actually more than you need them. They have to write or they don't have a job anymore. They don't have a site anymore, right? If they stop posting, it's kind of like the bus from speed. If they slow down like their site dies, right, they can't start posting less and less content. So they need you on. What Haro does is it allows journalists to explain what they're looking for. Sources. So they might be like military birthmark like it can be really, really specific. Um, it can be, it might be semi related. It might be like photos of families. Well, while the other person is out the other spouses out on duty. Um, but sign up for Haro. They give categories like business and finance, um, camera for some of the other categories, but it's h a r O. Help a reporter out. Just Google it and you can sign up and then browse that. And it's basically journalists saying We need a source for this. We need someone to comment on this right, and it takes a little bit of time, takes one minute a day. You can scan the headlines that say, Is there anything relevant? Right. So take the sub tribes, What? The logos they trust in what logo's matter to them and then sign up for Haro and say, Oh, here is something about I need a documentary film maker to talk about. You know, it could be just perfect right up your alley, and then you're the perfect person to respond. They get the story, you get the logo. Everybody wins questions on that. So here is another example. It doesn't have to be. The logo doesn't have to be the Kickstarter project itself. So this was Matt Cuteness, the guy who did the travel saver app. The raised 27,000 and $1 app. Well, he's a very popular travel blogger, so he has been building his tribe for years and all that stuff but in he's been featured in all these places. So I mean, I would ask anyone if you just go and sit this now where this lives is below the video. So this is the first thing below the video, and there's the video and then the big description right below that, you know, have a designer design a nice, um, logo banner. And doesn't this automatic? Wow, New York Times Time magazine There's a Huffington Post like, Instantly. It's like these guys legit. He's credible, right? He wouldn't be in all these, but you could fake one logo or get a small mention in one magazine or whatever, but this sort of adds credibility to him. It's not about the clicks, because these all came from before. It's about increasing credibility, that trust on the conversion rate. Now to put this on steroids, if these press outlets have said great things about your project, this. This was a project called Drain Audio. They made. They were doing sustainable, cool kind of headphones and audio accessories. It was guys that came out of a company that had made that stuff and then had folded. And if you read the testimonials, it's extremely like so called, um, at cool hunting gear hungry throws again. The thrill is logo probably means nothing to your tribe, and the gear hungry logo means nothing to your tribe, right? So identify the 10 or 20 that matter, and these are the ones that matter for him. For for this project that was about cool tech cool headphones. Green puts the speaker first, letting function and form structure, no matter how where you intend to pump up the volume Cool hunting and it links to the actual article. So it's not just the cool hunting logo, which is kind of like a testimonial from Joe M. From Lincoln, Nebraska. It's don't believe me. Click on the link here is what cool Hunting said about it. Right, so logo banner. Ideally, no matter what testimonials, even better