Kickstarter Strategizing
On October 21st, we launched a Kickstarter project. We’re two weeks into our three-week-long campaign, currently at 58% funded toward our goal. I wanted to share some of my thoughts behind doing this to begin with, and some of our strategies for maintaining momentum through the end of the campaign. Here’s a little Q&A with myself….
Do you really need the money?
At this point, yes. Every little bit helps. Our original timeline had us opening before the end of 2021, so we’ve experienced a solid year of additional salaries, insurance, some rent payments, and inflation. While we got more investors to come on board behind the scenes, we still needed an extra bit of funding so that we can get everything on our wish list for our training lab.
How did you decide on the rewards?
Since we’re launching a roastery, every backer reward level includes bags of coffee. We wanted to give people the chance to support us and, at the same time, get true value out of their pledges. Of course, there’s also branded swag like mugs, t-shirts, stickers, and coffee canisters. The reward of tickets to an exclusive Kickstarter backer party is honestly just an excuse to celebrate with a lot of people!
Couldn’t you have done Indiegogo instead, and not risk it on an all-or-nothing project?
Yeah, probably. Though Kickstarter has some good reasons for structuring as all-or-nothing. From my perspective, I do think the urgency helps bring others into the group effort of excitedly getting the word out.
How are you getting the word out and keeping the campaign from stalling out?
Along with our initial campaign launch party, we did the usual social media posts, personal asks, and email newsletters. Basically, we’re been trying to tell anyone and everyone about the campaign, attempting to leverage our fairly wide network since we have a lot of people on our launch team and community of stakeholders. We also sent press releases to local publications, though as of today not a single media outlet picked up the story (let me know if you can help with that!).
Another strategy was to keep the campaign to a short three weeks so that there was a lower chance of a lengthy lull. Not sure if that was the right call, but we’ll see.
Why should anyone back the campaign instead of just waiting to buy coffee at the brick-and-mortar location when it opens?
We have a brand-new 15kg roaster that’s waiting for us to fire it up and crank out batches of beans. The inaugural batches are reserved for Kickstarter backers, so… bragging rights!
Also, from my experience running Taproom Coffee’s Kickstarter campaign back in 2014, we’re building a small community of people that will forever be able to claim they “were there when it all started”. And the exclusive Kickstarter party will totally be worth it!
Aaaand… you’ll have my personal gratitude! I genuinely appreciate all the enthusiastic support people are giving us through the outlet of this campaign.
The campaign ends the morning of Friday, November 11th. Please consider backing us at any amount!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/taproomcoffee/opo-coffee-roastery-cafe-training-center