How We Raised $10,000 on Kickstarter and Almost Lost It

We’ve all heard the incredible crowdfunding success stories like the Pebble Watch and Coolest Cooler - products that raised millions of dollars through crowdfunding, seemingly overnight. This isn’t one of those stories.
 
In 2016, group of soldiers were sitting around in Afghanistan wondering why no one sold individual packets of cinnamon. After searching the internet and finding no vendors, we took matters into our own hands and founded Cinn-Credible Cinnamon Packets. We used our savings to manufacture the initial batch of prototype packets, but needed an additional $10,000 to design and manufacture retail packaging for our newfound creation. It was downhill from there:
 
We Had Horrible Timing
We made just about every mistake you can possibly make when considering the timing of your crowdfunding campaign. We began the campaign on Thursday, November 17th for a period of 60 days, ending on Monday, January 16th. That one sentence contains at least four pieces of bad timing in itself. First, Thursdays are one of the worst days to start your campaign. All of the tips suggest starting your fundraising campaigns on a Monday morning, which allows you to get a full week of momentum going before people take off for the weekend. We had just gotten things going when the weekend came and took all of the wind out of our sails. Not only that, but when everyone came back to work the next Monday, it was Thanksgiving week - the busiest travel week of the year! Guess what people aren’t doing if they’re traveling? Giving money to your campaign! Thanksgiving was quickly followed by the Christmas and New Year holidays, and to top it off, our campaign ended on Martin Luther King Day…yet another holiday.
 
We Didn’t Plan Ahead
From the moment we pushed the button to activate our campaign, we began finding things we should have thought of, and prepared for, ahead of time. In an effort to raise awareness about our campaign, we wanted to have a press release - something we could have written ahead of time. In order to have a nice press release, we needed high-quality pictures of our product - something we could have taken ahead of time. We then needed to research methods to get our press release out. We wanted to showcase our product on social media, but our accounts were brand new and had no followers. We were forced to organically grow our followers DURING the fundraising campaign, potentially missing out on a ton of opportunities.
 
We Had a Poor Splash Page for our Campaign
We didn’t end up shooting our main Kickstarter video until about week 2 of the campaign, and were continually swapping out pictures for higher quality ones (once we had them photographed) and creating infographics for our Kickstarter page. The page didn’t become “final” until almost a month into the campaign, and by then, most of the momentum was gone.
 
Although we made quite a few mistakes, there were a few gems that we figured out along the way:
 
We Streamlined Our Social Media Posts
Since we knew that social media was going to be the cheapest, most efficient way to get the word out about our cinnamon packets, we were spending a disproportionate amount of our time crafting and posting updates on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. In all, we posted more than 300 times across these four platforms. We eventually found PostPlanner, which allowed us to create and schedule posts for Facebook and Twitter ahead of time. We were able to choose the day of the week and time for the future posts, and we let PostPlanner do the rest. We ended up having posts scheduled for more than a week in advance, and whenever we were too busy to log into Twitter on a particular day, we knew our Tweets were still going out…driving traffic to the Kickstarter page, increasing our followers, and raising brand awareness.
 
We Partnered With Similar Brands
Much too late in the game, we were able to partner with Chorus Beans, a specialty coffee bean vendor in New York. We were able to trade our cinnamon packets for their coffee, providing an extra reward boost for those that weren’t quite ready to pull the trigger and support our Kickstarter campaign. It’s important to find those people in your market who are providing similar, but non-competing, products. A little synergy can go a long way.
 
We Tracked Our Links
In order to determine which advertisements and social media posts were generating the most traffic to our page, we used bit.ly, which allowed us to post not only shorter website addresses, but track how many times that particular link was clicked on, and from where it was clicked. We quickly found that our Facebook posts drove far more traffic to our site than any other platform.  
 
While we did end up meeting our $10,000 goal during the last 24 hours of the campaign, we made a TON of potentially costly mistakes. Most of these mistakes could have been solved by sitting down and creating a marketing plan, with specific dates and actions. This would have highlighted the numerous holidays our campaign would span, as well as the many marketing products we had yet to prepare. Our best piece of advice – Don’t Rush It! Spend the time to do some planning ahead of time, and save your self the headaches we gave ourselves!
 
Will Atkins is an Air Force veteran, and the owner of Cinn-Credible Cinnamon Packets. He is a future public servant for the great state of Florida, where Cinn-Credible was born. Their adventures convincing Starbucks to carry their packets can be followed at their website, and @cinnamonpackets on Twitter.