# I Raised $108K in 30 Days with This Strategy... Channel: Rob Walling Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJslcNaLxOA Duration: 11 min Language: English Words: 2355 Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/dJslcNaLxOA --- [0:00] in my career as a software entrepreneur I've sold millions and millions of dollars worth of software and then as a hobby I've backed almost 300 kickstarters but I had never run a Kickstarter myself and if you know me or you know this channel you'll know that in addition to building launching growing and selling SAS companies I have now written four books about being an entrepreneur but prior to this I've always launched my books with a landing page and a striped link people could pre-order and then we'd print the books but for the first time ever I ran a Kickstarter just a couple of months ago so in this video I'm gonna dive into the [0:34] steps that helped me raise a hundred and eight thousand dollars on Kickstarter for my new book the Sass Playbook I'm Rob Walling a Serial entrepreneur with multiple exits I've written four books on building startups including one that I kick-started that we're going to talk about today and I've invested in more than 150 companies one question you might be thinking about and it's one that I received frequently is why run a Kickstarter at all I could have put up a landing page taken some pre orders and printed books in fact I've done that for multiple books before this one but there were a few reasons why I wanted to delve [1:07] into the world of Kickstarter the first one is that I've always done paperback print on demand in the past and in this case I wanted to print hardcover books which can take several months of lead time to get done really if you go to Hong Kong or China at six seven months to get book spray and if you put up a landing page and you take someone's payment up front you're really not supposed to charge a credit card six or seven months before you fulfill an order so really what I wanted to do is take pre-orders in a way that fit within the confines of our financial system so I [1:38] really needed a pre-order system and that's exactly what Kickstarter is in addition I wanted a lot of different tiers from thirty dollars all the way up to five thousand dollars which is what we ended up with in the kickstarter so again is there a system that exists in the world where you can put a bunch of tiers and allow people to choose from and it's just all baked in that's Kickstarter in addition I wanted to take advantage of the community or or the social network if you will of Kickstarter I have reached into YouTube and to Twitter podcast landscape blogs there's a lot of places where I have [2:08] content but although I've backed close to 300 kickstarters I have never run one myself and I wanted to see if I could find new people a new audience on Kickstarter because it turns out about five to ten percent of people who backed the campaign found me through the natural search on Kickstarter telling me that they didn't come from my existing audience and lastly and perhaps most importantly I'm an entrepreneur I love learning new things I love trying hard things and challenging myself to get better at them even if maybe I make mistakes maybe I fail I wanted to know what it felt like to run a Kickstarter [2:42] since I've never done it that's what we do as entrepreneurs right we take measured risks and running at Kickstarter was exactly that for me now back in the day when I published my first book start small stay small this is 13 years ago I wrote the book I did the layout I designed the really ugly cover I did all the project management work I I bought the ISBN I wrote the marketing and the landing page copy I submitted it to Amazon's print on demand and on and on and on but that takes time and if you're in that situation where you have the time to do it and you don't [3:10] have the money to hire a team just do it yourself I've done this kind of stuff myself for conferences for launching books for launching software products you have to grind it out in the early days it just takes time do the work these days of course I'm running microcomp and tinyseed this YouTube channel I'm putting out 52 podcast episodes a year and I don't have all the time to do all the stuff I did for my first book so in this case I did hire a project manager who helped coordinate everything then we hired a designer someone to do layout and I'm at the point in my career where I do need to [3:42] trade money for time and if you're in that situation that's great but if you're not there yet then put in the time there's no excuses here's what I don't want to see our YouTube comments saying oh you could do this because you have the money I didn't have the money back in the day and in fact that first book has made low six figures for me in sales over the course of its life lifespan so for the first three books I grounded out and you might need to as well let's dive into the six tips that helped me raise a hundred and eight thousand dollars in just about 23 days [4:10] on Kickstarter the first thing you have to focus on is a great landing page we spent about 50 days developing the landing page and the video and I wound up spending about ninety five hundred dollars on contractors folks who did graphic design I had professional photos taken I had a copywriter write a video script and we really stayed on top of the Project's timeline and a copywriter wrote the landing page copy to make sure that timeline was communicated the rewards were communicated we spent a ton of time again back in the day I would have done all this myself probably spent several weeks of effort these days I [4:46] spent just under ten thousand dollars to really make sure that the design and the copy was up to Snuff and that the video production quality was high tip number two is to build an audience if you don't have an audience I think we're in a Kickstarter is going to be a challenge you'll hear me say on this channel if you're building SAS build your network not your audience but if you're selling a book if you're selling information you need to build an audience I just don't see any two ways around doing that so if you're gifted on the microphone start a podcast if you're gifted on video start [5:17] a YouTube channel if you're great with written words you have a Blog you can write books you can be on Twitter but I wouldn't run a Kickstarter without an audience personally and once you have built that audience doesn't need to be huge doesn't need to be tens of thousands of people but even if it's just a few thousand people who hang on your every word if you run a Kickstarter you need to communicate with them a lot we sent about 10 emails plus a bunch of tweets most of the emails were pre-campaign or during the first week and we used emails to educate my audience about what Kickstarter is to [5:47] ask them to sign up in advance to explain why I was running a Kickstarter and so people could get to know the platforms such that the day it launched we could fully fund the campaign my goal was twenty thousand dollars I want to to fully fund that within a few hours certainly within the first 24 hours and the good news is I think it worked because we really didn't have to do any customer support around Kickstarter or answering very many questions in the early days we also asked people to spread the word we had clear calls to action asking them to tweet or let their audiences know and a lot of people did [6:19] one thing to note we spoke with several Consultants who run Kickstarter campaigns and they were not going to be valuable to us they are more for folks who don't have audiences so if you have zero audience and you need to build it from scratch fast running ads and such you might want to get a consultant involved I was wary of Consultants who were going to ask for a percentage of my campaign so they wanted five or ten percent or whatever that number is but the problem is is my campaign was going to be funded almost instantly and I thought that we could hit six figures which we did so it didn't seem to make [6:50] sense that I would be sharing that with them when I could do that on my own because I did have an audience tip number three is something that I heard from several friends of mine who've run successful campaign chains and it's to keep the number of tiers to seven or fewer to avoid that Paradox of choice we offered a pretty wide range of tiers from thirty dollars up to five thousand and besides offering that wide range I wanted one that was quite expensive to Anchor the rest of the prices even if we didn't sell any of those tiers the other tiers that worked well for us were those [7:21] with limited quantities they were super engaging for the audience so I believe we have limits of eight for one-on-one Consulting we might have raised that later and then we had a limit of say 12 for group calls and I think there's an asynchronous group call for 25 people and those booked up very quickly the fourth tip is a logistical one it's that if you're going to ship physical products have all of that ironed out in advance we knew who was going to print the book and which fulfillment house was going to ship the book before we even started the campaign therefore we knew what countries we could ship to what the [7:54] cost would be both for the books for postage for handling all of that before the kickstarter ever went live because if you're guesstimating it you're gonna be wrong and you're likely going to go in the hole you don't want to owe money after you run your Kickstarter so be sure that you really know your numbers going into your campaign and a corollary to that is find a fulfillment center that knows how to work with crowdfunding campaigns it will save you a lot of time and a lot of explaining tip number five is when I heard from friends and a couple consultants and it's a launch on [8:23] a Tuesday and end on a Thursday I let my campaign run for 23 days I was originally gonna let it run for about 16 because I thought that we'd get like 40 of the purchases on the first day or two and 40 on the last day or two and then 20 sprinkled throughout but it was honestly a lot more than I expected a lot more evenly dispersed new backers were coming in Daily and I am glad that we made the campaign run long something else to think about especially if you have access to an audience is try to maximize the first day backing so that you hit your campaign goal quickly and [8:54] you can potentially be featured on the kickstarter homepage we actually did the pre and announcement so people can sign up to be notified exactly when we launched and that allowed us to fund within a few hours of launching I set my goal pretty low at 20 000. that was actually not as much money as I needed to to pay for everything and to print the books but I wanted to fund quickly and the sixth and final tip is to think about an alternate way of taking pre-orders and how are you going to take orders the moment that your Kickstarter stops because what we found is there [9:24] were a lot of people like a dozen per day for the first few days after the kickstarter ended who wanted to continue backing the product and so we went and set up a Squarespace shop because my website SAS Playbook is hosted on Squarespace certainly you could use Shopify or woocommerce or any other e-commerce platform and we are still taking pre-orders and that helped us for a number of reasons there were some people who just didn't want to sign up for a Kickstarter and so we sent them to sasplaybook.com I didn't want to raise a ton of money that way but I was able to filter a few people over there during [9:55] the campaign and then the moment that it ended we were still making a lot of noise voice and we wanted to keep selling to those folks who found out later about the kickstarter after it had closed and even to this day which is almost a month later I'm still getting two three purchases trickling through if you're interested in checking out the book you should head to sasplaybook.com you can obviously order electronic copies and physical copies if you're in the US the book will be available in physical form on Amazon in just a few months in Fall of 2023. so in my entrepreneurial Journey I've made I [10:29] don't know 40 50 times more money from building and selling SAS companies that I have from writing books or selling information so if you want to see how I gain the expertise to be able to write these books and to be able to talk about these topics on YouTube about building SAS companies here's a great video to watch --- About this transcript Read from YouTube's own caption track and laid out by ViewRank AI (https://viewrankai.com). 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