Greetings,

Two months ago I made a post called “Sultan’s 10 tips for making your Kickstarter campaigns successful” which had a couple of positive feedback. So I have decided to do a series of posts which highlights the common mistakes one can do with their kickstarter projects and what project creators can do to avoid them.

I am on Kickstarter constantly, browsing through numerous projects almost every 6 hours over the past 6 months since I started. I have seen the good, the bad and the “Ow! My Eyes!” kind of ugly. Over that time, I have analysed a lot of projects to see what separates the successful ones from the unsuccessful ones and still I am learning something new almost everyday.

The purpose of my guides? To help you build a better presentation for your project on Kickstarter. Think of your Kickstarter page as your CV which will be seen by many people from around the world. You need to impress them, not only by the concept of your project, but by the way you present it as well, because the way your present it indicates how enthusiastic, sincere, dedicated and passionate you are about the project.

So here is part 1 of my “Common mistakes to avoid with your projects”:

Pledge Sequence: One of the things that annoy me are the pledge sequences that I tend to find on a lot of Kickstarter projects. What is a pledge sequence? Glad you asked! A pledge sequence is a term I generally use to describe the way that they pledge amounts are laid out.

Already we know that the minimum pledge anyone can make for a project on Kickstarter is $1 (or 1 GBP) and maximum is $10,000 (or 5,000 GBP). Now if your project’s goal is at $20,000 dollars then generally the pledge sequence should be something similar to this:

$1 – $5 – $25 – $50 – $100 – $250 – $500 – $1,000 – $2,500 – $5,000 – $10,000

The above numbers are to indicate a sample of how you can create your rewards structure. You are free to use any sequence that you feel might work for your project, just remember that the highest tier doesn’t have to be $10,000. One thing to keep in mind is that you want to attract people from different income levels as not everyone on Kickstarter is Richard Branson

Now here is the thing you want to avoid: I have seen a number of project on kickstarter do something that is similar to this sequence

$1 – $25 – $500 – $5,000 – $10,000

This causes me to bang my head against the wall…just kidding…what it really does is makes me move on to check out the next project. So why is this a mistake? Because you are not catering to the people in what I would like to call “the middle segment”, you can’t entirely depend on 20,000 people making $1 pledge or 2 people making $10,000 pledges to make your goal of $20,000 complete. You need a healthy mix of backers and that can happen with a healthy sequence of pledges, and those in the middle are going to help you get successfully funded if you know how to attract them.

And please don’t to this sequence below…ever! It is illogical and both Spocks (Nimoy and Quinto) will kill you for it!

$1 – $2 – $3 – $4 – $5……..$9,998 – $9,999 – $10,000

So remember to make a decent, logical and appropriate pledge sequence with reward levels that caters to people of low-income, medium-income and high-income. Try visiting some of the successfully funded projects to see how they structure their rewards, here are two examples of successful projects where the creators were very pragmatic in their rewards structure:

Summary: Make a good rewards structure with a decent pledge sequence that can cover the whole spectrum of backers. Don’t leave out reward amounts that could attract the multitudes of potential backers in the middle segment.

Best of luck and stay tuned for part 2 – To Limit or Not To Limit