Decide when to launch your Kickstarter and how long to run it. The speaker launches on Tuesdays, ends on Thursdays, and recommends 17 days as the sweet spot for books. Match your marketing pace to campaign length to avoid burning out backers.
Chapters
This is it, the last day of Monica and my 5-day Kickstarter challenge. And today we're going to talk about your launch day and how long to make your campaign. And I just want to, before we get there, to just congratulate you for getting this far. We've done a lot this week. We got your title and subtitle right. We picked your category. We got your location. We figured out a product image. We got a product video. We have a funding goal. And now all that's left, well, there's a lot left because we have rewards and a whole bunch of other stuff, but the last part of this page is when you're gonna launch and how long you're going to launch for. So obviously I can't change this 'cause our campaign is live, but I have some thoughts. On when to launch. Now, the truth is that as long as your audience is ready, you can launch. Like, it's about making your audience ready. Brandon Sanderson made his audience ready in one day. It takes me about a month to warm up my audience. And what I use to warm up my audience is Kickstarter has a— if you go over here to the promotions page, Kickstarter has a pre-launch page and you can see how many people are following that page. And I know their launch, I know the quality of the launch based on how many people are following that page. So one thing that you can do is say, I'm going to launch when 50 people are following this page and I'm just going to keep promoting the pre-launch page until that day. I think that's a rather unique strategy that I've been talking about recently. I've never seen anyone do it, but It's absolutely possible. I like for myself to launch on Tuesdays because it has the most traffic on Kickstarter and end on Thursdays because it has the second most traffic on Kickstarter and really the most traffic on most websites. So I've seen people launch literally every day of the week and have success and have a lot of success. For me, what's important is I am consistent. So I've done basically 21 campaigns and all of them have launched on a Tuesday as far as I know, as far as I remember, and almost all of them have ended on Thursday. Some have launched on a— finished on a Sunday or a Monday, but most of them, almost all of them have that frame. Start on a Tuesday, end on a Thursday. Now, the length— and actually before we get to length, Talk about time of month. Most Kickstarters will start at the beginning of the month, just like most campaigns, uh, most KU books will launch on at the beginning of a month. They have the longest amount of time to get the most page reads. Um, so, uh, if you want to negate that, you should go on a different week. And most people launch on a Tuesday. So like yesterday was a very busy day on Kickstarter. Uh, Brandon Sanderson, for instance, launched yesterday, and a whole lot of my friends launched yesterday. Launching a little bit later in the month or on a different day can give you some advantage because there are ways to, if you go to discover, you can see just launched products, projects, and a lot of people do search that. So there are reasons to do this on a different day, but it depends on your schedule. We started on February 22nd because there were far less people launching in February and we wanted to take advantage of that. And then we launched for— and we also knew we were gonna launch for a very long time, which is the next thing that we were gonna talk about, maybe the last thing, which is campaign duration. So most campaigns are 30 days. Most of my campaigns are 31 days because they end on a Thursday. However, I have done everything from a 5-day campaign up to a 52-day campaign. The most you can do is 60 days. And this campaign is a long one. Why is this a long one? Why is this particular one a long one? And by long, I'm gonna say over— 30 days is a long time, but this one is 45 days or something like that. And it's very, very long. And I did that for a couple of reasons. One, I've not been feeling very well, and I know I wouldn't be able to give this my all for the 24 days. Days that I normally do a campaign like this. Number 2, we lost $9,000 in backer— $8,000 between book 1 and book 2. So I figured if I had a little bit longer campaign, I would make a little bit amount of more money throughout the course of the campaign. And I could— and if we were low on, below our funding goals, we would have time to make it up, more time to make it up, and for me to plan things. One of the things that I always do is I try and plan a lot of ways to increase funding if we're below what I'm targeting and what I'm tracking at. And I'm not gonna go into how I track these things or how I design what my mileposts are, but like over time you'll figure out how to do that for yourself. And, you know, we can talk about that if you join our group, which we'll talk about in a bit as well. So, uh, I, I, that's why you can go longer. Monica also likes long campaigns because she doesn't like to be rushed to do anything, I think is what she has told me in the past, the reason why. So by having a very long campaign, she can be like, oh, I'm going to do some marketing today and a week from now, and then 2 weeks from now, and she doesn't have to be rushed to do everything within a week. I like to cram everything in a very short amount of time and do a lot of marketing very quickly. Another thing is you might not want to cram your marketing down because you send weekly or monthly emails. You don't want to overwhelm your list or overwhelm your marketing. And while I'm very sure that you can send daily emails because I've done it for a long time when I have a campaign, for this campaign I wanted it to be a little bit slower and more gentle. Now that means that the campaign is going to take forever. And I started the campaign in February. It's not going to end until the beginning of April. I won't get my money until the end of April. That's almost 3 months that I'm talking dealing with this. So the opposite thing that you could do is run a very short campaign. And now I have a lot of— before I do that, stepping back for a second, the other reason why you want to have a longer campaign is if you're planning a lot of marketing. So we have a lot of marketing planned throughout the course of our campaign. We have a lot of podcasts and blogs and people just word-of-mouthing this campaign and building a snowball. So we wanted time for all of that to work. And that's another reason you want a longer campaign. A shorter campaign is great. I generally preference a 17-day or a 14 to 21-day campaign for most of my launches, unless there's a big reason, unless there's a big marketing push that I'm going to do. So our previous book, I think we did 13 days. We did 10 days for the Void Calls Us Home campaign. And it allows us to go very hard, very quickly, and only hit our audience. So if we're only trying to hit our audience with our books, and then we know that we don't need to spend that much time because they're already going to be excited. So I recommend, especially if you're going to go for like a $250 or $500 goal, keep your campaign short, 17 days, 14 days. Don't go a lot much less than 14 days because I do think that you lose out on some people backing if you cut it down below 14 days. I think for me, 17 days is the perfect spot for me where unless I have a bunch of marketing, I'm not going to lose a lot of my backers. I'm not going to miss out on getting backers if I have a campaign that's 17 days long. Yours may vary, but somewhere between 14 and 20 days generally feels right. Most book launches are 2 weeks, 2 intense weeks, and so I use— like publishers to sort of design that part of it. And so I recommend a 17-day campaign or less unless you have a lot of marketing, and I don't recommend you set up a bunch of marketing for your first campaign because we're trying to get a baseline for you. If you've already done a couple of campaigns, sure, we can talk about that, but otherwise, I don't think that you should do a long campaign because it is very grueling and grinding, and the whole process is already grueling and grinding even though you've done it as often as I have. So your goal for today is to go into the group and tell people when you're gonna launch and/or how many days you're going to launch for. And I have a very special offer for you, which is we have a Facebook group where it's literally called our Kickstarter Sprint group, where we are in there all of the time giving hands-on advice. There are hours upon hours of videos with minute detail about how to do every little piece of this process. And up until this moment, we have a 100% success rate with Kickstarters that we launch in there. So if you would like to join, you can, you can just comment below "in" and we will reach out to you and get you set up. I'm not exactly sure the exact day we're going to start the sprint again, but we're planning on doing a new sprint contingent in April at some point. And, and until then, you're going to have access to all of the resources that we have available. And I hope to see you inside of there and around the interwebs.
