What to Do When Your Kickstarter Project is More Popular Than You Expected

Exceeding your Kickstarter funding goal sounds like an entrepreneur’s dream come true. Even though this situation represents a real potential for growth and for launching a successful business, it could potentially turn into a headache if you fail to find a balance between managing costs, delivering a quality product and satisfying backers’ expectations.

Assess costs before launching your Kickstarter campaign

Contact suppliers and manufacturers to get an accurate per unit price before launching your campaign. Take shipping costs into account, and figure out how much you will have to spend on marketing to promote your campaign.

Keep in mind that you will have to pay a 5 percent fee for using Kickstarter and a payment processing fee that should be between 3 and 5 percent of the money raised. Don’t set a goal that exceeds what you need, and assess how many products you can realistically make and ship within your timeline.

You should also assess how many rewards you can realistically offer for the backers who pledge more. Create different rewards tiers and use the “Add an Item” function to indicate how many items are available for each rewards tier.

Shipping more items

If you carefully assess how much money you need for your project and end up exceeding your funding goals, you have the possibility of simply producing more products. Even though Kickstarter lets you refund money, creators are expected to do everything they can to complete projects. Look into delaying production if you need to. This will give you some time to deal with suppliers and manufacturers and maybe find a better way to make your product. However, if you delay production, be sure to communicate with your backers through updates. A delay in manufacturing is not uncommon for crowdfunding projects, but it is incredibly important to be transparent with your backers to maintain a positive relationship.

This is what the creator of Genius Games did when his campaign exceeded its funding goal by 400 percent. More game boxes were manufactured, and the extras were added to the boxes.

Set some stretch goals

Stretch goals are an interesting option if you want to offer more options to backers while providing options to maintain your production cost goals for your product. You will need to realistically assess what kind of stretch goals you can offer to your backers without compromising the quality of your original project.

It is best to focus on one or two stretch goals at a time since these additional goals could attract even more backers. It is crucial to be realistic and to put quality first. The creator of the Electric Eel Wheel Kickstarter decided against setting stretch goals for their electric spinning wheel since he didn’t wish to delay production and wanted to keep production local.

Go beyond Kickstarter

A successful Kickstarter campaign is a sign that there is a huge demand for your product. You should take advantage of this momentum to keep growing. If you haven’t already done so, create a business. You might need to hire some help to keep up with the growing demand.

Look into investing the funds you raised on Kickstarter to develop a better product or to market your new business. Make your Kickstarter backers a part of this journey by communicating with them and offering exclusive rewards and perks. This is the route the creator of the Joker Greeting Kickstarter took. This musical birthday card that never stops playing exceeded its funding goal and its creator used the additional funds to launch a second product line.

The best way to deal with a popular Kickstarter campaign depends on what you can realistically do for your backers. You should focus on finding a balance between growth and fulfilling backers’ expectations.

Communicate with your backers regarding the success of your campaign, share their enthusiasm, and make the best decision possible for your backers and for the future of your business, even if it means adopting a conservative attitude toward growth in favor of quality.

Hosted by
Roy Morejon

Roy Morejon is the President of Enventys Partners, a leading product development, crowdfunding and ecommerce marketing agency in Charlotte, North Carolina, in charge of digital marketing strategy, client services, and agency growth.

Join the discussion

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

More from this show

Episode 169
Art of the Kickstart logo

Subscribe to the Art of the Kickstart Newsletter

Sign up now to receive the Art of the Kickstart Crowdfunding checklist and notifications of new posts and interviews

Success! You are now subscribed!

Crowdfunding Checklist

Fill out the form below to subscribe to our weekly newsletter and get a free copy of our checklist for preparing for a successful crowdfunding campaign!

You have Successfully Subscribed!