It’s now a week since I’ve launched a Kickstarter project to help bringing funds for FileVoyager’s development.
My prognostic for the success of the funding is:
EPIC FAIL! 😳
Well, I am OK anyway. I’ve quickly understood that it will not become a success story. The project was not well prepared (even though I’ve spent a lot of time crafting it…).
The causes I see obviously are the following:
- I’m not a marketeer. Nothing was sexy enough in the project presentation. About 6000 project were active on Kickstarter at the moment I launched mine. My project had no chance to stand out of the crowd.
- The social network around FileVoyager is too tiny. Thus, the project had no chance to be widely noticed. In 10 days, my project page has been visited 170 times.
- Software projects, except games, are rarely successful. The average success rate of Kickstarter, all categories included, is around 37%. The software sub-category has a success rate of 14% (266 project have raised 100% or more of their funding on a total of 1906 projects at the moment of this post).
I don’t consider this funding failure as a hard kick on my head. It’s just something I’ve experimented and from which I’ve learned a few things.
If you want to try the crowdfunding adventure, think about this before:
- If you’re not a talented marketeer, find one! Someone that can help you sublimate your product. Even the sexiest product can fail if it’s not well presented.
- Build a serious social network a few time before you begin the funding. On that point, right after launching my project, I’ve received a lot of proposals to “buy” an audience by various means. The requested amounts were variable, from really affordable to insane. I rejected them all. Maybe I was wrong?
Voilà . I know that the funding period is still running for 20 days, and that things can still change. But I am honest with myself…
Next time I’ll do better! Meanwhile, I still have my own Donate page, so “A votre bon coeur” 😉