[Udo]

There is something to be learned from reasonable Kickstarter campaigns that successfully complete their funding. First, the video. I get the feeling that a lot of the successful video pitches are professionally produced, even though they're often made to look casual. And there's a lot of emphasis on the videos.

You guys put your main emphasis on making the text part informative - maybe too informative. I think it's no coincidence that many successful KS projects look like they're already finished. Maybe a lot of them are indeed already finished, but the rest are certainly faking it very elaborately. There's good business sense in doing that: Kickstarter has become somewhat of a pre-order platform, and people are used to ordering what they see, not what it might become after funding.

I don't mean to be overly critical towards crowd funding, but one of the big illusions "sold" by crowd funding platforms is that anyone can get their pet project funded. In reality a lot of the people (if not indeed most of them) you see doing well on Kickstarter are extremely well-connected on social media or otherwise well-known. Crowd funding is a way of leveraging that kind of clout. If you don't have that, it can be tough even getting your message in front of the right audience.

One does not simply walk into Kickstarter. Successful people put a lot of effort into looking like they are just casually letting the world know about their thing and, behold, great fame and money follows. But that's not what's actually happening behind the scenes. Crowd funding is not the big equalizer, it's just another way of leveraging marketing potential that already exists.

If you can't put a check mark on at least two of these three things I talked about (professional production, pre-existing audience, potential for runaway virality), chances are it's not going to work out.

So honestly, no I don't think you'll reach your funding goal. However, that doesn't mean it's a bad project. In fact, I would love following it over time to see what you're doing. If you feel strongly about the concept, consider doing it on the side or taking a few months off - this is the kind of project that looks like it could very well be implemented as a hobby. Use that development time to churn out videos and blog about your progress. Slowly build up that audience. By the time you're done, you'll already have customers and fans lined up.

[andyidsinga]

you're especially right about the pre-existing audience. i went to a kickstarter boot camp ..and it was brought up a few times that a kickstarter campaign should be at the end of a project's marketing effort. A community or audience must be in place before day one of the campaign.

Also brought up : if a campaign fails, dont despair, put a link up before the project ends that can 3xx redirect to a new campaign ...then build momentum & audience from the failed campaign.

[Udo]

Sure, they could always try again. I can see how for some projects getting crowdfunding traction might be the only real prospect, so it makes sense if there are people who basically do nothing but hustle for weeks on end.

However, this doesn't strike me as that kind of project.

These guys could happily go on to make their thing and gradually show it to an incremental audience as they're building it. It's not at all clear that they actually need to be successful on Kickstarter. They're makers and they'll just make something that's fun for them. It could in fact be argued they'll have more fun and freedom doing it on their own instead of subjecting themselves to that sort of external pressure in exchange for a pittance.

[andyidsinga]

thats a great point - incremental build plus audience building is effectively boot strapping. probably the best approach as long as they can continue to avoid "needing" an injection of funds.

[andrewhillman]

These are all valid points. I would also like to add that I have noticed when projects fail the first time, some repost months later and succeed.