Written by Your launch day is a big deal, but why does everyone keep talking about the importance of the first 24 hours of your crowdfunding campaign?
Show your potential backers they can trust you
Crowdfunding relies, at its heart, on the idea of the wisdom of the crowd. If enough people agree that a project is a good idea, then they’re probably onto something. Many potential backers (deliberately or not) look for reassurance and support by seeing whether anyone else thinks this project is a good bet. A campaign that already looks successful, and already has plenty of support, is more likely to attract even more support.
As a creator, that means that the sooner you get your project looking successful, the sooner you’ll be able to attract those uncertain or wavering backers.
Get your crowdfunding platform to pay attention
Whichever crowdfunding platform you’re using, there’s a team of people behind the scenes making it work – but they don’t have time to sit and examine every single live campaign, daily. They rely to some extent on algorithms and milestones to draw their attention to particular projects. So if you can make your campaign tick as many of their ‘looks successful’ boxes as possible, you’ll get their attention.
Why does this matter? Because most crowdfunding platforms charge a percentage fee on your final funding – which means the more money you make, the more money they make. So if your campaign’s going to do well, it’s in their interest for it to do really well.
Make the most of your time
Once you launch your crowdfunding campaign, the clock is ticking – as a general rule, you don’t want to run a campaign for longer than a month or so. You need to make each one of those four weeks count. If you’re spending your first week or two on making contact with your own networks, you’ve already lost time.
But when you’ve done your preparation well, then by the time launch day rolls around your existing audiences are waiting for their chance to support your crowdfunding campaign. If you’ve done all your work on messaging them already, that means after launch day you can shift your focus to spreading the message further and reaching new audiences.
Not sure if you’re ready for launch day? I’m a crowdfunding consultant and I’d be happy to help, whether that’s looking over your final campaign before you go live, or walking you through making the most of your preparation weeks – get in touch here.