As more people in Australia over the past 12 months searched for “start-up company” than “find a job” according to Google Trends, the interest in crowdfunding for start-ups continues to grow.
Many of the tips and skills learned from running a crowdfunding campaign match the advice you often receive from the books that make start-up life sound like a dream or the overly simple one-page guides of how to do it.
Here are 6 tips that are common lessons for success for both crowdfunding and for start-up founders. If you are thinking of being a start-up founder why not try out a crowdfunding campaign for your idea first and see how you fare. It can be a relatively cheap, low risk way to get started.
1. Getting your hands dirty
Like starting your own business nothing beats getting your hands dirty and trying it and learning your own lessons from running your crowdfunding campaign. Many will fail the first time, but start-up founders should remember that the inventor and successful entrepreneur James Dyson famously failed 5,126 times – before he succeeded – it took 5,127 prototypes to build the first bagless vacuum.
2. Pick yourself up, learn and experiment again
Some might question whether we should even call it failure it is just part of the journey and how you respond to it and what you learn from it is what counts. The key is being quick to pick yourself up, learn and experiment with something else and try again – some call it pivoting if it is a clear new path or it can just be making process adjustments or product modifications until you get closer to your product, market fit.
3. Start with a modest campaign goal
As someone who has spoken to 100s of Australian campaign creators it is interesting to see how much advice gets really listened to at the start particularly when it comes to the size of the campaign goal.
Like with start-up ventures everyone reads the dream success stories and check out campaigns that have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars. For campaign creators it is better to start with a modest goal of $10,000 and raise $12,000 than have a target of $20,000 and appear short. Having a target of $10,000 does not stop you raising $120,000!
4. Success takes hard work
Many of the newbie crowdfunding campaign creators and start-up entrepreneurs forget that all walks of life, (elite sports being the poster child), where people excel at what they do, the hours and hours of practice when others are slouching around in front of the tv with their feet up or chatting to friends with their 3rd decaf almond soya of the day, make the difficult things look easy.
The lesson, you will need to hustle and put in the hard yards – successful crowdfunding campaigns like successful businesses are hard work.
5. Shout your idea from the rooftops
For some budding entrepreneurs and crowdfunding campaign creators another rather fundamental stumbling block can be the fear that if they tell someone else about their idea that someone else will steal it.
There are trillions of ideas out in the world or bobbing around in people’s heads, but the success of crowdfunding campaigns or businesses rarely comes down to the idea. Success is about execution.
It is very difficult to build a success crowdfunding campaign or business if you keep your idea secret! Shout your idea from the rooftops and see who comes along to join your party.
6. It is never too early to collect e mail addresses
If you are aiming to build a successful crowdfunding campaign it can never be too early to start collecting e mail addresses and followers.
One of the features of the ReadyFundGo crowdfunding platform is the “Preview” feature. It enables campaign creators to quickly create their page with an image and their story (they can also add a video at this stage if they like) and share this preview inviting people to add their e mail address. You can be building up your followers while you are still refining your campaign page, creating your rewards and finalising your video. As the campaign creator you can reach out to these people when the campaign launches. Getting traffic to your page and the word out early helps to create traction for when your campaign goes live.
What are you waiting for? Get Ready to Get Funded and Get Going!
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