I would guess a lot of people find an interesting (but expensive) project on Kickstarter and want to see it succeed. They might not be able to afford the standard pledge to buy the device outright since some are rather expensive.
For example, the OneWheel managed to raise a very healthy $630,862, over six times it’s goal. They had 431 pledges over $1,200, all of whom got a skateboard, but they also had 527 pledges for stickers, caps and t-shirts.
Chances are that these people didn’t really want a poster, but they pledged $25 and this was their reward. The problem is that they had a limit of 500, but only ‘sold’ 10. Of course they can still order 500 and give them away as promotional items, but if 500 posters cost $2k to print that’s a pretty big shortfall. They might be able to print a smaller run but if they end up costing more than $25 (with worldwide postage) the posters have lost them money.
343 people pledged just $1, with no expectation of reward. In total they took about $6,513 in pledges from 527 people.
Our suggestion is to remove these low cost rewards and encourage people to throw in a little more money. So instead of a t-shirt you give everyone the chance of actually getting something cool, like a skateboard or motion simulator.
People will still just throw in $1 to get updates but I would bet quite a few others would possibly pledge more.
So, the idea is simple. The lowest unique pledge receives the ‘standard reward’ such as a simulator. If you want to be even more generous then you can do it again when you get to 200% and so on. So someone might get a simulator with $23 and someone else with $42… People who like the project and were willing to give $1 might be given a push to give a little higher.
For the skateboard campaign this would mean making 6 more skateboards, easily covered by the $6k in pledges, although I would suspect that they would have taken even more. Of course the major advantage is that campaigns don’t need to start sourcing t-shirts and other rewards, they can use all the funds to complete the project.
Kickstarter has lots of rules so this might fall foul of them but I’m sure this would be fine on Indiegogo who seem to be a lot more relaxed about what they allow.
If anyone wants to try it, please let us know and tell your backers about us for our future campaign….
