By John Hawthorne
Crowdfunding can be incredibly thrilling, right?
You’ve been dreaming about something for months, maybe even years, and now you finally have a chance to bring it fruition. And so you carefully put together your Kickstarter campaign, estimating how much it will cost and when you’ll be able to ship it.
Hold on. Don’t take it live yet. There is something you need to know.
A huge number of Kickstarter projects are delayed:
A study in 2012 found that a whopping 84% of Kickstarter’s top 50 projects shipped late.
Before you launch your project, you need to know why so many projects ship late so you can know how to avoid those mistakes.
Here are 10 common problems that cause Kickstarter projects to ship late.
#1 – You’re Way Too Confident
When you’re in the initial stages of creating a product and preparing for your Kickstarter launch, it’s hard not to be excited. Confident. Thrilled. You’ve seen the early results and know that you’re onto something big. You can already see that this is going to change things.
When you’re in this state of mind, you usually feel incredibly confident. Confident that you can make everything work. Confident that you can get the product to market in time. Confident that you can navigate all the challenges.
But when you actually get into the process of turning your initial idea into a mass produced reality, you suddenly realize how complex everything is. You have to deal with supply chains and backorders and power outages.
You have to figure out how to ship everything to your backers as well as stay on top of any issues that arise. A single break in any of these links can cause your Kickstarter project to go off the rails. Before you know it, you’re delayed weeks, maybe even months.
#2 – You Didn’t Price Your Rewards Correctly
You might think that pricing is easy.
You simply add up the cost of the materials, assembly fees, and any other obvious fees.
But when productions actually begins, you may find that you didn’t leave enough room for yield losses (example: damaged products that didn’t make it the whole way through the assembly line) or design changes.
When complications arise, you usually only have two options:
Article originally published at floship.com/10-mistakes-kickst arter-projects-delayed/
- Eat the losses
- Delay shipment
- Problems are discovered when producing initial large batches, which then need to be scrapped, which then eats up money.
- Supply chain issues arise because you didn’t anticipate the volume of parts needed.
Article originally published at floship.com/10-mistakes-kickst