Kickstarter! How it Works and Projected Value for Earning Money Online in 2019

How does Kickstarter work and what is the projected value of Kickstarter within the context of making money online?

I'm Jerry Banfield YouTuber and a Facebook live streamer. I imagine if this is helpful you'll leave a like and subscribe as I start off talking about my newest Kickstarter project and then going forward, we'll look at, is this worth doing? What are your potential values?

What I'll do is explain the context of Kickstarter and how it works. Let's begin with that right now.

Kickstarter is the most popular crowdfunding website. The basic idea is that you put a page up and you get people to click on back to this project. You can then get money from it as I'm grateful people have given $91 towards my project within the first few days of release.

Here's the big limitation with Kickstarter though. A lot of people just aren't interested in crowdfunding and if you're not out there messaging yourself and inviting thousands of people to contribute to your project, realistically a lot of times you aren't going to meet your funding goal.

If you don't meet your funding goal, you don't get anything meaning, if I don't get $1234 within 27 days, I don't get anything out of the $91 that has been given by 3 different backers.

So where does Kickstarter fit in making money online? I'll talk a little bit more about Kickstarter and we'll put this in the big picture of “Are there better ways for you to make money online if that's your goal”?

There are a lot of different ways that you can make money online and ultimately with your Kickstarter, aren't you hoping to make money online? I mean that's probably part of the equation, right?

You can look at Kickstarter as a way to make money online and get publicity for what you're doing. That then means you are considering the dollars per hour you could potentially earn from your Kickstarter project versus doing it a different way.

What I've decided after launching my fourth Kickstarter project here is, I've decided that the dollars per hour and the long-term results of what I'm going to get with my Kickstarter project are likely to not be as good as just launching the show myself.

I don't need the funding to do the show. I set it up as a way to help generate interest, get publicity, and get some initial funding. However, it may be much easier for me to just sell tickets on my website to my show and just promote the show instead of the Kickstarter. Here's why?

Lots of people will be happy to do something in a format they're used to like buy tickets to go to a show but a lot of people are not interested in trying something new and if they haven't used Kickstarter before, it can be difficult to explain how it works to sell somebody on why they should contribute to your project and why they should share it.

For me, I can absolutely get this funded. The question is, is it worth my time to send thousands of messages and thousands of emails to people to get funding for this?

I can make an online ad as I did today in an hour or two and share it with tens of thousands of people and then sell tickets directly to my show instead of even talking about the Kickstarter project.

For me, the latter objective meets what I'm trying to do much better and I'm grateful that I have taken a look at that today.

With the Kickstarter project, what I wish I knew before I started is the sheer amount of time and energy it takes to start a Kickstarter project. The recommendations I've heard are that it should take months to prepare to launch a Kickstarter project.

I spent $320 getting my graphic design done for this project. I've spent at least 10 if not more hours setting this project up and after all the effort I've spent on this Kickstarter project, I've only done probably 20% of the work for it.

To really get a project successfully funded, you can expect to just have to message everybody. The biggest error you can make on a Kickstarter project is thinking you're just going to do a great job like I did. I made a video. I put time, energy, and in the story relative to what I do with a lot of the stuff I create, and I put this up.

I like that this is a great project. I should be able to just post about this and talk about it a little bit and get funded and no that's not how it works.

Some of the successful Kickstarter project videos I've watched, they've spent 10, 20, 30, 50 or 100s hours and sometimes 6 months or so ahead of time. Many of these successful projects have spent months preparing to launch. After all this time preparing to launch, they get huge amounts of donations right on the 1st day or 2.

If you really want to have a successful project, more than likely, you need to spend months to get your project launched and therefore, the main value of having a project is the potential upside on Kickstarter.

If you just explore on Kickstarter, you'll see some of the top projects. You can see a lot of these have good amounts of funding i.e. $7,000 and $20,000 as you can see in the image above. You need to get into “Projects We Love” on Kickstarter more than likely.

The real value of it is to get all that extra reach to have Kickstarter feature your project, have Kickstarter email it to have people in the press talking about your project and if you are not achieving that with it, there's really not much of a point in doing a Kickstarter.

You might as well just set up whatever it is you're doing. For example, I've just set up at jerrybanfield.com. I’m likely to forget the Kickstarter project. I'll just promote the local show and talk about that directly. The Kickstarter project gets in the way of it and I could sell tickets easier just talking about the show then convoluting what I'm doing with the Kickstarter project.

For example, one of the Kickstarter projects I did was a book idea. I went ahead and just wrote 21 different books instead of putting a bunch of energy into the Kickstarter project. Now, if you've got no following online, a Kickstarter project can help you build one. It can help you bring your friends and family if you're starting something.

However, if you already have a following online like me and if you've already done a whole bunch online, sometimes crowdfunding can be more difficult because people think “Well, with all you've done, do I need to support your project? Can't you just start the show yourself"?

Yes, I can. I really don't need crown funding for it.

My vision was to use the project to get some more publicity and get people excited and involved but I see there's no substitute for just bringing people in person.

Therefore, I wish somebody had told me these things about how Kickstarter worked before I found it. These are the things you really need to know about how it works more than the technical stuff and more than how to write a great story.

I got a great look at a professionally designed Kickstarter story. I have a video filmed with a $10,000 to $20,000 filming set up here. I've got rewards that I think are great based on some of the other projects that worked well with rewards.

So the question now is what are some other things you can do to make money and what is the bigger context of making money online that Kickstarter falls into? For that, we will focus on interacting with viewers live and sharing my experience.

If you're trying to make money online, one of the best things to do is to be up-to-date on the newest ways that are working to make money and the best opportunities and for me, having the conversation I have with you as a viewer is one of the ways I get great information. Another is, I'm watching videos. I'm looking and researching myself.

Cryptocurrencies are one of the top ways I've made money teaching online in cryptocurrencies and you can do a Kickstarter for an online course and that can be a really good way if you're wanting to teach online to kind of launch your kick-starting career.

If I had known about using Kickstarter and seen how well people were doing using Kickstarter to crowdfund video courses, I would have done that before.

However, my whole business is all about just giving things away for free and doing live streams like on youtube or Facebook. I can't be bothered to do any more online courses.

I imagine now that one of the great opportunities if you do want to build a following and earn money online is live streaming. That's why I'm back to live streaming. I have been doing live streaming for years and having quality interactions with people live is a very good way to make connections.

If you're trying to do something like Kickstarter crowdfunding, doing some regular live streaming can be a really good way to get people motivated and excited about something you're doing.

If you want to know about what I use to share my streams to different social media platforms all at one, here's a 12 video playlist in which you can learn all about it.

The key is to stay inspired.

Stay in a good mental state because the mental state will guide you to the best places and if you're wanting to make money online or build a following or just feel good and have a great life, something like Kickstarter can be helpful.

However, it'll only be helpful with the right mindset. If you love what you're doing, if you are committed to doing your project and if you see that there's no better way for you to launch a project.

Who is Kickstarter exactly right for?

If you don't have much of an established following in one place, Kickstarter can be quite a struggle. Therefore, you really need at least some kind of email list or contacts.

Even if you've just emailed and have a lot of clients, you really need to have some kind of foundation of at least a thousand people that you can ask and at least a hundred at a bare minimum that have a good shot at backing you if you want to really realize the full value of Kickstarter.

While I've got that, at the same time, it's like “Okay well, Kickstarter is about making money, getting publicity and building a following or a community”. Well for me, why bother with Kickstarter when I can get publicity, I can make money and I can build a community all without using Kickstarter in a much easier way? 

Thank you for all the conversation and your followers on Mixer. I intend to live stream almost every day on Mixer, Twitch, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. I'm so grateful for the chance to see you today.

Thank you for reading to the end of this post. I love you. I appreciate the chance to serve you today.

If you want to make sure you see the updates, please hit the subscribe button on my Youtube channel. I post new videos I imagine are helpful for you every day.

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You may like to read this blog post: How to Presell Udemy Video Courses with Kickstarter!

Love,
Jerry Banfield

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