Here’s a hard truth.
Most people never launch their product because they’re scared. They look at the nearly 59% of Kickstarter campaigns that fail and think, “I don’t want that to be me.”
Clearly crowdfunding is risky, but at the same time it’s so worth it to have a successful crowdfunding campaign. That’s why our goal at LaunchBoom is to lower that risk dramatically.
How do we do this?
One major way is through our software. Yep, we built our own software to make launching a crowdfunding campaign easier and more affordable. It’s called LaunchKit and it features a full suite of proprietary tools to give you the edge you need to standout in the crowded marketplace.
In this post, I’ll go over what LaunchKit does, how it works, and how you can use it to make your crowdfunding campaign a success.
Key Takeaways
- Understanding the top challenges of launching: there are three challenges every startup faces when launching their product.
- Knowing what tools you need: learn what tools are most important to have for your crowdfunding launch and why.
- Seeing how our tools work: see how LaunchBoom’s proprietary crowdfunding tools give creators an edge for success.
Contents
Challenges in startup crowdfunding campaigns
I’ve been a part of over 1,000 crowdfunding campaigns. Because of that, I understand the challenges that startups face when trying to launch. If you know these challenges now, you can better understand why LaunchBoom’s proprietary crowdfunding tools work so well.
Challenge #1: Reaching the right audience
One major challenge facing creators is targeting and reaching the right audience. Meta platforms have over 3.98 billion active users in a given month as of 2023, so the options for targeting are extensive and overwhelming. Without the right strategy for finding the perfect backers for your product, the lower your chance of hitting the right pre-launch metrics that lead to a successful campaign.
Challenge #2: Creating a marketing strategy
Not everyone is a natural born marketer, which means creating a good marketing strategy will be harder for some than others. From writing digital ad copy, to producing eye-catching images, to brainstorming punchy headlines for the campaign page, there’s a lot of creative effort that goes into validating a product idea. Creators might feel stuck when they get to this step, which can slow down the process and waste precious time.
Challenge #3: Making sense of data
The great thing about platforms like Meta and Google is that they come with incredible amounts of data for you to leverage. The tricky thing, though, is sifting through all of that data and knowing which metrics matter. Those who haven’t had experience in crowdfunding, might misinterpret certain data points, which can easily lead to failure.
The best thing to do in the face of all these challenges is to choose the best set of crowdfunding tools.
How to choose the best crowdfunding tools?
So how do you know which crowdfunding tools are best? There are a few important things to consider when making this decision.
- Do the tools actually solve a problem? As discussed earlier, there can be some big challenges when preparing a crowdfunding campaign. The first thing you need to do is isolate the main obstacle and make sure the crowdfunding tool can solve the problem.
- Are the tools easy to use? Nothing is worse than unwrapping a shiny new toy and then not knowing what it does or how to use it. Great crowdfunding tools should be designed for creators of all levels.
- Are they free of fluff? We tend to think more features are a good thing, but they’re only good if they are essential for the end result. In crowdfunding, we’re only trying to answer a few questions, like “does your product have a market,” and “does it have a big enough audience to meet its funding goal.” Crowdfunding tools that are well designed shouldn’t be packed with too many extra features that detract from these main objectives.
Let’s look at how LaunchBoom’s proprietary tools work.
Using LaunchKit to achieve your crowdfunding goals
If you work with us, you’ll get access to LaunchKit. Our technology is the result of a decade of experience working with over 1,000 creators. We took the most important parts of our marketing strategy and packed it into one piece of software – making what was once complicated and expensive, simple and affordable.
There are four parts of LaunchKit which make it so effective at launching successful campaigns.
1. Reservation Funnel: Build an email list of buyers
As we like to say at LaunchBoom: the key to a successful launch is a successful pre-launch. And nailing the pre-launch is all about building an email list who can’t wait to buy your product. In all my years of doing this, I haven’t found a better way to build an email list than with a Reservation Funnel.
That’s why it’s the foundation of LaunchKit.
A Reservation Funnel has four parts:
- Landing page: where you explain your product and collect an email.
- Reservation page: where you explain your VIP offer.
- Checkout page: where someone puts down a $1 deposit to upgrade to VIP.
- Thank you page: where you thank them for signing up for VIP.
The Reservation Funnel tool makes it super easy to set up each of these steps.
No technical or web development experience required. As long as you have the images and copy you want to include in your Reservation Funnel, you can build the whole thing in 15 minutes.
The Reservation Funnel tool also has the following features:
- Drag-and-drop page builder
- Customization of fonts and text colors
- Built-in A/B testing for testing different landing page layouts
- Desktop and mobile previewing to check for optimization on both display types
With this software in your toolkit, you’ll be able to save time and start collecting launch reservations ASAP. The email list you can build using this tool has been shown to be 30x more likely to back crowdfunding campaigns.
2. LaunchBoom Audiences: Shortcut your ad targeting
Finding the perfect audience to target can be difficult – especially for first-time creators who don’t have any customers yet. That’s why we built a tool to make it way easier for creators to find good audiences.
Over the years, LaunchBoom has built a big network of different audiences spanning many different interests. Not only are these audiences tuned for common crowdfunding categories, the people in this network have already backed Kickstarter and Indiegogo campaigns in the past. By using these audiences for targeting in Meta, creators usually see better results on their ads.
3. LaunchKit Analytics: Understand your data easily
Data is a key part of the pre-launch process because it points you in the direction you need to go for a successful campaign. Reading all of the data can be overwhelming, which is why LaunchKit comes with a crowdfunding-specific analytics tool that tells you exactly what you need to know.
LaunchKit Analytics hooks up directly to your Meta Ads Manager and displays key metrics on an easy-to-understand dashboard.
The main overview of stats you’re going to see include:
- Number of visits (to a page)
- Lead conversion rate
- Number of Add to Carts
- Purchase conversion rate
- Lead to Purchase rate
These metrics are all important in knowing the health of a reservation funnel.
Additionally, LaunchKit Analytics offers more detailed metrics broken down in three different categories: Funnel Stats, Meta Ad Performance, and Custom Link Performance. The Detailed Metrics display key stats and how they develop over one-week periods. Knowing how your pre-launch marketing efforts are trending is ideal for knowing where you can optimize.
We mentioned the ability to run A/B tests in the Reservation Funnel tool, but this tab is where you’ll get to see the most detailed breakdown of those tests. A/B testing is a must when it comes to landing page optimization, which is why we’ve included it here.
LaunchKit Analytics also allows creators to make custom links that can be tracked in this tab. For example, you can create a link that’s used for other promotions (e.g. TikTok videos, conventions, PR, etc.), which is then used to track performance on each link individually. This information can tell you where you’re getting the most traction — and most importantly — where you should continue to focus your other marketing efforts outside of Meta ads.
Finally, LaunchKit Analytics offers in-depth post-campaign analysis that pulls directly from the crowdfunding platform you used. This tool uses the final backer report generated by Kickstarter or Indiegogo and cross-references it with your pre-launch email list. The goal here is to calculate return on investment (ROI) from your pre-launch advertising efforts, which is super important to understanding true campaign performance.
4. Ad Copy Generator: generate your ads with AI
LaunchKit also comes with a powerful AI tool: the Ad Copy Generator. Using data from hundreds of our successful crowdfunding ads, this tool can take your product information and generate all of your ad copy. All you have to do from there is copy and paste the ad copy into Meta and you’re good to go.
The AI Ad Copy Generator works as if you are making ads from scratch by considering the most important information about your product and target market:
- Product name
- Product category
- Product features
- Target audience
- Unique selling proposition
Once our AI tool has this information, it will create several versions of copy for you to consider. The generated copy is broken down into multiple styles that we’ve found to work best. Creators can then take the different copy variations, adjust them if they want, and start testing them in their ads immediately.
Final thoughts on LaunchKit
Our mission at LaunchBoom is to make it simple and affordable for creators to launch their product ideas and build profitable businesses. LaunchKit is key to making that happen. That’s because LaunchBoom sits at the intersection of software and service.
LaunchKit is the software. Our team of experts is the service. And combined they help product creators go from product idea to profitable business in a fraction of the time and cost of agencies.
If you’d like to launch your next product using LaunchKit, to talk with one of our product launch experts.
What is LaunchKit: Frequently asked questions
How to use the Reservation Funnel on LaunchBoom?
The Reservation Funnel tool comes with drag-and-drop functionality and pre-built funnel templates, so all you need to do is provide the copy and images you’d like to plug in and the Reservation Funnel will construct all of it for you so you can start collecting reservations for your upcoming launch.
How to use LaunchBoom Audiences?
LaunchBoom Audiences is your shortcut to audience targeting in Meta Ads Manager. This tool gives you access to qualified audiences that are much more likely to back crowdfunding campaigns. In most cases, this brings down the cost of advertising for creators.
How to use the LaunchKit Analytics?
LaunchKit Analytics is a straightforward dashboard that displays the exact metrics you need to see to optimize everything from digital ads, to social media headlines, to landing page copy.
How to use the LaunchBoom AI?
LaunchBoom AI prompts you by asking for important information about your product, then generates ready-to-use copy that you can plug into your landing page and digital ads. It’s been trained on ads from hundreds of successful crowdfunding campaigns to shortcut the process of creating a good performing advertisement on Meta.
