Lessons Learned Post #2: Delivering On Promises

Reflecting on my successful first pin badge kickstarter with artist Rob Turpin. The results are on sale at my Etsy shop here. Posts: original spec, on managing the KS.

Lesson 7: People are actually pretty bright

At the end of the Kickstarter, I sent out a survey to all backers to get their addresses and pin preferences, selecting from the grid above. I was quite worried that the wide variety of designs would cause my backers confusion. As it turned out this was no problem at all and everyone followed the instructions. A couple of people selected one too many pins; upon messaging they either changed it or were happy to pay a bit more.

However, for my own internal management purposes the tier structure I’d come up with was a nightmare. The way KS provides you with the data from your backer polls is broken up by tier, so the resulting spreadsheet the survey produced was very awkard to manage.

So next time I will: Poll buyers exactly the same way but design tiers to cause myself fewer spreadsheet migraines.

Lesson 8: Packaging 

For my first foray into pin-selling I’d just stuck the frog through a card and put him in the smallest (110x165mm) jiffy-bag (bubble mailer to Americans) I could get my hands on. Most customers were happy with this but the only less-than-perfect reviews I got for my shop suggested that the clutch had been damaged in the post. Also, for early bird (and certain special customers) I was sending postcards, which could just about be jammed in but it wasn’t much fun for anyone. I ordered some larger (120x215mm) jiffy-bags, and some rigid cardboard boxes for the larger orders that were coming in, but that left the damage issue (worse, as I didn’t want anything in these bigger boxes scratched!)

The solution was to wrap each individual pin in its backing card in a glassine paper bag. The glassine bags are pretty cheap (about 4.5p each, as I bought them) and I feel much happier about the level of protection they offer.

So next time I will: Make sure I have the appropriate packaging to hand to begin with – which won’t be hard as I have a load of surplus now! The jiffy-bags I’m using are “Enviroflute” which are all-paper and wholly recyclable and biodegradable, meaning apart from the tape and bubble wrap on the big boxes there’s no plastic involved at all.

Lesson 9: Pin Clutches & Backing Cards

My previous backing cards were, er, extremely low-budget, but for this one I had a proper graphic designer working with me. I used printed.com for the designs Rob produced, and it all ended up looking absolutely lovely. However! Adding a large number of pins to their cards was quite fiddly and time consuming. It was much more difficult, too, with the design #2 with its two pins, which had to be quite carefully aligned.

I’ve always been a bit prejudiced against the newer rubber pinbacks and preferred the butterfly style clutches, but I’m going to be honest, taking several hundred of those off pins, putting those pins through backing cards and then jamming them back on again was an absolute flipping nightmare and nearly had my fingertips bleeding at the end.

So next time I will: Get rubber clutches and look into labour-saving devices like this interesting backing card press someone recommended. Factor in a bit more time for packaging.

Lesson 10: Postage and Labels

I use the Royal Mail Click & Drop service to print my postage labels. It’s not that difficult to upload the bulk addresses Kickstarter extrudes into a format which the site can and print labels in bulk. I paid myself for tracking on large orders but charged for cheap, untracked International Standard postage which kept costs down for my buyers. I haven’t had to deal yet with any pins going missing (and may need to update this lesson as and when I do.)

The labels are produced as PDF files; label printers are a bit outside my budget at the mo but I bought cheap sticker paper which would run through my home printer and printed them 4 to a page (regretfully I had to use Acrobat to print rather than my much-preferred SumatraPDF). These were then cut up with a £7 paper guillotine. I did the same thing for the CN22 customs labels.

 

 

Easily the most fiddly and annoying part of this whole business was… peeling the labels off the backing paper. Seriously, it was a nightmare!

So next time I will: Grow out my thumbnails. And if I’m trying to make a business of this long term, look into getting a label printer – but for now printing and guillotining label paper is working just fine.

Lessons Learned Post #1: Running the Kickstarter

Reflecting on my successful first pin badge kickstarter with artist Rob Turpin. The results are on sale at my Etsy shop here.

Lesson 1: Preparation!

Before launching, I’d done some prep work drafting update posts and working up timescales, budgets and plans, but I hadn’t actually got every single post 100% ready by the time I pushed the button. A lot more could have been effectively prepared before starting, especially graphics, but I was in a hurry to start and made things up a bit as I went along. My original plan had been to do polls on second designs and extra colourways after the kickstarter finished, which I quickly realised was ridiculous as extra colourways were going to be the main draw for anyone buying more than one airship. The kickstarter immediately smashing all early goals meant I needed lots of extra colourways pronto and didn’t feel ready. The rush also meant I had to bother Rob for artwork at quite short notice (or cook up my own in Paint with very limited graphic design skills).

So next time I will: plan a schedule of posts, polls &c out carefully in advance, and make sure all necessary graphics and such are ready for all of them before I pull the trigger. Especially because…

 

Lesson 2: Money comes in much faster at the beginning and the end.

I’d seen this before on other kickstarters so it didn’t come completely by surprise, but the “first week/last hour” thing is very real. I was mainly overwhelmed because the kickstarter did much better than I was expecting in the first week – not a bad problem to have! It then went pretty flat for the middle of the month. There was a genuine uncertainty a couple of days before finish about whether we’d reach the final stretch goal, but in the end it was smashed by nearly £200.

So next time I will: Do basically the same, but focus my publicity to push things at the very beginning and end, and consider this when planning stretch goals.

Lesson 3: Everybody Loves Democracy

There were LOADS of potential colourways for the airship (with my manufacturers, adding extra colours requires a minimum order but doesn’t add cost) which I had to narrow down so as not to get Silly. Running Doodle polls was a really easy way of doing this, and also a sort of free form of market research – the orange and blue combinations (which I don’t personally much like and wouldn’t have made on my own) proved extremely popular, so they ended up getting made.

Knowing the rough proportions of interest in each pin also meant I could prepare my order to my manufacturer before sending out the post-kickstarter survey to backers, saving everyone a week.

So next time I will: Do basically the same thing (if offering varieties of a design – if I know exactly what I want to produce running polls is a lot of time and effort.)

Lesson 4: Stretch Goals

 

The kickstarter broadly went quite well, but the initial few stretch goals were so close on the heels of the first deadline and so close to each other I was announcing them all being smashed almost immediately, making them meaningless. (They weren’t particularly ambitious or expensive goals to fulfil, but still.) I had to improvise a bunch – I was only originally planning on doing four or five colourways total rather than the nine I ended up with. The later ones were decently spaced out, but I think Design #2 was also reached too early as the minimum manufacturing cost wiped out any potential profit from the first £1500.

So next time I will: Spread out stretch goals further, bearing in mind lesson 2, and look at them with an eye for the budget. Stretch goals relate quite closely to…

 

Lesson 5: Budgeting and Profit

I’ve seen people recommend running pin kickstarters on the above “third” basis (ie 1/3 for minimum manufacturing costs to meet pledge, 1/3 for overheads – shipping and kickstarter fees – and 1/3 for profit/margin of error). The overheads and minimum worked out roughly right.  However, unlike most pin kickstarters I was also paying Rob fees, and really should have put the initial target up to reflect that – the budget was initially very tight. I ended up making no profit at all off the KS because I put all the profits into further pin manufacture to sell in the long run, but that was a deliberate choice rather than being forced on me – if I’d just made enough to cover orders there would have been a moderate profit, though less than 1/3.

So next time I will: Ensure goals which front-load profit a bit more and factor in in artist costs from the very beginning. As well as changing the goals, this could have been affected by better handling the…

 

Lesson 6: Pricing and Tiers

I wanted the pin to be cheap for backers, but given the budget I think I went too far and underpriced it for what it ended up being (particularly as it ended up costing a bit more to manufacture than expected). This wasn’t helped by a slightly silly pricing structure I came up with, where it was functionally £5 per pin at all tiers unless you bought one for £6 or early bird three for £14. Early bird tiers could have been distinguished a bit more – and I’ve seen postcards and stickers as nice extras which would be worth doing in future. The “airship+frog” tier sold out extremely quickly, to my surprise – having the option to buy another design is something that I’ll definitely bear in mind in future.

So next time I will: Either improve or do away with the idea of an early bird tier; have a slightly more profitable starting price and standardise it at all tiers except for quite large orders. (There are other good reasons for this – which I’ll discuss in the next post, about FULFILLING ORDERS.)