We’ve taken the call from panic-stricken entrepreneurs more times than we can count. “I have two weeks left in my Kickstarter campaign, and we’re not even 20% of the way there. How can I get on TechCrunch?” We bite our lips to keep from saying the truth, “Press isn’t your problem. Your problem is that people aren’t buying your product.”
Our company, Fortified Bicycle Alliance (formerly Gotham), is onto our second successful Kickstarter project–an invincible bike light. Before our first project last year, we meticulously studied hundreds of Kickstarter successes and failures and interviewed countless successful Kickstarter entrepreneurs. In the last two years we’ve given guest lectures on Kickstarter, written articles, and coached entrepreneurs (pro-bono). We do it because we believe venture capital is slavery and crowdfunding is freedom.
But there’s a myth around the Midas touch of crowdfunding. For every high-flying $10 million Pebble Watch and $8 million Ouya Game Console there are thousands of dead and quickly forgotten projects. In fact, 56% of Kickstarter projects fail.
And despite being teachers and practitioners of Kickstarter we have almost failed several times. We’ll get to that later, but first let’s debunk the biggest myth about Kickstarter success.
Myth: Like Steve Jobs, I know what customers want.
Truth: You are not Steve Jobs.
Jobs, the greatest product developer of our time, loved quoting Henry Ford, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Jobs had a crystal ball that the rest of us mortals don’t have.
Customer Development
Don’t listen to Steve Jobs. Listen to Steve Blank, Stanford professor and author of Four Steps to the Epiphany, and creator of the Customer Development Methodology (book PDF here). You can have ideas or opinions on how to design a product, but as Blank writes: “An intelligent opinion is still a guess.” And it doesn’t matter how smart of an entrepreneur you are. “The dumbest person with a fact trumps anyone with an opinion. There are no facts inside the building so get the heck outside.”