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The Crowd Goes Wild

Our not-so-secret recipe for launching repeatedly successful Kickstarter campaigns.

By Peak Design

It Ain't Rocket Science.

Well, it’s not easy either. Designing products and launching them on Kickstarter takes a ton of work, and there is ample room for miscalculations, mis-steps, and good old fashioned ball-dropping.

This shit is hard. Do not underestimate the complications.

That little gem of a quote is from our very own founder Peter Dering, during a presentation at the Outdoor Retailer show titled Kickstarted: Building an outdoor gear brand from scratch through crowdfunding. We’re not trying to scare you away, we’re just trying to make the point that Kickstarter is not a set-it-and-forget-it, cures-what-ails-ya business building tool. You need to do lots of stuff to make your crowdfunding campaign (and the oft-overlooked aftermath) successful.

Fortunately, running a successful crowdfunding campaign ain’t rocket science. It’s the same success recipe for any business: ample preparation, hard work, strong passion, and good communication. Your grandpa might call it “piss and vinegar.“ But we’re not your grandpa, so we’re not just going to bark “work harder” and then leave to go bowling with the fellas at the vet’s hall. We’re going to share with you some slightly more constructive advice on how to design and execute a successful Kickstarter project.

Although bowling with the guys from the VA sounds pretty fun.

Our design team sitting down with adventure photographer Trey Ratcliff, discussing the inspirations behind The Everyday Messenger.

1. Solve a real problem

Note that we’re coming at this from the perspective of product designers, but we think this piece of the pie applies to creative projects across the board. If you’re not solving a real problem for a real audience, then you’re fighting an uphill battle from the get-go. Let’s pick this apart a bit:

It’s got to be a real problem.

A pain point. An annoyance. An inconvenience. An area for improvement. A general feeling of discontent. If you’re looking for inspiration, watch an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm and you’ll discover that damn near everything can easily become a real problem.

You’ve got to have a REAL solution.

People often tell us that Kickstarter is a great way to test if an idea/solution has gravitas, and we suppose that’s true. But if you’re launching a Kickstarter project with the goal of testing your solution, we think that you’re way behind where you need to be. You should know that you have a great solution, and that solution should exist in a whole (or near-complete) form. For us that means months of designing, prototyping, testing, and at times going back to the drawing board. It means getting our manufacturing dialed in, and being sure that we can build what we’ve designed.

Your solution needs a market.

For most solutions, you need a big market. Who is affected by the problem you’re solving? What percentage of those folks will be willing to pay for a solution? Can you easily reach these people on the web? Look at kinds of design projects that seem to perennially kill it on Kickstarter: iPhone accessories, homewares, wearable tech…these are things with massive online consumer markets. Note that you don’t need a giant market though. The Petzval Lens, for example, is a $400 vintage-inspired SLR camera lens for portrait photography. Lomography raised $1.4M on Kickstarter for this expensive niche product. Why? Because photographers are a spendy group, and Lomography already had a big, active online community of creative photographers under their wing.

The 4-Season Glove by Give'r.

The Petzval 58 Lens by Lomography.

Pebble Time smartwatch by Pebble.

2. Tell a Great Story

It can be serious, humorous, inspirational, shocking, or uplifting. Or it can be none of those things. What it does need to be is attention-grabbing and share-worthy. Your video doesn’t have to be flashy and professional—heck, you could shoot it all on your smartphone if you want—it just has to get your point across in an interesting way.

Even if your video budget lacks fancy equipment and production tools, it should be padded with plenty of time. Write, film, edit, share. Get feedback from friends, family and strangers. Repeat again and again. A great story gets better with every retelling.

3. Pay Attention To your Customers

Your backers are your customers. As we’ve said before, they’re the best kind of customers in the world. And if you treat them like they’re the best, they’ll help you grow your campaign.You’ll get questions of all kinds about your product. Why does it only come in one color? Will it hold a loaf of bread? What kind of steel is the rotary girder made out of? Answer these questions. Better yet, answer them with a story. Bring your customers into the know about every little nook and cranny of your product and business. Share your journey of invention. Share the highs and the lows. Share pictures and videos. We hold On-Air Google Hangouts with our backers with live demos and Q&A sessions.

Post frequent updates to your project with behind-the-scenes footage of what’s going on. Take a selfie with the mailman when he drops off the new 3D printed prototype, and share that. Do whatever it takes to keep your customers engaged, excited and talkative. An engaged audience will be more likely to share your product with their friends, and when new potential backers come to your project page they’ll immediately feel the excitement.

Designer Robb Jankura holding a marked-up prototype bag panel. We always share behind-the-scenes manufacturing footage with our backers.

4. Tell everybody about it

If there was ever a time in your life to shamelessly self-promote, it’s now.

In 2011 when Peak Design was born, Peter Dering launched the Capture Camera Clip on Kickstarter. He then promptly sent an email to 500 of his friends, family, and acquaintances from all walks of life, telling them about his project. 3 days later, Gizmodo wrote an article about us, and boom, Peak Design was on the map.

That is a microcosmic story for the effect marketing can have before and during your campaign. As a project creator, you need to climb on top of a mountain with a megaphone and shout your project to the world. The shouting needs to begin well before your crowdfunding campaign begins, and continue until the very last second. Sometimes it’ll feel like you’re screaming into the abyss. Rarely (very rarely) you’ll get lucky and a big media hit will fall in your lap. Most of the time you’ll feel like an outbound sales rep, tirelessly sniffing out new leads, winning them over a few at a time.

We’ll be posting an entire article about how to market a Kickstarter project, but for the time being we’ll just stick with a few basic things to keep in mind. The Kickstarter platform can bring you great visibility, but don’t expect the pledges to just start rolling in the moment you hit that launch button. You need to actively share your campaign, and you need to continually find new channels (advertising, media, influencers, events, communities) to share it through. Even now, after 5 years of Kickstarter projects, we’re constantly trying new things in order to make new people aware of our campaigns.

Hundreds crowd around a street performance in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, where most of Peak Design's soft goods are manufactured.

5. Be ready and able to deliver

A few years back UPS launched this TV ad. If you don’t feel like watching, it goes something like this:A company is about to launch their new store, and they’re all huddled around a computer. They press a button and they’re open for business! Then they anxiously watch their analytics to see if anybody makes a purchase. Within seconds they get their first order and they cheer! They quickly get tens, then hundreds more orders and they cheer even louder! Then, the signup counter just starts skyrocketing. Hundreds of thousands of orders. The cheers quickly evaporate as reality hits the team: their new store is wildly successful, and now they’ve got to deal with the logistical nightmare of fulfilling all these orders.

This sums up the feeling you get when your first crowdfunding campaign comes to a massively successful end. You’ve poured your time, energy and savings into this project, and when it ends you realize that your work has just begun.

When you’re a first time product designer, going from zero to funded is much less difficult than going from funded to fulfilled. If you wait until your Kickstarter campaign has ended to figure out things like manufacturing, warehousing, packaging, and shipping, you’ve waited way too long. You’ve gotta dial these things in early and set your backers’ expectations as accurately (and realistically) as possible.

Back in 2012 CNN posted a report stating that 84% of the top 50 Kickstarter projects shipped late. We’re not sure what that number is now, but we bet it hasn’t changed much. Does fulfilling late mean you’ve failed? Absolutely not...there are some household names (Pebble, Oculus Rift) on that list. If you’re communicative and attentive to your backers they’ll cut you some slack. But that goodwill can only be stretched so thin before people start coming at you with pitchforks and you end up in the “where are they now?” bin.

Everyday Messengers in various stages of completion await further assembly at our supplier's sewing facility.

Now, go HAVE FUN.

We have mastered none of the above things. As a matter of fact, we maintain that they’re un-masterable. We’ve learned a lot in the past 5 years, enough to formulate some broad advice to the crowdfunding community. But we are always learning, the tables are always turning, and nothing ever goes exactly to plan.

The fun part is doing it, even if you don’t totally know what you’re doing.

Learn from your mistakes. Make new mistakes. Celebrate your successes. Whatever you do, keep moving. Sometimes the most enjoyable rides are also the bumpiest.

The Crowd Goes Wild

Footnotes

All photos taken by the Peak Design team, except for those otherwise watermarked.

SEE WHY WE CROWDFUND

FootNotes

All photos taken by the Peak Design team, except for those otherwise watermarked.

© 2026 Peak Design

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