3 Reasons Why You Should STOP Using Kickstarter

If you’re an aspiring entrepreneur or a business owner looking to launch a new product, you’ve probably heard of Kickstarter. It’s a popular crowdfunding platform that has helped many startups raise funds, validate their products, and bring them to market.

However, in the last three years, there has been a noticeable trend that has caught the attention of Kirsten Ross, an e-commerce strategist. In this blog post, we’ll discuss why you must reconsider using Kickstarter this year.

Here are three reasons why you need to reconsider using Kickstarter:

1) Oversaturation

Over the last ten-plus years, Kickstarter has become the go-to platform and method for small businesses to get funding for their products. This has popularized crowdfunding as a way to skip investors and go straight to market. There are many benefits to doing a crowdfunding campaign, from social proof to the audience on Kickstarter, the organic traction you can get on their platform, and the market validation it provides. However, in the last three years, Kickstarter has become oversaturated with campaigns. This is a problem because the power of Kickstarter lies in its community. Kickstarter has over 17-18 million people that come back every year to look at products and potentially back them. The ability to tap into that community can give you a snowball effect and cause you to get a lot of organic pledges coming in off the platform.

With so many campaigns live on Kickstarter and launching every day, Kickstarter has an algorithm that helps them figure out which campaigns are popular and which ones should be seen by more people. The more campaigns that have launched on Kickstarter, the more popular the platform becomes, and the more competitive it becomes. This means that it is harder than ever to compete and get eyeballs on your campaign.

2) The price to play

To be successful on Kickstarter and rank in front of their community and stay ahead of all the well-funded startups is high. You can’t pay for advertisements on Kickstarter, so the price to play refers to what you need to invest financially in the campaign to set you up for success.

With oversaturation, the price to play is getting higher as more competition comes in, and more eyeballs come on the platform. It is becoming harder to compete, especially in popular categories, without deep pockets to pay for marketing.

3) The quality of the products

The quality of products on Kickstarter has been declining. As the platform becomes more competitive, some startups are rushing to launch their products without proper testing or validating them. This has led to many products failing to deliver on their promises, which has hurt Kickstarter’s reputation as a platform.

What can you do instead?

While Kickstarter can be beneficial for some startups, it’s not the best option for everyone. If you’re looking to bring your product to market and pay for inventory without going into debt, there is a method that you can use that provides almost the same benefits as Kickstarter.

Using a pre-order model on your website, you can collect pre-orders and validate your product within weeks, instead of months. You can also get revenue in and build your customer list slowly but more profitably and faster.

Shopify -or- Kickstarter? That is the question!

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