Learn these 5 lessons from my failed Kickstarter

I’m working part time on my cybersecurity startup Malparse. It’s been an absolute blast and a huge learning experience from the beginning — even though it’s still in its infancy. Some of my greatest lessons, though, have not come from my current startup, but from my project in 2020, SketchyReq.

The Idea

SketchyReq was never going to be a moonshot unicorn. It solves a fairly niche problem for a fairly small population of users: fetching malware hosted on sketchy domains without the bad guys finding out who did it. The system design was almost as simple as the idea. That said, it was going to be my first SaaS project I’d ever worked on… Hell, it was going to be the first time I’d ever written JavaScript! So I'd bitten off a lot for my first big project.

After months and months of careful planning and long nights of development, I had something I could at least demo. So, I released the demo and got some great feedback, and that gave me just a smidge too much ambition…

The Dream

All of a sudden I had a new dream: join the honorable ranks of the full-time Indie Hackers. I wasn’t particularly unhappy in my job, but I’ve always wanted to be more independent, and as I grew more enamored with the IH community, I began to think about a Kickstarter campaign.

Fast forward a couple of months and the Kickstarter launched, mainly carried on the winds of organic marketing on social media and a ProductHunt I barely put time or effort into. I got an influx of initial funding from friends and family so I really thought I’d hit my goal. I had done it all right, validating my idea, creating marketing, making a demo, so the only thing that could happen was success, right?

The Flop

Then, the money dried up. The Kickstarter didn’t get a single dollar for months at a time, I couldn’t drive people to it to save my life and the launch failed on ProductHunt. I kept my head up throughout the latter days of the campaign, but the feeling was crushing. I even got ghosted by my first would-be angel investor!

At the end of the campaign, I raised less than 10% of my completely arbitrary $13,000 goal. I spent the next month not wallowing in my sorrows but doing an honest introspection on what happened. I’ve returned to that introspection several times over the last two years and I think I know what lessons I’ve learned.

The Lessons

• Don’t just do a Kickstarter for marketing — I had no idea why I wanted to do a Kickstarter, or why I set a funding goal of $13,000. I just wanted to do it to drum up some money to offset hosting/development costs and to be a source of marketing.

• Have a plan — What are you going to do with the money? What are people paying for? When is the project going to be released? Doing a Kickstarter without a plan is a quick way to end up with an underfunded project and/or some disappointed customers.

• Failure isn’t an ending — A failed Kickstarter isn’t the same as a failed founder. It’s one metric, for one app with one singular outcome. You can try again later at Kickstarter or look for a new source of revenue, or just bootstrap it!

• Put some effort into marketing — A Kickstarter is your landing page, not your sole source of marketing. I put close to zero effort into marketing for SketchyReq outside of social media posts and a halfway done ProductHunt profile.

• Be cautiously ambitious — Chasing funding is perfectly fine. We all want to eat and most of us want to do a bit more than that. Keep your ambitions reasonable, or, as they say, keep your head in the clouds and your feet on the ground. Make reasonable funding goals and understand the limitations of your own market.