Facebook ads for a Kickstarter campaign

A 3D printing education business launched on Kickstarter with a $3,000 goal. It funded in three minutes and raised $30,000 on day one from about $3,500 of ads.

Stephen, 3D printing academy. Recorded June 2023.

Stephen runs a 3D printing academy — teaching people to print, to design for printing, and releasing his own designs for others to print. The Kickstarter was for a product launch out of that business.

He had run Facebook ads himself before, so this was not unfamiliar territory. His concern was specific and sensible: there are a lot of buttons, it is easy to set up wrong, and setting it up wrong on a campaign with a fixed launch date means spending real money for nothing at exactly the moment you cannot afford to.

What he wanted was someone who had done it on similar projects. Crowdfunding is its own discipline. The traffic has to arrive on day one, not gradually, because Kickstarter’s own algorithm rewards early momentum by surfacing campaigns that fund fast.

The campaign funded in three minutes against a $3,000 goal and raised $30,000 on the first day, on roughly $3,500 of ad spend.

The goal being small is worth noting rather than glossing over — he set it at the minimum that made the project worth building. Funding in three minutes is a statement about the pre-launch audience more than about the target: the interest was assembled before the campaign opened, so the launch converted rather than discovered.

That is the whole method for crowdfunding. Build the list first, then launch into it. A campaign that starts advertising on day one has already missed the window that matters.

In Stephen’s words