In 2013, I crowdfunded a card game called Story War on Kickstarter. It was an unknown brand that raised $360,000 from over 7,000 people. I had never done a Kickstarter project before, and I had to figure everything out as I went. I want to teach you how to crowdfund something, assuming crowdfunding still exists by the time you read this. But if crowdfunding dies, something else will rise up and replace it, and this advice should still hold.

The principles described in this essay are used to talk about crowdfunding, but they could just as easily be applied to a basket weaving business in 1836, or a laser drug factory in 2525. Because these tips aren’t really about a platform—they’re about human nature. And platforms like Kickstarter exist as a mirror of human nature. The tools at your disposal might change, but the wiring of human brains will not.

Come up with a good product.

The first and most important step to crowdfunding something is to come up with something that would do well on a crowdfunding platform. This is where a lot of projects die before they even get started.

You might think crowdfunding would be a good way to make that game or book or movie idea you’ve been kicking around in your head since high school. But you’re probably wrong. Because that idea that has been incubating in your head for years is probably already too dated, too personal, and reverse engineered around your own preferences. It probably won’t work well on a crowdfunding platform.

Instead of thinking, “I want to crowdfund my secret brain thing,” you should be thinking, “What is a new thing I could come up with that would do well as a crowdfunded project?” First, look at all the projects that are already successful. What is it that they all have in common?

No, I’m not talking about zombies, steampunk, and Cthulhu, although that’s part of it. You’ll find that most successful crowdfunding projects center around a core novel idea that makes people say, “Oh, wow, that’s cool.” You need to come up with an idea that makes people say that. You need to come up with a bunch of ideas and tell your friends about them, and see which ones they think are cool. If enough friends tell you one of your ideas is cool, it probably is. If you get a lukewarm response, you should move on and try something else.

Once you have an idea that gets a positive response from your friends, you should test it out on people you don’t know very well. Talk about it at parties to friends-of-friends, or PM it to someone you barely know on Facebook. Try to encourage harsh feedback. If your idea survives and consistently excites people, it’s probably a good one. Now you just need to figure out how to communicate that idea to a stranger as quickly as possible.

You’re not given much time to make an impression on the Internet, and the quicker you can communicate an idea and get people to the “oh cool” realization, the better. Zombie projects are popular because it’s an aesthetic shorthand that means “few vs. many combat.” Steampunk is shorthand for “gadgets and puzzles and fashion.” These aesthetic shorthands are popular because they are public domain brands that can efficiently communicate the familiar part of an idea to the audience, making the unfamiliar part understandable much faster.

You’ll need to be a little bit more populist and a little bit more pandering than you’d probably like to be, but hey, this is crowdfunding. You need to play to the crowd.

You only launch once.

I have no opinion on Steve Jobs as a man, but as shoulder angels go, he’s the worst. So many young entrepreneurs have bought into the Jobs mythos that a self-assured “F you” attitude is the secret to success. Part of the reason the WWSJD philosophy is so popular is because it’s so self-serving.

Who wouldn’t want to believe that their first instincts are right and that the world is full of idiot sheeple who can’t wrap their head around you, the misunderstood visionary? This idea is toxic and almost always leads to failure. And it’s probably also not the way Steve Jobs actually ran his business.

You should realize that your first instincts are probably going to be wrong. The Dunning–Kruger effect describes a cognitive bias where inexperienced individuals overestimate their own competency and underestimate the skills of others.

If you launch your product using your own initial expectations, you will probably fail. Then you’ll wish you could go back in time and do the whole thing over again with all the new things you learned. And you’ll probably write a blog post about it.

But there’s another way! Instead of rushing in like an idiot, you can drink the tears of other idiots and absorb their powers.

Seek out “crowdfunding postmortem” blog posts and read them. Read as many as you can find. Read the success stories and the failures. Look at what they have in common and what was done differently. You’ll find that a lot of people came to similar conclusions. And you can use these conclusions to plan your campaign before you launch it.

Should you do a $1 reward tier? No, the credit card transaction fees will eat your revenue and steal sales from your next tier up. Should you sell T-shirts? Maybe, but calculate the profit margins first and find a T-shirt fulfillment company to handle that for you. Should you sell posters? Heck no, they are awkward and expensive to ship because of the weird cardboard tube thing. All these questions and more can be easily answered by the simple act of researching before you do something.

Marketing is easy if you never sleep.

Finally, after months of research and planning, it’s time to launch your campaign. Get ready for all of your research to suddenly become useless.

You’ll find that research can only take you so far. There are too many unique quirks to your campaign and too many unknown variables to account for. You won’t really know how to promote your campaign until you’re actually looking at the stats on a day-to-day basis and freaking out about it.

But don’t worry! You’ve got a sophisticated secret weapon at your disposal: trial and error. Try every kind of marketing tactic you can think of. Spamming your former co-workers. Maybe try posting it on your mom’s Facebook wall. Is Reddit still a thing? Do ANYTHING you think might work, monitor whether or not it does work, and repeat the things that do work.

When I ran my campaign, I thought the biggest source of traffic would be viral Tumblr posts. But we exhausted that audience pretty quickly. It turns out my game got the most new backers when it cross-promoted with other games on Kickstarter. I asked other people running projects at the same time if they wanted to give each other mutual shoutouts in backer updates. This had a huge impact on sales; it turns out it’s way easier to get someone to back a project if they’ve backed something else before. As soon as I figured that out, I switched gears and made cross-promotion the focus of my campaign.

This is not to say that cross-promotion will work for you every time. I’m saying that you should try a bunch of stuff and repeat what works and stop doing what doesn’t. This is easily the most arduous part of running a crowdfunding campaign and not something you can really pawn off to a PR agency. No one is going to fight for you as hard as you can fight for yourself, not for any amount of money.

Do you want fries with that?

About halfway through your campaign, you should be feeling pretty good. You’ve got a few real customers now! They like your product! They like you! They’re going nuts for your thing! It’s time to milk them for all they’re worth.

It’s way easier to up-sell existing customers than find new ones. That’s the short answer for why capitalism made Americans fat. If people are so excited about your thing that doesn’t even exist yet that they’re willing to give you $20, they might be excited enough to give you $40. Try it.

You’ll want reasonable reward tiers with a price that you choose based on research. It might be $10, $20, or $30; it depends on the value of your product. But pretty soon, you’ll see that one of your tiers is clearly the most popular. That’s your cue to make the tier immediately above it way cooler and constantly talk about how much cooler the more expensive tier is in backer updates. By incentivizing your backers to switch to a more expensive tier, you could potentially double your revenue without gaining a single new customer.

Always remember that your existing customers are your most valuable resource. You can get so much more out of them than money. You can get some great feedback on your actual product. You can ask them to promote your project on their social media feeds. Heck, you can even use them as a bargaining chip to initiate cross-promotions with other campaigns (e.g., “Plug my thing to your people, and I’ll plug your thing to my people!”).

Just don’t forget that this is more about them than it is about you. If a lot of people start angrily pushing back against your wacky schemes to grow your campaign, it might be time to cool your jets and try another tactic. The difference between a crowd and a mob is subtle, so be careful.

If you knew what you were doing,
you wouldn’t be here.

Congratulations, your campaign has been dramatically overfunded, and you suddenly realize you have no idea what you’re doing! How does mass producing things in China work? Can I just mail stuff with regular stamps? How do I get a barcode? Are taxes a thing? You’re going to have to spend the next year or so figuring all this stuff out!

But don’t worry, it’s cool: People will be banging on your door begging to help you out. Most of the problems you’ll have can be solved by a company or consultant that specializes in solving that very specific problem. Their potential client base is so small that they’ll be coming to you! And then you’ll have to learn to tell the difference between a good sales pitch and a bad sales pitch.

A good strategy for finding out if a fulfillment agency is legit is to go behind their backs and talk to their biggest clients. The agency will probably list all their big clients on their website, along with a carefully curated quote. You can use that to find the client’s contact info and reach out to them. Usually when people regret a business arrangement, they won’t say anything publicly, but they’ll probably drop hints in an off-the-record, one-on-one conversation.

If a fulfillment agency looks shady, Google whatever service they’re claiming to provide and find their competitors. Talk around and pit them against each other until you get the best offer. Don’t be timid about it—this stuff is important!

Once you’ve taken other people’s money, it’s too late to say you’re “bad at the business stuff.” If this whole thing falls apart, you could face a ruined reputation, legal action, or worse! I know at least two people who ended up in actual psychiatric hospitals because of the overwhelming stress of a mismanaged crowdfunding campaign. No pressure.

Also remember that a product isn’t necessarily a business. Finding a small community of early adopters is the easy part; the hard part is generating consistent sales to the general public. This is a classic business problem, and you can learn more about it by reading the book Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore, which was published in 1991, but is still very relevant to startups today. You’ll need to start thinking about how to turn your product into a sustainable business as soon as your campaign ends.

Obviously you’ll want your business to succeed, but what if it doesn’t? You’re going to have to make a contingency plan for all levels of success, including total failure. Make sure you always leave enough money in the bank account for your exit strategy; you don’t want to one day realize you spent everything on fulfilling the project and have no money left to pay your rent.

You’re probably going to feel like your creation is the most important thing in your life (your Heisenberg meth) and that nothing else matters. And while it’s very productive to feel that way, remember to be a human being. Remember that you’ll eventually need to go back to sleeping and showering on a regular schedule even if you don’t have a day job.

Remember that all your dreams coming true doesn’t mean your life stops happening. When this is all over—and one day, it will all be over—you’re going to feel like a totally different person. But it’ll be worth it.

Now go forth and hustle.

Get a few decades of secondhand experience.

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Build a case-study library and let other
people’s experience guide your next steps.

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Bookmark, download, or otherwise find at
least fifty stories of either success or failure in
your realm of business.

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Scan for key themes, repeated behaviors,
and red flags. Remember these stories as you work
on your next big thing.