How I am Coping with Launching a Kickstarter Campaign about Mental Health and during COVID!!!

Launching a Kickstarter campaign has never been easy; you need to be an octopus on all fronts; having a novel idea, intersted customers, sales and marketing capabilities, and above all, resilience. Add to this COVID situation and the need to work in a coherent environment to handle the dynamism of the campaign.

So what are the coping mechanisms that I am using?

Connecting with my intuition, consultations, prayers fuel me with resilience and patience. Having a support system that comes from my faith, purpose, family, friends, and mentors adds more coping power.

Okay! Practically, how I keep focused and driven towards my goal?

I use different approaches, here are some:

1. Contemplation practices combine meditation and mindfulness techniques using non-self-centered actions (connecting myself with a higher source, ‘God’).

2. Practicing gratitude daily, journaling, and sport especially core stretching techniques.

3. Practicing guided and unguided meditation at least once a day.

4. Being aware and present in the current moment using continuous emotional check-ins.

5. Reading books or articles, watching related Ted talks ignite my purpose and fuel my brain.

5. Practicing emotions with grace, I don’t push myself too hard, i.e., when I need to isolate myself, I do it whatever it takes; this builds our emotional agility muscle. You can learn more about it here:
https://www.susandavid.com/about-emotional-agility

These five practices equip me with resilience and emotional agility to proceed with a clearer path and ease if I face a new situation which is always the case for a living being ;).

But why crowdfund?

I keep reminding myself why I need to launch a crowdfunding campaign, whether using Kickstarter or another platform? from the first glance, the answer is obvious! I NEED TO RAISE FUNDS. However, this is a byproduct of the campaign; many more embedded benefits are there whether we succeed or fail, and we need to embrace all of them.

Building a crowdfunding campaign forces the creator/s (founder/s) to ask tough questions and revisit their purpose, vision, and strategy; this is one of the major benefits. Another one is mimicking research, development, marketing, and sales operations — so the whole package of a startup daily work at once-.

What are other benefits of launching a crowdfunding campaign?

1. Building our brand locally and globally as Larimar https://larimar.io/index.php/en/home/ or as a team. Whether we get the funding goal or not, we are ready to penetrate the market with loyal customers and advocates who can help us in co-creating a personalized service.
2. It’s a great experience with so much knowledge to gain, i.e., sales, marketing, pitching your innovation, connecting with backers (customers), and gathering allies.
3. It’s one of the best cost-effective, measurable options to penetrate the market and test innovation.
4. It exposes the project to honest feedback from technology enthusiasts or interested customers.
5. And, evaluating our status, resources, tools despite the results is another major benefit. It gives you honest, solid feedback about the project; to proceed pivot or exit.

So, where are we now?

We are in the pre-launch phase of the campaign, and I’ll share what we have learned until now and keep sharing updates about the journey to get a real-time spot on our Kickstarter campaign;

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/larimar/the-wellshift-app

What I did and worked for me?

The first tasks to do are; check out if your project is eligible to be available on the crowdfunding platform (in my case, Kickstarter), defining your crowdfunding goals ‘what do you want to achieve and why, set measurable objectives for each goal, clearly identify your target audiences in term of their interest, needs, funding capability, preferable channels, and marketing messages.

I call all of the above steps the Preparation phase of the campaign. After that, things will be clearer, and you can start the next phase, the ‘ Pre-launch’ phase, where I am in now and about to complete:

Five things I have done, and they are of great value:

1. Connect with advocates, activists, influencers, press to promote your project.
2. Generate a categorized mailing list; big fans, fans, friends, family, colleagues, advocates, activists, and paid influencers. And contact them regularly with project updates.
3. Generate your marketing message and marketing statement, test it through sharing with fans and paid ads. Here you should have a landing page with a subscription form to collect customers’ emails.
   Tip: provide value on your landing page before asking for customer's emails.
4. Create your video, project image, and page on Kickstarter, i.e., title, rewards, bio, story, breakdown budget, risks, etc. Then share it with your friends, mentors, and super fans to get feedback and update it continuously.
5. Update your social channels and start creating a buzz about the campaign through emails, posts, the project’s proposed value, and updates. Ensure to clearly ask your need in the update, i.e., subscription, backing, sharing, etc.

I’ll be sharing more hints and updates. So stay tuned!

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