Acquiring funds. It’s probably all that an entrepreneur wants. To see their business take flight and be believed in by investors. The problem with this? It’s really, really hard to secure that funding. Whether they seek support from banks, friends and family or from an alternative source such as crowdfunding, there is no simple guide to guarantee that a business receives funding.
Crowdfunding has seen its popularity grow in recent years as a faster and easier alternative to the traditional routes. Sourcing backing from multiple investors who all understand and believe in a common goal is an attractive prospect to entrepreneurs and it can be a great way to market your product, drum up interest and, crucially, get your funding.
One platform that has seen its own fair share of businesses find funding success is Kickstarter. Started in 2009, it has assisted in more than 130,000 projects, helping entrepreneurs to connect with the right investors to truly build a convincing relationship between customers and businesses.
Most businesses are only purely concerned with reaching their target. Simply finding out that customers are interested in your product can galvanise businesses and help them to build a successful platform. But what about getting more than you asked for?
You may not dare to dream that you could ask for anything more than just reaching your target. Being humble and realistic with your goals is a good way to engage with investors and achieve your target, but what happens if you actually overfund?
You may ask for a few thousand pounds to help you with a specific aspect of the project, but there are examples of businesses managing to raise millions of pounds over their target.
Question is, how do they do it?
Overfunding has a general understanding of surpassing the initial funding goal in a determined campaign period. This can can be the best thing that happened to a small business. Yet, it is risky, challenging, and hard to get—but not impossible. One of the ways to look at it is exploring previous successfully funded projects and learning from the creators’ experiences.
One of the most overfunded projects to hit Kickstarter is, oddly enough, a card game called Exploding Kittens. Funded back in February of 2015, The Exploding Kittens tag line is “a card game for people who into kittens and explosions and laser beams and sometimes goats.” What more do you need to know!?
It ended up raising $8,782,571 (87,825 percent of goal) – pretty crazy for a card game about exploding cats.
Kind of says it all, right? Created by of game designers Elan Lee (Xbox) and Shane Small (Xbox, Marvel) and cartoonist Matthew Inman, the mind behind popular web comic The Oatmeal, the campaign for the distinctive Russian Roulette-style card game became Kickstarter’s most backed campaign ever with 219,382 backers.
Market Inspector has collected primary data from interviews with successful founders from three different continents to present you the most common key steps to get overfunded. It is known among former founders that choosing a smaller funding goal increases chances to raise the whole amount of money.
