What’s your experience with crowdfunding platforms for SaaS products?

I'm working on a blog post about this. It's not quite complete, but there's a lot there already. Here you go... If you’re running a SaaS company, a crowdfunding campaign can work like a pre-sale. With the right narrative it turns your sales process into a big event. In 2022, we raised over $130k through a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo. Here’s how we did it. The campaign took months of prep and was pretty involved. Along the way, I figured out some things that worked and others that didn’t. In this post I want to share some reflections on how you can use a crowdfunding campaign to drive sales for your SaaS platform. You can checkout the original campaign here: https://sutra.co/crowdfunder This strategy won’t work for everyone. You need to have a good story and have some sort of social impact aspect to your project. Our campaign took two months of planning and two months actually running the campaign. For me as the founder, most of that time was all consuming. I would say I spent 80% of my time on this for about 4 or 5 months. One of the most important dimensions of a crowdfunding campaign is the narrative. Early on I was introduced to the hero’s journey concept for framing the story of the campaign. The basic idea is this: your ideal customer is the hero. They have something they really care about that they’re trying to actualize in the world. Your offering is the magic solution that will get them there. We spent a long time wrestling with this narrative frame trying to find the right balance between a top level and a bottom level aspiration. A top level aspiration is like a noble goal that people care about but isn’t necessarily part of their as lived, daily reality. A bottom level aspiration is a clear and present challenge that a person deals with and would like to overcome. For us, the top level aspiration is about creating a peaceful world through group learning experiences that invite meaningful connection and conversation. This is the part that speaks to people’s hearts. The bottom level aspiration is about helping creators with everything they need to organize an experience like this. This is the part that speaks to people’s practical reality. It’s practical and relevant to what they’re dealing with. My first step in approaching the campaign was to learn as much as I could about successful crowdfunding campaigns. I spent days searching for campaigns that really stood out for me and identifying a few who’s style I really liked. One of my favorite campaigns was the original Oculus campaign from 2012 that raised $2.5m for their VR headset. My favorite part was how they wove in lots of testimonials from different influencers. I didn’t have a big budget to do any fancy editing, but I felt I could work with that approach to create a good video. I literally transcribed the script for that video and used it as a bench mark to see how much talking was done by Palmer Lucky vs everyone else. Once I felt like I had a general sense of direction with the kind of video that I wanted to put together, I started writing the script. I put together a couple of pages of language and timed myself reading the script. Once I was happy with a V1, I reached out to a handful of people and asked them if I could read it to them. I got a lot of great feedback that way. Then I organized a couple of group calls with people from our community. I asked them to listen to the script from the perspective of someone who might contribute to the campaign. We got great feedback that allowed us to continue refining our narrative. I was also referred to an awesome course on Udemy called The Art of Crowdfunding for Social Change. The $20 I spent on this course was nothing compared to the value that I got out of it. I actually reached out to the guy who created that course and hired him to spend a few hours with me refining my campaign. It was really helpful to have someone who was super value aligned but didn’t have a pre-existing relationship with me. You can actually watch the post campaign follow up call we did here: Ian is amazing and I highly recommend reaching out to him if you’re serious about running a campaign. Between his input and all our feedback sessions we went through more than ten different versions of the script. After putting together the script we started working on the video. We didn’t have a big budget and we wanted the video to feel professional. We worked with a couple of video editors but nothing was heading in a direction that felt good. In the end, I ended up scrapping everything and choosing to produce the video myself. I’m not a pro editor by any stretch, but I’m super technical, visual, and attentive to detail. This is all a good set of qualities for video production. Creating the video ourselves took a long time, but I was really happy with the output. To prepare for our launch, we made a huge list of every person and organization that we had a relationship with. We reached out to many of these people in advance and throughout the campaign asked if they might help us promote the crowdfunder. We made this super easy for them by putting together a notion document with easy language and images to share. You can check that out here: https://sutraco.notion.site/Sutr... Here are some specific things that really worked for us: - We interviewed various thought leaders throughout the campaign and released those videos to build interest. - We hosted a handful of Zoom calls with our community around different topics relevant to our audience. This really helped build engagement and support. - Our Crowdfunder was basically a pre-sale. We offered 50% discounts on our plans and we offered Lifetime plans. The Lifetime plans came in at about 2.5x of an annual plan. We had over 40 people sign up for lifetime plans and that generated a huge amount of our funding. - We created a simple link to share the campaign (http://www.supportsutra.co) that redirected to our crowdfunder page and made it super easy to share with everyone. - We posted updated to the campaign page regularly to keep the momentum going and keep our supporters engaged. One of the most surprising things that really worked for us revolved around the campaign deadline. We had originally scheduled the campaign to be 1 month long. At the end of the month we had only raised $70k of our $100k goal. Indiegogo let us extend the campaign by 30 days. We did that and, in the end, increased the total raised to over $133k. I’ve found that in every campaign the vast majority of the money comes in in the last day or two. We rescheduled the campaign at the last moment. Literally hours before the campaign was supposed to end, so it effectively gave us two deadlines where we saw a sharp increase in contributions. This wasn’t intentional, but I definitely think it’s worth noting. I hope this is helpful…

I don't have experience with this yet, but I'll launch my SaaS https://www.producthunt.com/prod... on Kickstarter next month. I'll post about my experience then. While Kickstarter is not focused on SaaS, it has an "Apps" category, and I don't think there are other platforms currently where more people can be reached. But I'd be grateful for suggestions of alternatives.

Interested in follow up on this!