Crowd Start Serves As the Ultimate Guide to Crowdfunding

In the age of Kickstarter, Indiegogo and GoFundMe, Crowd Start: The Ultimate Guide to a Powerful and Profitable Crowdfunding Campaign offers an opportunity for prospective individuals or businesses to learn how to leverage the power of crowds to achieve their dreams. The book, written by an entrepreneur who successfully exceeded funding for her own crowdfunded project, details how readers can establish a well-planned campaign. The book covers the fundamentals, strategies and roadmap that will take a crowdfunder from Day Zero until completion.

What is Crowd Start About?

In Crowd Start, author Ariel Hyatt dives into the world of crowdfunding to help prospective participants decide if they are ready and able to get involved. You may have heard about crowdfunding sites, like Kickstarter or IndieGoGo. You might have heard about the success stories of entrepreneurs, creative professionals, and other individuals that used crowdfunding. Based on those success stories, you might assume all you need for a successful crowdfunding campaign is a smart idea and the right kind of “buzz”.

The answer couldn’t be farther from the truth.

As Hyatt points out, crowdfunding is not a guaranteed win. In fact, a surprisingly large number of crowdfunding campaigns fail to reach their goal for a wide variety of reasons. Nothing, not even the cutest cat videos, guarantees a success so participants have to put in the time to build an audience, craft a campaign, and get funding.

But what makes up a crowdfunding campaign with a high chance of survival? Hyatt points to several core elements: a good idea, a committed audience, well-designed and engaging campaign and a team of helpful supporters. Starting with this formula of a good idea, crowd power, platform and teamwork, a person launching a crowdfunding campaign can stack the odds heavily in his or her favor.

Maintaining your crowdfunding campaign’s momentum is the next hurdle, something Crowd Start covers in a lot of detail. The book outlines a highly specific timeline that readers can follow to keep the audience engaged and responsive through the entire campaign. Crowd Start then provides tips for what to do after crossing the finish line to leverage crowdfunding success or failure into an experience worth the effort.

Hyatt is the founder of CyberPR music, a PR firm that leverages publicity, social media, crowdfunding and branding to help creative professionals, businesses and others leverage the power of crowds to achieve their dreams. A veteran of the PR industry, Hyatt is also a speaker who has been involved with big events like South by Southwest and helped clients get press on Oprah, CNN, and Forces.

What Was Best About Crowd Start?

Crowd Start provides a detailed step-by-step template for those who want to know exactly what they should do at every point in a crowdfunding campaign. Hyatt provides templates for social media messages, blog posts and email newsletters along with recommendations on how to leverage advertising and other online tools to extend the reach of your campaign. This level of insight comes from the author’s own PR experience, but also her experience running a successful crowdfunding experiment earning her over $10,000 more than expected.

What Could Have Been Done Differently?

One area of caution to consider with Crowd Start is the amount of time it will take to run a campaign, which isn’t really discussed in the book. Hyatt provides a lot of channels, from social media updates to videos and blog posts, that must be maintained to keep the momentum of a crowdfunding campaign going. While the timeline in the book can help with figuring out what tasks should be done each day, more information on how to efficiently allocate time during a crowdfunding campaign might give readers a more realistic assessment of the time commitment and work involved.

Why Read Crowd Start?

Crowd Start is an excellent example of a book written from the perspective of someone who knows their subject matter. As discussed above, Hyatt successfully launched her own crowdfunding experiment and has used her expertise to help others. Crowd Start serves as a blueprint to that success, identifying the key milestones and challenges of which perspective crowdfunders must be aware. This kind of information will be extremely helpful to any person or business at any point in the crowdfunding journey. This includes those thinking about launching a crowdfunding campaign and those who have already completed a campaign and want additional insight into their experience from an expert.

This article, "Crowd Start Serves As the Ultimate Guide to Crowdfunding" was first published on Small Business Trends