How to Get Your First Kickstarter Backers

Your first hundred backers will not come from Kickstarter.

That’s the thing that catches people out, and it’s worth stating flatly because the whole platform is built to imply otherwise. Kickstarter does send campaigns traffic, but it sends it to campaigns that are already moving. So the people who make you move have to come from somewhere else first.

Here’s how to get your first Kickstarter backers. Four sources, in this order: people who already know you, communities your buyers already gather in, other creators’ audiences, and paid ads. As an official Kickstarter Expert Partner I’ve yet to see a funded first campaign that skipped all four and hoped.

Why 100 is the number that matters

A hundred sounds modest next to the thousands founders imagine they need. It isn’t modest, and it isn’t arbitrary.

A hundred committed backers at a £50 average pledge is £5,000 on day one. The pricing calculator will give you your own average from your reward tiers. If your goal is £5,000, you’re funded inside a day, which is the thing that triggers Kickstarter’s own distribution and turns every later visitor into someone reading a successful campaign rather than a struggling one. I’ve gone through why that matters in what a Kickstarter day one should look like.

Which reframes the whole exercise. You’re not trying to find enough backers to cover your manufacturing bill. You’re trying to find enough to clear a goal you’ve sized honestly. Those are very different jobs, and the second one is achievable.

Where the first 100 actually come from

1. People who already know you. Your first twenty, realistically. Former colleagues, university friends, the people who’ve watched you build this thing on your personal socials for a year.

Do ask them. Just don’t mistake them for validation. They’re backing you, not the product, and they’d back a lemonade stand if you were running it. Their value is launch-day momentum, not evidence. If you’re reading their pledges as proof the product works, you’ll set the goal wrong.

2. Communities where your buyers already gather. This is the big one, and the one founders do worst.

Not “social media”. The specific subreddit for your niche. The Facebook group with 8,000 members who own the thing yours replaces. The Discord. The forum that looks like it was designed in 2009 and has the most engaged audience you’ll ever find. The niche newsletter with 4,000 readers whose author will absolutely reply if you email them like a human.

3. Other creators’ audiences. Founders who’ve launched in your category have exactly the backers you want, and many will cross-promote. The catch is that you need something to trade, which usually means doing it for them first or being genuinely interesting to their people. Cold-asking a creator mid-campaign to plug you rarely lands.

4. Paid ads. The fastest and least romantic. Expect £2 to £6 per email lead in most product categories, so a hundred leads is a couple of hundred pounds, and a thousand is a few thousand. The full breakdown is in Kickstarter cost per lead in the UK.

One rule that saves real money: point paid traffic at your own landing page, never at your Kickstarter pre-launch page. A follower on Kickstarter belongs to Kickstarter. You can’t email them, segment them or take them anywhere. Capture the email on your page, then ask those subscribers to go and hit follow.

The rule that gets you banned

Communities are the best source and the one founders burn fastest, almost always the same way: they join, post a link, and get removed.

Most subreddits and groups have explicit rules about self-promotion, and moderators are very good at spotting an account whose entire history is one launch announcement. Getting removed is the mild outcome; getting the domain blacklisted is worse and it happens.

The version that works is slower and duller. Turn up weeks before you need anything. Answer other people’s questions. Post the prototype that didn’t work and explain why. Ask which of two colourways people prefer and actually use the answer. By the time you launch you’re a person who has been around for two months, not a link.

That’s not a trick to get past moderators. It’s the actual mechanism: people back founders they’ve watched struggle with something. The visible-progress version of you is more compelling than the polished-announcement version, and it’s also easier to produce.

If you want a second opinion on which communities are worth your time for your specific product, that’s a good use of a £60 strategy call. Picking the wrong three costs you a month.

What to actually say

The pitch that works barely reads like a pitch.

Lead with the problem, not the product. “I got fed up with X so I’ve spent eight months building Y” earns more attention than any feature list, because the first half is something people recognise and the second half is a person doing a hard thing.

Show the work, not the render. Photorealistic product images make people suspicious now, and rightly so. A slightly rough photo of the actual prototype on your actual kitchen table outperforms a beautiful render, because one of them proves the thing exists.

Ask for the email, not the follow. Followers live on a platform that decides whether they ever see you again. Email addresses are yours. That distinction decides whether your launch email reaches people, and it’s the single most valuable habit in the whole pre-launch. More on the numbers in how big your pre-launch list needs to be.

And when you do have people, talk to them regularly rather than storing them up for launch day. A list that’s heard from you every fortnight converts several times better than the same list going cold for three months, which is the pattern behind VIP lists that don’t convert.

What doesn’t work, and costs you the campaign

Three shortcuts get sold to first-timers. All three are worse than doing nothing.

Buying backers. The gigs promising guaranteed pledges are bots or throwaway accounts, and Kickstarter is good at spotting them. The pledges fail to collect at the end, so you’ve paid for a number that evaporates, and a flagged campaign can be suspended outright. You cannot relaunch your way out of that.

Backer-swap groups. You back mine, I’ll back yours. It feels harmless and it’s a waste of everyone’s money: the pledges cancel out, the backers have no interest in either product, and the drop-off at collection is brutal because nobody actually wanted the thing. What it does produce is a backer count that flatters you into setting a goal you can’t hit.

Engagement pods. Same logic on social. Inflated likes on posts nobody read tells your ad targeting the wrong thing about who wants this, which quietly makes your paid traffic worse.

The connecting problem isn’t ethics, it’s that all three produce a fake version of the only signal you need. You are trying to find out whether strangers will pay for this. Every one of these methods answers that question with a lie, and you then set your funding goal on the strength of it.

Real backers are slower and there are fewer of them. They also turn up on launch day and their cards clear.

How long it actually takes

Six to ten weeks of consistent effort for the first hundred, done manually. Faster with ads, but with a bill attached.

The variable isn’t which tactic you pick. It’s whether you show up every week for two months. The founders who conclude that Reddit or Discord “doesn’t work” have almost always posted twice, got a quiet response, and stopped. The ones it works for treated it as a habit.

Which means the honest planning answer is to start now rather than optimise later. If you’re eight weeks from a launch date with no backers lined up, the useful move is usually to move the date, not to compress the outreach. Launching with no audience goes through what that build really costs.

Key takeaways

• Kickstarter’s own traffic follows momentum; your first 100 come from elsewhere.
• 100 backers at a £50 average pledge funds a £5,000 goal on day one.
• Friends and family are your first 20, but they are not validation.
• Never send paid ads to your Kickstarter pre-launch page; capture the email yourself.
• Participate in communities for weeks before you ever post a link.
• Budget 6 to 10 weeks of consistent effort to find the first hundred manually.

Want a hand with yours?

If you know you need backers and you’re not sure where yours actually are, that’s a specific enough question for an hour. The £60 strategy call covers which communities fit your product, what your goal should be, and whether your date is realistic.

And if you’d rather not work it out alone, coaching walks the whole pre-launch with you, and includes your launching-soon, VIP and referral pages plus a dated launch schedule. Either way, start the outreach before you set the date. It always takes longer than the plan says.