Kickstarter cross-promotion: how campaign swaps work

About ten days into a campaign, the messages start.

Another creator, also live, also in the quiet middle stretch, asking whether you fancy mentioning each other. It sounds like free money and mostly it is — but only if you pick the right partner, and only if you understand what the swap actually costs you.

How Kickstarter cross-promotion works

The arrangement is simple. You mention their project to your backers, they mention yours to theirs. Usually it happens in a backer update, sometimes in an email to a pre-launch list, occasionally in a social post or a Discord.

It works for a reason that is easy to miss: the audience you are borrowing has already backed something. They have a Kickstarter account, saved card details, and a demonstrated willingness to give money to a stranger for a product that does not exist yet. That is a much rarer trait than it sounds, and it makes another campaign’s backer list warmer than almost any cold traffic you could buy.

Compare it with what you would otherwise be doing in week two. Paying for ads to reach people who have never heard of you, most of whom have never backed anything. The cross-promotion audience is smaller and enormously better qualified.

Match on backer numbers, not on how much you like their product

This is the part founders get wrong, and it is what turns a good idea into a waste of an afternoon.

The swap is only fair if both audiences are a similar size. A campaign with 2,000 backers mentioning one with 90 is not trading, it is doing a favour — and favours have a way of not happening. What usually occurs is that the smaller campaign sends their mention promptly and the larger one goes quiet, gets busy, or sends something so buried nobody clicks it.

Aim for a partner within roughly double your backer count in either direction. If you have 300 backers, anyone between about 150 and 600 is a sensible trade. Outside that, one of you is giving away considerably more than they get.

Backer count is public on every live campaign, so this takes about thirty seconds to check before you reply. Do it before you agree to anything, not after.

The second filter is adjacent, not identical. You want a campaign whose backers would plausibly want your thing too, without it being the same thing. A camping stove and a water filter is a good pairing. Two camping stoves is not — you are asking your backers to consider a direct alternative to the product they just funded, which is a peculiar thing to do to someone who has already paid you.

Not sure whether a partner’s numbers stack up against yours? A £60 strategy call covers this and the rest of your mid-campaign plan in an hour.

The cost nobody mentions

Here is the thing most advice on this skips entirely: a cross-promotion usually costs you an update slot, and updates are not free.

Every update you post emails every one of your backers. That email is a prompt to look at their pledge again, and some proportion of people who look at their pledge again decide to change or cancel it. Campaigns that update constantly lose backers doing it, which is why I argue for keeping updates to a minimum and posting only when something genuinely happened. There is more on that in the post on what to put in campaign updates.

So the swap is not free. You are spending one of the four or five updates you should send across a thirty-day campaign, and you are spending it on somebody else’s product.

That does not make it a bad trade. It makes it a trade you should be deliberate about. Two ways to spend it well:

Bundle it into an update you were sending anyway. If you have real news — a stretch goal unlocked, a manufacturing milestone, a press mention — put the partner mention at the bottom of that. The email was going out regardless, so the marginal cost is nothing.

Or use a channel that is not an update. Your pre-launch email list, your social accounts, your Discord or community. These reach people without emailing your existing backers, which sidesteps the problem entirely. Offer this and you will often find the partner prefers it too.

Where to find partners worth swapping with

Kickstarter’s own Discover page is the tool, and it is free.

Filter to live projects, pick a category adjacent to yours, and sort by popularity or end date. You are looking for campaigns that launched within a week or two of yours, because you want to be in the same phase — a campaign in its final 48 hours has no interest in promoting you, and one that launches next month cannot help you now.

Read their page before you write. If the writing is sloppy, the timeline implausible or the risks section absent, walk away. Their delivery becomes your reputation the moment you point your backers at them, and a partner who never ships is a partner your backers will remember you introduced.

The other source is the communities that already exist around crowdfunding — subreddits, Discord servers, creator groups. Plenty of them have threads specifically for this. The quality is mixed and the size-matching rule matters even more there, because everyone in those threads is looking for a bigger partner than themselves.

How to approach them

Short, specific, and lead with the numbers.

Say what you are launching, how many backers you have, when your campaign ends, and exactly what you are offering — a mention in an update on a named date, or a post to a list of a stated size. Then ask what they would send back.

Vague approaches get ignored because they sound like work. A message that says “I have 340 backers, we end on the 22nd, I will put you in Thursday’s update which goes to all of them, what can you do?” is answerable in one line.

Agree the dates in writing and go first if you are the one who approached. It costs you nothing to be the reliable one, and the alternative is two campaigns each waiting for the other to move until both run out of time.

What to actually put in the mention

A link and a logo does almost nothing. The mentions that work read like a recommendation from someone your backers already trust, because that is exactly what they are.

Three or four sentences is plenty. Say what the product is in plain terms, say honestly why you think this particular group would like it, and link it. If you have actually spoken to the founder, say so — “I have been talking to the team behind this and their approach to X is worth a look” outperforms any amount of enthusiastic copy.

Put it at the bottom of the update, under your own news, with a small heading that makes clear it is a recommendation rather than something you are selling. Backers are fine with this when it is framed honestly. What annoys them is opening an update that appears to be about your project and finding it is an advert for somebody else’s.

One image, one link, no more. And send the partner the exact wording you plan to use before it goes out — it takes two minutes and it catches the occasional misunderstanding about what their product actually does.

When to say no

Three situations where the answer is no, however friendly the message.

When the sizes do not match. Covered above, and it is the most common one.

When they are a direct competitor. Your backers do not need to hear about the alternative they did not choose.

When you have already spent your updates. If you have posted three updates in two weeks, a fourth for somebody else’s product is not the right call. Send them to your social channels instead and keep the update slot for your own news.

And one worth watching for: creators who ask everyone, promote nobody, and are collecting mentions. If they cannot tell you the specific date and channel their side is going out on, they have not planned to send it.

Key takeaways

• Cross-promotion works because another campaign’s backers have already proven they will back a stranger.
• Match on backer count — within roughly double either way, or the swap is a favour rather than a trade.
• Pick adjacent products, never direct competitors.
• Every update emails every backer, so a swap costs you an update slot you may want for your own news.
• Bundle the mention into an update you were sending anyway, or use social and your pre-launch list instead.
• Find partners on Discover, filtered to live campaigns that launched around the same time as you.
• Read their page first: their delivery becomes your reputation.
• Agree dates in writing and go first if you approached them.

Planning the middle of your campaign?

The mid-campaign stretch is where most founders have no plan at all, and cross-promotion is one of about six things worth doing in it. Which of them apply depends on your category, your backer count and how the first week went.

If you want an hour on what to actually do between day three and the final 48 hours, a £60 strategy call is the fastest way to get a plan you can work from.