How to validate a Kickstarter idea before you launch

Two thousand people on the list. The campaign funded at eleven percent.

That founder had done everything the pre-launch advice told him to do, and none of it had told him the one thing he needed to know.

How to validate a Kickstarter idea is a different question from how to build a list, and the two get treated as the same job constantly. I’m an official Kickstarter Expert Partner, and this is the most expensive confusion I see.

To be completely clear before I go further: you absolutely need an email list. Build it, build it bigger than you think, start today. Nothing below argues otherwise. The point is that the list is your fuel, not your evidence, and founders keep reading the fuel gauge as proof the engine works.

How to validate a Kickstarter idea: what an email actually proves

Someone gives you an email address in about four seconds. It costs them nothing, commits them to nothing, and they will forget they did it within a fortnight.

So what have you measured? That a person who saw an advert for a thing they quite liked was willing to spend four seconds on it. That is curiosity, and curiosity is not demand.

Andrea Baldereschi, who runs crowdfunding campaigns for a living, put it better than I can: an email address measures curiosity, a reservation measures intent.

The uncomfortable part is the spread. Published figures put email-signup-to-backer conversion somewhere between 0.5 and 5 percent. That is a tenfold range, which means a list of two thousand predicts somewhere between ten and a hundred backers, and nobody can plan on that.

The three things validation actually has to test

TCF, a crowdfunding agency and Kickstarter Premier Partner, drew the distinction cleanly in a piece on Kickstarter’s own blog. Real validation tests three separate things, and a signup form tests none of them.

Is the problem real, and is the market big enough? Not whether people like your product. Whether the thing it fixes genuinely annoys enough people to build a campaign on.

Will they pay your actual price? Not a hypothetical price, not “would you buy this”, but the number that will appear on your reward tier.

Which presentation works hardest? The same product described two ways performs very differently, and you want to know which way before you spend your launch budget.

Your email list answers none of those. It tells you how many people clicked a thing once.

The test that costs someone money

The fastest way to separate curiosity from intent is to ask for a small payment.

A refundable deposit, often a pound or two, reserves an early-bird place and comes back if they change their mind. It is a trivial amount. That is the point: it is not about the money, it is about whether a card comes out of a wallet.

Reported deposit-to-backer conversion runs far above email conversion, in the region of 20 to 40 percent. I would treat the top of that range carefully, because the people publishing it sell deposit funnels for a living. Even the bottom of it is several times what a plain email list does.

What matters more than the exact figure is what the behaviour tells you. A person who has paid you anything has crossed a line that a person who typed an address has not.

Not sure whether your list is real demand or a pile of curiosity? A £60 strategy call is an hour on your own numbers, and you will leave knowing which.

You still need the list, and you need it big

Saying it again because it is the half of this people drop: build the list. A campaign without one does not fund.

You need the list. On launch day it is the fuel: the volume that produces the first-day spike that decides whether Kickstarter starts promoting you to its own audience, which I have covered in the day-one benchmark. No list, no spike, no algorithm.

The mistake is not building a list. It is treating its size as evidence that the campaign will work. Those are two different jobs, and only one of them is being done when you watch a signup counter go up.

Build the list for volume. Validate separately, so you know what the volume is worth.

Testing the pitch, not just the product

The third test is the one almost nobody runs, and it is cheap.

Take your product and describe it two or three genuinely different ways. Not three headlines with different adjectives, three different arguments about why it matters. Run them as ads to cold traffic, with the same budget and the same landing page.

One of them will cost noticeably less per signup. That is the message your campaign page should be built around, and you have found it before spending anything on video or page design.

This also tells you something uncomfortable and useful: if all three perform badly, the problem is not your copy.

What I would actually do

Talk to twenty people who are not your friends. Friends validate nothing, which is a harder rule to follow than it sounds. You are listening for whether the problem lands, not whether they are polite about the product.

Ask what they currently do about the problem, what that costs them in time or money, and when they last went looking for something better. If they have never gone looking, the problem is not sharp enough to fund a campaign. Do not describe your product until the end, and do not ask whether they would buy it, because almost everyone says yes to be kind.

Put a deposit page up, not just a signup form. Let people reserve a place for a refundable pound. Watch what fraction of your traffic does it rather than just leaving an address.

Run three different arguments as ads. Small budget, cold audience, same page. Keep the one that wins.

Then size your goal off the deposits, not the list. This is where the whole thing connects: your funding goal should be what your warmest people can clear on day one, which I have covered in how to set a Kickstarter funding goal. The day-one calculator will run the numbers once you have them.

If your list is already large and you suspect it is soft, that is a different problem with its own fixes, and I have written about why a VIP list stops converting. And if you are weighing up whether you are ready at all, the readiness check is the honest version of that conversation.

Key takeaways

• You still need an email list, and a big one. It is launch-day volume.
• An email address measures curiosity. A payment measures intent.
• Email-signup-to-backer conversion runs roughly 0.5 to 5 percent, too wide a range to forecast from.
• Real validation tests three things: is the problem real, will they pay your price, which pitch works.
• A refundable deposit of a pound or two separates the two groups faster than anything else.
• Test two or three different arguments as ads before you build the campaign page.
• Friends validate nothing.
• Size your goal off deposits, not list size.

Want a hand with yours?

The founders who get hurt here are not lazy. They did the work, built the list, and measured the wrong thing.

If you want someone to look at what your pre-launch numbers actually prove before you commit to a goal, book a £60 strategy call. An hour, on Zoom, on your campaign. For help across the whole launch, the options are on the home page.