A Crowdfunder's Strategy Guide

CHAPTER 8Go Small to Win Big

There is one counterintuitive concept that every crowdfunder should embrace: if you want your project to be a big success, make almost every aspect of it as small as possible. This goes against much of what we’ve been taught about startups. The new companies that get the most media attention are those with big-name investors and big, expensive product launches. We’re told that more is better—more options, more customization, more Facebook Likes, more re-tweets. We hear that size matters, whether it’s the length of the movie or the number of pages in the new Game of Thrones novel. The bigger, the better.

But with crowdfunding, the opposite is true. Focused, personal campaigns are better for backers, and thus result ...