Here is a team that put their product on Kickstarter, got fully funded in 8 hours, eventually hit 370% of their goal, met the founders of kickstarter, and have gone on to create a second product:

376% funded Kickstarter campaign giving out advice (AMA)

The obvious first question: how did they get fully funded in 8 hours?

Each member of our team divided their contact lists into 3 tiers – tier 1 for people you knew were going to support us, tier 2 for people that might, and tier 3 for people that probably won’t, but you never know. Before launching on Kickstarter, we made sure to send really small samples of KPOP Sauce to our Tier 1s and some of our Tier 2s. Then, 2 weeks before the campaign, we literally called and texted our Tier 1s and 2s to give them a heads up that our campaign was going live at a 5pm on April 24th. Then on the morning of our launch day, we sent an email and texts to those people, reiterating the time of for our campaign. Additionally, we also held a launch party for our Kickstarter campaign and invited around 80 ppl to show our Kickstarter video and enjoy some food with the sauce. I hope this helps….

The total number of our Tier 1s came out to about 100 and Tier 2s about 200. We honestly didn’t work with massive numbers as the idea was more to contact people who we knew would convert or share our Kickstarter campaign on Facebook.

They also point out:

A really important thing is building a community before launching the campaign. By community, I mean gaining followers on Facebook, Instagram, website, etc. We didn’t have any money for a PR team, so we relied on our community to share our campaign on Facebook the minute it went live. We garnered over 100 shares and this increased our visibility tremendously and really helped.

I’ve heard of other Kickstarter campaigns that spent money FB to collect emails and some have even gathered over 10,000 emails before going live on Kickstarter. It was unfortunate, but these campaigns saw incredibly low conversion rates, so I wouldn’t focus too much time on simply getting email lists.

Another big learning was the importance of structuring our stretch goals. After we hit our initial goal of $10k, we set up a stretch goal of $25k and had specific things we explained we needed the additional $15k for. However, when we passed the $25k, we didn’t really have specific things set up and this hurt us to a degree. So make sure to think through these things.

The point is that you must have enough people ready to jump on your campaign, and actually buy, in order to get your campaign off the ground quickly. That sentiment is echoed here, where he says:

I’ve ran 3 campaigns. DO NOT LAUNCH unless you can guarantee massive traffic in the first hour and continued traffic throughout. The only way to make this happen is through an email list that has shown interest and then paid facebook/display advertising that is targeted to crowdfunding backers. Any PR mentions are just added bonuses. Like I said, do not launch unless you have this. To top it all off, you need a campaign that CONVERTS visitors so make sure you look into conversion optimization, easy pledges, and a strong value proposition in the video.

Then, after day 1, you have to keep the momentum going:

Yes, keeping the excitement throughout the campaign was difficult and it should be expected that after the first couple of days, things will start to slow down. We were fortunate that after a week, we were selected as the Kickstarter Project of the Day and that helped gain a lot of momentum.

One key thing we focused on was responding quickly to questions and inquiries in the community chat room. We also provided a lot of updates in the Kickstarter campaign page and also through our social media accounts. The more transparent we were, the more positive feedback we received from our community.

Additionally, we shared our story with media outlets and were fortunate to get some coverage from newspapers and other outlets. Any chance we had to share our story, we made sure to do it.

Regarding rewards, while we didn’t do it, we did hear of other campaigns that successfully executed it. The idea is that you reward all of your backers with an additional item if you reach your next goal. An example would be like including an additional bottle of KPOP Sauce or bumping all of the previous backers to the next tier. Its definitely a big incentive for current backers to share your campaign, however we didn’t try this tactic.

More ideas here and here.

Now they had a product that was successful. They are selling it on a web site. How do they keep traffic flowing to the web site?

We use a number for different techniques from growing our social media accounts on IG and Facebook, using PR and backlinks, SEO, adwords, FB ads, influencers, etc. We also do receive a lot of organic traffic for our recipes and content.