Stretch Goals on Kickstarter and Indiegogo: What Are They?

The crowdfunding market is more popular every day, and as you may know, the major crowdfunding player are Kickstarter and Indiegogo, when you launch a crowdfunding campaign on these platforms you should definitely aim to reach the goal that you fixed.

Reaching your goal is not only helpful for creating your project, but it is fundamental for your career and credibility!

However, there may occur the situation in which you reach the initial goal before the campaign's end or you may have raised way more money that you did expect. What do you do in this case? Either you keep the money for you or... you can propose a stretch goal! What is that?

Before reading the article...

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1. WHAT IS THE STRETCH GOAL?

What to do when you've reached your goal and still have more days till the end of the campaign? You can decide to launch one or multiple stretch goals, here's what is a stretch goal.

We can say that stretch goals are ''promises'' for backers, that means creating a new goal for a product improvement or a little gadget related to the main product, if this additional amount of money is funded the creator will do fixing or improvement to the final product. For example, with board games, creators often promise game components as stretch goals.

Basically stretch goals have two purposes: First, you show backers that you're taking it seriously, if you fix a stretch goal that will mean that you're fully committed in bettering your project and you want your backers to have the best quality products and be completely satisfied with the final delivery!

Second, stretch goals will help keep backers engaged with the project, even if they already backed. In fact backers will be much more excited if a better feature is added to the product of if a little gadget comes with that. That also prevents your campaign from becoming dull and boring after reaching the goal.

Take a look at this example of stretch goal chosen by the creators of Vidcode campaign on Kickstarter, an app that teaches girls computer programming.

2. BE CAREFUL WITH STRETCH GOALS

Apparently, it may seem that setting a stretch goal is a win-win situation, but be careful, it is not that easy as it seems! Why?

If not handled well, stretch goals can be a problem because they mean changing the final product, which can be very risky if the creator does not understand exactly what they are doing. Here's what you have to keep in mind:

First, always remember that it’s better to choose low-cost or no-cost features to produce in order to minimize the chance to go in the red from trying to make a great experience for the backers. You don't want to spend all of your funds on stretch goals, because it costs a lot already to fulfill additional rewards once you go beyond your fundraising goal. We've already talked about successful creators finding themselves paying bigger bills than expected resulting into a campaign fail just look at The Coolest Cooler.

Second, you should definitely plan stretch goals in advance. You don't want to come up with stretch goals on the spot, because that will end up with a disaster, make sure to plan every single stretch goal well before the launch of the campaign. You don't have to publish the stretch goals right at the beginning of the campaign, but it is fundamental to plan each one of them in advance and that is because it will add extra time and costs to the final delivery of the project.

Also, create a feasible and non-complex stretch goal, meaning that if you're creating a video game do not promise a table game version as a stretch goal, this is not feasible and it will take away your time and all the money you backed, you rather want to save it for the next project!

Fulfilling a campaign on-time and under budget in the first place is very difficult. This is because on top of creating an excellent product and marketing it very well, a creator must also create a functioning supply chain.

3. BEST 5 ADVICE FOR STRETCH GOALS

Stretch Goals could really help your campaign receive a huge buzz, but as we already stated, there are a lot of things to consider in order not to incur in confusing situations. Let's see the best practices to set up your Indiegogo and Kickstarter stretch goals:

1. Organize in advance and plan every stretch goal before the campaign.
2. Plan the highest stretch goals you can, that will avoid the temptation to create stretch goals on the spot later!
3. Focus on incremental improvements, avoid revolutionizing the whole product that backers paid for.
4. Set a stretch goal a couple of thousand dollars higher than it has to be in order to be possible and avoid uncertainties.
5. Increase the timeline, some of your stretch goals may increase the time to ship, so you should account for the stretch goals in your original timeline.

WRAPPING IT UP

This is it for today, creators, as you can see stretch goals are a huge opportunity to increase the popularity of your campaign on Kickstarter or Indiegogo, so if you're lucky enough to get more funding than your original goal and you want to launch some stretch goals, get ready and evaluate all the possibilities.

A crowdfunding launch requires a lot of hard work and sacrifices, but I'm sure that it will be worth it in order to start making your dream project come true.

Always remember that before launching your project you will need to analyze and prepare your pre-launch phase to launch your first product, I’ve got you covered with my crowdfunding pre-launch free e-book called ''3 steps to success on Kickstarter and Indiegogo''. 

As always make sure to subscribe to my channel to stay updated on fresh new content that I’m gonna drop there.

Ciao ciao! 

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