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Partnering with the nonprofit Tesla Science Center (which had been trying to buy this land for eighteen years), Inman turned to the crowdfunding platform Indiegogo. Next he created a long, funny comic about Nikola Tesla—who he was, why he was important, and why the world needed to buy that property and build a museum to honor his legacy. Humorously titling the campaign Operation: Let's Build a Goddamn Tesla Museum, Inman released the project in August 2012.
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Within a day, it went viral. Over the course of its first week, it raised $145,000 per day, $6,000 per hour, and $100 per minute. Then things got really interesting. At one point during the campaign, contributors were donating over $1,000 a minute. By the end of the month, they had shattered their goal of $850,000, raising over $1.3 million from 33,000 backers in 102 countries.

Like the Pebble Watch campaign, the Tesla Museum campaign marked a turning point in crowdfunding. What made it unique was the fact that it was a nonprofit initiative (generally, nonprofits don't do as well on crowdfunding platforms) without any real product to offer (meaning, unlike the Pebble watch, backers would never get a gizmo in the mail). As a result, the Tesla Museum pushed boundaries, becoming the most successful campaign on Indiegogo and opening the door for the crowdfunding of larger, more conceptual projects. The Oatmeal, of course, commemorated the whole thing with a new ending to his comic, writing: “Mr. Tesla . . . We're sorry humanity forgot about you for a little while. We still love you lots. Here's a Goddam Museum.”

When Eric Anderson, Chris Lewicki, and I launched our asteroid mining company Planetary Resources, we knew we needed a powerful community behind us. When you're doing something as radical as asteroid mining, having a group of passionate supporters is downright necessary. The question was how we could actively and authentically engage the public in our mission to explore space. After all, space is expensive, difficult to access, and—as we've learned by now—stubbornly impenetrable. Furthermore, people care most about things they can have an immediate impact on, but from the beginning of humanity's extraplanetary exploits, most everything we've done in space has been done by a small group of experts and has taken decades to get off the ground. We wanted to stimulate people's interest now, hopefully by providing them with a way to participate firsthand. This was when we hit upon the idea of crowdfunding the first ever crowd-controlled space telescope, the ARKYD.

Thus began a four-month journey as we started researching, planning, and developing our Kickstarter campaign. We appointed one
member of our team, Frank Mycroft, to be in charge of the effort, assembled a group of affiliate launch partners, including notable space and science celebrities such as Bill Nye, Hank Green, and Brent Spiner, and finally hit on the idea of pulling together an army of super activists we dubbed Planetary Vanguards to help us implement and promote the campaign. Our media team got busy shooting, editing, and testing our pitch video. Our technology team finalized the prototype designs, renderings, and prototypes of the ARKYD space telescope so people could see what the finished product would actually look like.

But we had another problem. Most successful “product” campaigns actually had a product to offer. We didn't. We weren't selling a cool new watch; ours was a telescope designed to hunt for asteroids. While we could offer our backers an image taken from the telescope of, say, an asteroid, a galaxy, or the Moon, when we polled our existing community for feedback, we discovered this idea wasn't likely to go viral. Then, in the month right before the campaign launched, one of our team members suggested offering a “space selfie”—a chance for anyone to send a photo of themselves up to our spacecraft, where that image would be displayed on a screen, photographed with the Earth in the background, then sent back down to them (more on this later). Priced at a $25 reward level, we thought this was the perfect solution, and when we tested it, our community agreed.

On May 29, 2013, we held a press conference and launched our crowdfunding campaign. Our goal was to raise $1 million—enough money to launch the telescope into orbit (the actual cost of the telescope was being covered by Planetary Resources). Within the first two days, we'd raised close to $500,000. Our Vanguards proved invaluable, spreading the word and pushing the movement forward. Thirty-two days later we finished with $1,505,366 in funding from 17,614 backers.
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While this was the largest space-related crowdfunding campaign to date, more important was the community we built. As a company working to do something new and bold, having a group of passionate supporters will prove priceless when we seek to crowdsource future
support and solutions.

In the section below, you will find some of the most valuable lessons I've learned while researching successful crowdfunding campaigns and implementing my own. I'll give an overview of the topics, then provide far more detailed analysis in the pages to come. In sharing this knowledge, I hope to enable many more innovators and disruptive entrepreneurs to launch their own wildly successful crowdfunding ventures.

While crowdfunding can be an immensely valuable tool to raise capital and grow a community, it isn't for everyone. My research shows that the best crowdfunding campaigns have five key characteristics in common:

• The product is usually in late prototype phases, sufficient to show prospective backers what they're supporting.

• The team is correctly assembled and capable of executing.

• The product is community focused and consumer facing.

• The team has access to a large community of followers who can be pitched directly, or has the ability to marshal significant public relations/media resources to attract attention.

• The product aims to solve a problem, improve an existing product, and/or tell a new story.

Crowdfunding has a variety of benefits beyond raising capital. I've listed some of the most important ones below. Remember, a great deal
of how you design your campaign depends on which of these benefits you desire most.

• 
Market validation and real demand measurement
. Perhaps the most valuable benefit is your ability to get real customer feedback on your product—what features they desire, what colors, what accessories, etc. Equally critical, you also find out what they don't want. And unlike surveys or focus groups, here customers are voting with their wallets. Of course, as a bonus, you will also get far more general data—geographic info, price sensitivity, and so forth—that can help you shape strategy.

• 
The raising of significant investment capital.
Interestingly, some venture capitalists are requesting that a company run a crowdfunding campaign to validate market interest before making an investment. In this case, a successful crowdfunding campaign has two advantages: providing non-dilutive capital to grow the company in the early days, and allowing the company to command a higher valuation in its venture round. Just look at the results achieved by the Pebble Watch team, raising $15 million in venture funding twelve months after their campaign. Even more impressive, Oculus Rift went from raising $2.4 million on Kickstarter to being acquired by Facebook for $2 billion in just eighteen months.
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• 
The development of a paying community of customers.
There is enormous value in building and having access to a community of paying customers, yet this is very difficult to do in a normal marketplace, and almost impossible to accomplish before your product is released.

• 
Cheap cost-per-customer acquisition
.
Acquiring customers through other means is often orders of magnitude more expensive. Moreover, if you execute correctly, not only do you get free advertising, but your customers both pay you to be involved and promote your product to their friends and family.

• 
You're passionate about your product.
If you love your idea and want to get it out there quickly, there is perhaps no better way to make this happen fast and potentially at a profit.

• 
Public relations benefit.
Success begets success. The positive brand image and media attention associated with crowdfunding success has intrinsic value, putting the company on the map and making future product offerings easier and more lucrative.

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Cash-flow positive.
Oh yes, there's also the benefit of near-term dollars. Balancing costs and earnings correctly puts cash in the bank for product development.

So if one or more of those seven reasons resonates with you, and you're ready to create and launch your own crowdfunding campaign, the following is an outline of the twelve key steps needed for execution.

1. Choosing your crowdfunding idea (product, project, or service)

2. How much? Setting your fund-raising target

3. How long? Setting your campaign length and creating a schedule

4. Setting your rewards/incentives and stretch goals

5. Building the perfect team

6. Sharpen your ax: planning, materials, and resources

7. Telling a meaningful story (and using the right words)

8. Creating a viral video: three use cases, shareability, and humanization

9. Building your audience—the three As

10. Super-credible launch, early donor engagement, and media outreach

11. Week-by-week execution plan: engage, engage, engage

12. Make data-driven decisions and final tips

1. CHOOSING YOUR CROWDFUNDING IDEA (PRODUCT, PROJECT, OR SERVICE)

The most basic question is what should you choose to crowdfund? The short answer is found at the intersection of two primary drivers: First, find something you feel deeply passionate about creating. Second, choose something the crowd is passionate about seeing come into existence. A quick review of sites like Indiegogo, Kickstarter, and RocketHub shows an extraordinary diversity of things getting funded these days (see below). The point is that just about anything you're passionate about already has a crowdfunding history:

Arts/Entertainment

1. Creating a film

2. Writing and publishing a book

3. Launching a new play

4. Opening an art gallery

5. Creating a CD or music video

6. Producing a concert or festival

7. Creating a video game

Charities

8. One-shot charitable projects (a disaster relief project)

9. Starting or growing NGOs

10. Sponsoring a youth sports team

11. Supporting a school

12. Animal initiatives

13. Supporting deserving individuals

For Start-ups and Existing Business

14. Market-testing a prototype

15. A new piece of hardware

16. A new software capability

17. Launching a new service

18. Clothing and fashion companies

19. Starting a digital magazine

20. New food/snack/drink products

If you're considering a number of crowdfunding possibilities but are unsure which one is best, ask your community. Post your idea online (Google+, Facebook, etc.) and get feedback. You also want to pick an idea that is far enough along that people believe you'll be able to pull it off. If your product or project is underdeveloped, people will doubt your ability to make it real, and you're unlikely to get the support you need. On the other hand, if the product is too advanced—nearly finished and ready to ship—why would people want to back it?

2. HOW MUCH? SETTING YOUR FUND-RAISING TARGET

So now that you've settled on what you want to crowdfund, the next question is, how much money do you want to raise? Here again there is a bit of psychological strategy you need to consider.

Crowdfunding is all about incentives. The success of the campaign is wholly dependent on creating early excitement and offering urgent, exclusive, and value-added incentives.

Thresholds.
On many crowdfunding platforms, they allow you to run only fixed-funding campaigns—meaning you get to collect the cash only if you reach your stated fund-raising goal. Thus, the most important threshold is the amount needed to reach that goal, but this number can be tricky to estimate. For example, in 2012, Indiegogo found that,
on average, campaigns that set their goal between $50,000 and $75,000 raised more money than campaigns that set their goal at $100,000.
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In a fixed-funding campaign, setting the goal too high means that even if you raise millions of dollars and excite thousands of backers, you don't get to keep a penny. For example, Ubuntu tried to raise $32 million for a new phone on Indiegogo. While they eventually reached over $12.8 million in funding, they drastically undershot their threshold and all $12 million was returned to contributors.

So how do you set the right threshold? The first thing to remember is that crowdfunding is not where you make a profit on your project. It's where you offset some of your expenses. Notice I said
some
expenses. In most cases, you won't crowdfund all the development costs, but you will recover a significant portion of money that might otherwise have come from investment capital or out of your own pocket.

The second important point is that everyone loves a winner. If people believe your crowdfunding campaign is likely to succeed, it will. In other words, if you appear credible and able to meet your target goal, then people are more likely to back you. Conversely, if people don't believe you, they'll never whip out their credit card. In fact, the research shows that campaigns that reach 30 percent of their goal have 90 percent chance of success (that is, raising the desired amount). In the case of Pebble Watch, Eric Migicovsky needed $200,000 to move forward, but he set a goal of $100,000. In the case of the ARKYD Space Telescope campaign, the cost of building and launching the space telescope was roughly $3 million, but Planetary Resources set a goal of $1 million, with the expectation that these funds would at least help offset launch costs.