By lbrowning@hubspot.com (Laura M. Browning)

A couple years ago, a YouTuber and artist known as Ten Hundred reached his $10k Kickstarter funding goal in 3 minutes.

That’s 180 seconds, y’all. It took longer than that to write this intro.

Brandon Smithwrick, Kickstarter’s then-director of content and creative, told me more about this campaign, which ultimately raised over $2 million.

The project? A deck of playing cards featuring his artwork.

Smithwrick shared some of Ten Hundred’s secrets (and some other hard-won wisdom) so you can turn your own (metaphorical) deck of cards into (literal, 🤞🏽) millions.

Meet the Master

Brandon Smithwrick

Founder, Content to Commas

Claim to fame: Brandon was selected by Forbes for its “30 Under 30” list in 2024

Lesson 1: Build your audience — before you need to monetize.

“I started making content three years ago, part-time, before I even saw myself as a creator,” Smithwrick says.

The day we spoke, Smithwrick had just announced that he was leaving Kickstarter to run his new media company. Three years is what it took to build an audience that could support his full-time efforts.

In fact, Smithwrick hadn’t even considered at first that this could be a money-making venture. “I was just sharing my perspective, sharing my thoughts on LinkedIn.” Soon enough, the brands came knocking — a $300 deal here, a $900 deal there.

“Wait,” he thought, “you can make money doing this?”

Smithwrick describes those early deals as “validation and proof points,” but emphasizes: “It took me three years of building that foundation to say, you know what, it’s time for me to leave my full-time job.”

Lesson learned? “People don’t do enough to build hype,” Smithwrick says. “This is something that I’m trying to get a lot of people to understand. Before you begin to monetize your audience — sell to them, promote something — just start building an audience. You never know when you might need that in your back pocket.”

(Secret #1 from Ten Hundred’s successful Kickstarter: Seriously, don’t underestimate this step — Ten Hundred currently has 826k YouTube subscribers, and he collaborated with literally thousands of his fans while designing the deck.)

Lesson 2: Don’t be afraid to go hyper-niche.

At Kickstarter, Smithwrick says, “we discovered that the general content didn’t really perform as well as the hyper-niche content.”

For instance, “games” or “comic books” aren’t nearly specific enough to reach an enthusiastic, engaged audience. “Within gaming, there‘s tabletop games, there’s role-playing games, there’s video games.”

In other words, your audience isn’t just “comic books” — maybe it’s gekiga manga or graphic novels about poodles. Getting this specific may “feel like you’re …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog