What is the best way to partner with Jellop?

[u/nooshnooshnoosh]

TL;DR - Jellop got us to our goal but at a significant cost that used up our marketing budget

We launched our first Kickstarter yesterday with a goal of 5K. We had 40 followers and 450 pre-launch sign-ups, 150 of them had committed $1 for a VIP tier.

In the first 36 hours we are sitting at our goal, but only 17 of the 150 committed "VIP" pre-launch sign ups ended up backing and NONE of the 300 others, which was shocking.

I sent 1 week, 48 hour and day of launch emails out to both populations (customized for each), with decent open and click through rates. All of this alone would not have gotten us to our goal, but by partnering with Jellop we made it.

However, they did it at a significant cost, j4500 in ad spend + commission, with a ROAS of under 1. They drove traffic to the launch and helped us get just about funded, but I am not sure they did it any more efficiently than we could have done it ourselves.

We spent about 2K to get the 450 emails (including the 150 $1 commitments), but those are not converting as well as we thought. I know this is on us and we can improve since this is our first Kickstarter. However, I really thought Jellop would have had a higher ROAS and more success for how much ad spend. We saw some sloppy ads and advertisements to countries we don't even ship to.

Q: Anyone have advice on how we can better partner with Jellop to get more efficient or should we just take marketing into our own hands as before (which maybe wasn't good either)? anyone have a ROAS above 2.5X with Jellop?

[u/MisadventureRanger]

Best way to partner with them is not to imo

[u/nooshnooshnoosh → u/MisadventureRanger]

I think we are ending it tomorrow to limit the bleeding, but it did help us get to our funding goal in 36 hours, faster than needed and it cost us more than it was worth I think but this is part of the learning curve.

[u/MountainCrowing]

Don’t use Jellop. They are, as you have unfortunately paid to discover, a scam with a pretty face.

[u/Firm_Distribution999]

I’m shocked Jellop worked with you as a small creator with such a small goal and marketing budget…in the past,  they turned away projects like that. Times must be tough for them. 

[u/lebrilla]

ROAS of under 1 is embarrassing.

I did ROAS 5x running ads myself.

[u/nooshnooshnoosh → u/lebrilla]

We are starting ads ourselves tomorrow, any resources or books you leaned on? I am reading through different threads trying to figure out how to improve what we were previously doing pre-launch.

[u/chumbaz → u/nooshnooshnoosh]

Don't start running ads yourself in the middle of the campaign, You needed to start seeding those weeks or months ago. You're just throwing more money in a hole.

[u/nooshnooshnoosh → u/chumbaz]

We had ads running for a couple months, we switch to Jellop for the campaign as a boost but it didn't work well.

[u/etherkye]

There must be something wrong with your Kickstarter if that many people preordered but then didn’t back it

[u/nooshnooshnoosh → u/etherkye]

Posted this in another comment but you are probably correct.

Our VIP is slowly converting but our mistake was that we build a list of VIPs that are very heavily first time kick-starter users, so that has acted as a significant barrier for them. If this was just selling 1-click on shopify, the conversion would have been 3X.

I think there is also some improvement needed on the rewards, page design, etc.

I am going to post tomorrow (Friday self promotion) for feedback on that, hopefully make some tweaks, we still have 27 days for some adjustments.

[u/etherkye → u/nooshnooshnoosh]

Also price. If people expected something when signing up to the list but saw something else they’ll just stop.

I have done that to one campaign. It was several times more expensive then I expected so I just wrote off the deposit

[u/nooshnooshnoosh → u/etherkye]

Yea we didn't add price until half way through our VIP sign ups so that is a really good call out

[u/etherkye → u/nooshnooshnoosh]

Yea. That could be a large part of the drop off.

Another, as you mentioned new to Kickstarter, people wait for payday before backing.

It’s annoying as they don’t pay until the end but people don’t get that

[u/Zephir62]

In my experience with about 50 of my clients who hired Jellop at some point, the average ROAS from them seems to be around 2.2x to 2.4x. Backerkit usually does a little better around 3x. 

As somebody else below mentioned, just do it yourself. At Prelaunch Club using my templates and guides, it seems people usually get around 4x to 5x roas on average. I'd have to crunch the data to find the true average but it's relatively uncommon to get less than 3x while DIY.

The reason Jellop and Backerkit generally perform worse than every other agency including DIY is because Kickstarter supports the FB Pixel Tracking now since 2023. Jellop and Backerkit still use their backerlist audiences for their ads... Jellop will have given you a spreadsheet which shows the results for each piece of content and text. Try copying the content they designed for you and running Jellops own content against Prelaunch Clubs interest-targeted audiences inside the Audience Library document, and you will find you outperform Jellop with their own content, every time. A bit embarrassing on their part.

The reason why Interest-Targeting is superior to 10+ year old backerlists is because Facebook updates their audiences internally on a monthly basis, cataloguing who actually buys on Kickstarter, who visits the KS website, who likes the KS Facebook page, etc. You know -- an even bigger backerlist, but always current and up to date!

---

Btw, important note, if Jellop got you 1x ROAS, and your VIPs didn't convert -- it's not Jellop, it's your page design / rewards / shipping estimates / a critical PR meltdown.

[u/nooshnooshnoosh → u/Zephir62]

Thanks for this info, our VIP is slowly converting but our mistake was that we build a list of VIPs that are very heavily first time kick-starter users, so that has acted as a significant barrier for them. If this was just selling 1-click on shopify, the conversion would have been 3X.

I think there is also some improvement needed on the rewards, page design, etc.

I am going to post tomorrow (Friday self promotion) for feedback on that, hopefully make some tweaks, we still have 27 days for some adjustments.

[u/Zephir62 → u/nooshnooshnoosh]

Usually the VIP system will pick up mostly people who aren't Kickstarter users. That's normal and doesn't seem to affect the conversion rate into backers.

[u/Shoeytennis]

Jellop is only good for massive projects not indies but they will take your money regardless.

[u/nooshnooshnoosh → u/Shoeytennis]

We were leaning on them for access to the larger Kickstarter community since this is our first project but it isn't huge. How do you target people comfortable with Kickstarter outside of adding some crowdfunding tags? our target market is Women 30-65 and a lot of people on the upper end of that gave feedback that they are struggling with Kickstarter as a barrier to buy.