With the current downturn in venture capital, this is a legitimate question. I have been mentoring startups for about 10 years, and this question has come up s

With the current downturn in venture capital, this is a legitimate question. I have been mentoring startups for about 10 years, and this question has come up several times. There are some good articles on the web that discuss this topic, but in short, you need to do some brute-force legwork before crowdfunding to gather an audience if you expect to get anywhere with it. To do this, you have to "talk" to lots of people and do lots of social media pre-marketing. This means: - something to demonstrate - something to say about pain/solution to your audience, I.e. value - social media accounts and postings that link to... - landing page(s) - a call to action, e.g. email, pre-order or link to crowdfunding page - a great story and video for your crowdfunding page - and lots of interaction with those people that seem excited about what you are doing...they will tell friends if they are impressed enough There are no guarantees, and it's a lot of work, but it's good work because it helps you to focus on your customers and your product offering. Good luck.