I designed a healthier men's dress shoe and was able to gain close to $100K in preorders in a Kickstarter this past September; https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/oaka/oaka-the-worlds-he.... Hopefully it doesn't stay a side project for too much longer, fingers crossed.
I launched a successful Kickstarter a few years ago. Getting press coverage is critical, but it's difficult to get press to cover something that isn't yet available. To overcome this catch-22, you can (1) have a product that is somehow attached to a current trend in the news, or (2) have enough progress that you can convince journalists that it's not vaporware.
It also helps to have an existing network that would be interested, for example from a related product.
There are companies that you can pay to do marketing. I didn't use one of those, since it seems like many of them probably suck out all the profit from any Kickstarter that actually succeeds. But I imagine some of them could be good partners, depending on what you're making.
>have enough progress that you can convince journalists that it's not vaporware.
I second this. I launched my first and only campaign back in 2016, but even then media outlets were wary. Back when crowdfunding was new and exciting, many of them featured products that turned out to never launch. Once bitten, twice shy.
Those marketing companies can also be a good way to give you the initial market reach with kickstarter so that later on, when you make your product available outside of kickstarter, you have an established customer base. It can be worth losing the profit of the initial run for this.
