This is a kind of "transparency" exercise which might help others running Kickstarter. Or it might not. Here it is anyway.
FUNDING PROGRESS
Generally folks say that you start with a spike, it then stays flattish for the middle of your Kickstarter, and you finish with another spike in the last few days. I *kinda* found that, but the flattish part wasn't very flat. I think that's partly a function of just how much work you put in daily on the project - if you're working it like a full-time job, that flat middle can be a nice rise.
TRAFFIC SOURCES
These are the traffic sources that the EN World Kickstarter got traffic from. Obviously EN World itself is the highest, and most Kickstarters will likely have the owner's own website as the highest (or at least one of the highest) traffic sources.
It's actually quite a short list of traffic sources. 3 sites owned by myself, BGG/RPGG, Paizo, and some social networks. That probably shows that I could have done better by contacting other websites, bloggers, and so on. It's tracking pledges, though, not traffic, and one thing worth noting is that Kickstarter forgets the tracking information the moment you browse to another page - so if you land on the project page from another site, click something to find out more about Kickstarter (on its own site) and then pledge, Kickstarter considers that its own referral, not the originating website.
No Referrer Info: 38.8%
EN World: 20.7%
Kickstarter (various pages combined): 17%
Google.com, .ca, .co.uk: 3.65%
Twitter: 2.74%
Facebook: 2.55%
RPG Kickstarters: 1.02%
RPGGeek: 0.99%
Circvs Maximvs: 0.63%
Paizo: 0.59%
BoardGameGeek: 0.12%
Kicktraq: 0.33%
Various email providers combined: 7.89% (not including Google, whose figures are all under just Google.com)
SCHEDULES
For any of you who may be in the UK and are thinking of running a Kickstarter, I can provide a couple of little tips (I don't know if these apply to US Kickstarters, but it does for UK based ones):
1) When Kickstarter says there's a 14-day window for collecting pledges, it means it literally. I received the email saying it had finished 14 days to the minute after the Kickstarter ended.
2) There then follows an unspecified period of "a few days" during which the fund transfer to you takes place. So, if you're planning your Kickstarter, you will receive the funds in your bank account 3 weeks after your project ends.
3) Monte Cook's book says to expect 10% of the final total to be taken up by fees, failed pledges, (in the UK also VAT) -- I found the amount to be 10% almost exactly. It's an excellent rule of thumb to assume that the amount you'll receive is 90% of what your project raised.
I don't know if that's helpful at all. Feel free to share it around if you know anyone thinking of starting a UK based Kickstarter.
REWARDS
The popular reward was obvious. I borrowed the technique used by Reaper Minis (on a small scale of course), concentrating on building up a popular reward tier via stretch goals -- the idea being that that specific reward eventually becomes so attractive that you'd be silly not to go for it! I don't know whether I succeeded there (Reaper CERTAINLY did and should be viewed as the template for that technique), but the graph below certainly indicates that the £25 reward tier with all those PDFs was the really popular one.
THE TAKE-HOME MESSAGE
If I learned anything from this process, it's that a successful Kickstarter requires a lot of hard work. You have to work at it every single day - promoting it, arranging rewards and stretch goals, providing updates, making videos and graphics. You just gotta keep doing it every single day right up till the end. The lowest-funding days on my own Kickstarter were the days I didn't work on it.
Keep talking about it. I think it's worth doing that, although it can annoy some people. There are so many Kickstarters about these days, though, that you'll just get lost in the crowd unless you do. Use social networks, use websites appropriate to your project (the community aspect of it can be fantastic), try to get more people talking about it.
Oh, and buy Monte Cook's book. You won't regret it. Loads of useful advice.
FUNDING PROGRESS
Generally folks say that you start with a spike, it then stays flattish for the middle of your Kickstarter, and you finish with another spike in the last few days. I *kinda* found that, but the flattish part wasn't very flat. I think that's partly a function of just how much work you put in daily on the project - if you're working it like a full-time job, that flat middle can be a nice rise.
TRAFFIC SOURCES
These are the traffic sources that the EN World Kickstarter got traffic from. Obviously EN World itself is the highest, and most Kickstarters will likely have the owner's own website as the highest (or at least one of the highest) traffic sources.
It's actually quite a short list of traffic sources. 3 sites owned by myself, BGG/RPGG, Paizo, and some social networks. That probably shows that I could have done better by contacting other websites, bloggers, and so on. It's tracking pledges, though, not traffic, and one thing worth noting is that Kickstarter forgets the tracking information the moment you browse to another page - so if you land on the project page from another site, click something to find out more about Kickstarter (on its own site) and then pledge, Kickstarter considers that its own referral, not the originating website.
No Referrer Info: 38.8%
EN World: 20.7%
Kickstarter (various pages combined): 17%
Google.com, .ca, .co.uk: 3.65%
Twitter: 2.74%
Facebook: 2.55%
RPG Kickstarters: 1.02%
RPGGeek: 0.99%
Circvs Maximvs: 0.63%
Paizo: 0.59%
BoardGameGeek: 0.12%
Kicktraq: 0.33%
Various email providers combined: 7.89% (not including Google, whose figures are all under just Google.com)
SCHEDULES
For any of you who may be in the UK and are thinking of running a Kickstarter, I can provide a couple of little tips (I don't know if these apply to US Kickstarters, but it does for UK based ones):
1) When Kickstarter says there's a 14-day window for collecting pledges, it means it literally. I received the email saying it had finished 14 days to the minute after the Kickstarter ended.
2) There then follows an unspecified period of "a few days" during which the fund transfer to you takes place. So, if you're planning your Kickstarter, you will receive the funds in your bank account 3 weeks after your project ends.
3) Monte Cook's book says to expect 10% of the final total to be taken up by fees, failed pledges, (in the UK also VAT) -- I found the amount to be 10% almost exactly. It's an excellent rule of thumb to assume that the amount you'll receive is 90% of what your project raised.
I don't know if that's helpful at all. Feel free to share it around if you know anyone thinking of starting a UK based Kickstarter.
REWARDS
The popular reward was obvious. I borrowed the technique used by Reaper Minis (on a small scale of course), concentrating on building up a popular reward tier via stretch goals -- the idea being that that specific reward eventually becomes so attractive that you'd be silly not to go for it! I don't know whether I succeeded there (Reaper CERTAINLY did and should be viewed as the template for that technique), but the graph below certainly indicates that the £25 reward tier with all those PDFs was the really popular one.
THE TAKE-HOME MESSAGE
If I learned anything from this process, it's that a successful Kickstarter requires a lot of hard work. You have to work at it every single day - promoting it, arranging rewards and stretch goals, providing updates, making videos and graphics. You just gotta keep doing it every single day right up till the end. The lowest-funding days on my own Kickstarter were the days I didn't work on it.
Keep talking about it. I think it's worth doing that, although it can annoy some people. There are so many Kickstarters about these days, though, that you'll just get lost in the crowd unless you do. Use social networks, use websites appropriate to your project (the community aspect of it can be fantastic), try to get more people talking about it.
Oh, and buy Monte Cook's book. You won't regret it. Loads of useful advice.
