Kickstarter Recap

Before I get full back into heads down work on the game, I want to give a recap and share some data that might be helpful for others planning to run a Kickstarter campaign. For anyone not interested in this sort of stuff, you can safely click away. This post isn’t meant to be prescriptive advice, I just want to share some graphs that Kickstarter shares with me, some of the data I collected, and maybe talk a bit about my interpretations of them. My hope is that this will be helpful to other indie devs looking to launch a Kickstarter.

Pre-Launch Planning

Before launching the Kickstarter, I was trying to understand how to measure what was even feasible, so I reached out to a lot of people. I was ultimately able to get a rough estimation guideline, so I’ll walk you through that (with our numbers slotted in):

Take your funding goal ($65,000)
Divide by your base game tier price ($20)
And that will give you how many backers you need (3,250)

So here you can see that math doesn’t quite work out because everyone won’t be at the base tier (making this a very conservative estimate), but we ultimately had 1,792 backers making our true backer count only 55% of this estimated backer count goal. Here’s what our tier distribution looked like to give you an idea:

While it does look like just about everyone went for the two lowest tiers, the higher tiers still make a significant impact on your funding goal, so it might be wise to account for it in planning, even if it might make your estimates less conservative. To compare direct numbers, our rough estimate was assuming an average funding amount of $20, but our actual average amount was $44.79 (over 2x the estimate).

I also wanted some rough estimates for how to figure out how many backers I might be able to expect. I was told to try to build out a community (that is mailing list, Twitter, TikTok, Discord, etc. all combined) that is roughly twice the size of the number of backers I needed. Thus, I was trying to build out a social following of roughly 6,500 people. Before launch we were, I think, just shy of 2,500 Twitter followers and less than 1k on TikTok, and that was about it. So that would mean we should expect (very roughly) about 1,750 backers, but we were expecting to need about twice that.

Another good metric to get a sense of how many backers you will have is how many pre-launch followers you have on your Kickstarter page. A rough estimate I gathered is you need ~25% of the total backers you need in pre-launch follows. We had just about 600 by the time we launched, which means that didn’t quite hold true for us. We ended up with just about 3x the number of backers as we had pre-project followers.

Launch

We were going in with fewer backers than our rough estimates told us we needed, but we had some cards we were hoping to use to make a big splash at launch.

Peter Berkman (of Anamanaguchi, known for the Scott Pilgrim vs. the World game soundtrack) is going to be doing the soundtrack for the game, and we had mostly played that close to the chest so as to help use it for excitement at launch. Typically one would release the trailer ASAP and try to build early project-follows. I have no way to tell you if this was the right answer or if we would have been more successful if we had started pushing the trailer w/ music earlier, but I think it probably did affect our early-follows to backer ratio.
Peter Berkman also had a performance in Day of the Devs which featured gameplay footage and a bitly link to our campaign which had just launched. A lot of viewers were tuned into the “one more thing” bit of Day of the Devs and got to see and hear the game, and could then immediately go and back the Kickstarter.

We planned these things with the hope of making a big splash at launch. I believe it was all very successful in that you can see in our funding graph how much we jumped early on ($20k in day one).

I knew that a $65k goal was very high (most Kickstarters for video games tend to be in the $10k - $30k range), but that’s what I determined I needed to be able to afford to make the game as planned. So we went into this seemingly ill-equipped with a community headcount (although perhaps that wasn’t true, it’s what we thought), but with some powerful marketing advantages.

Referrals

So how did people find us ultimately? Well, there’s the Kickstarter referral tracking:

Which doesn’t give a fine breakdown but shows you just how powerful the Kickstarter internal traffic is. And anecdotally this is really strong: a lot of people come into the Discord server saying they found us via Kickstarter. A lot of that had to do with having that very strong day one, which got us onto the Kickstarter homepage and at the top of most of the game-related pages.

But I also asked backers in a survey (which saw about 32% backer participation) how they found us.

I made a mistake in that I forgot to make Day of the Devs an explicit option early on, so that is under-represented here. There are a lot of people that put variations of Summer Game Fest, Day of the Devs, or even other showcases we weren’t actually in, into the “other” option. But here you can see again that Kickstarter is still very important. (All of those tiny slivers are just the various strings that backers entered for the “other” option).

Doing a survey like this was really helpful because Kickstarter does not allow you to create custom referrers to your campaign until the campaign is live. This is a major issue with Kickstarter for helping project creators understand their audience, and unfortunately it just means you simply won’t be able to understand where all your traffic is coming from because you won’t be able to get people referral links in time. Our top referrer according to Kickstarter is “Direct traffic no referrer information”. 🙄

Comparing those two points of referrer data, while Kickstarter says we only had 2% from custom referrers, we had 12% of survey respondents saying they came from cross-promotion we did with other Kickstarter campaigns (and I was trying my best to make sure I had referral links for everyone).

The takeaways for referral data here are:

You can’t trust browser referrer data, it will often just be missing (who knows why, it could be a combination of copy and pasting of links, privacy blocking, I’m not sure).
Kickstarter doesn’t do enough to support referral tracking. They really need to allow for referral tracking to start before launch.
You’ll probably want to ask where backers came from in a survey at some point.

Follower Conversion

I don’t have much to say about Follower Conversion, but here’s what ours looked like:

Something that is important to note though: this was at 11% conversion rate for the bulk of the three weeks we were live. And only in the last few days did it start ramping up until ultimately reaching 23%. From what I can tell, this is a very standard conversion rate you can fairly well rely on, and it will probably double from half that from the start/middle of the project.

Another Look at the Funding Curve

So here was our funding graph, which is I think fairly common, although perhaps ours was steeper at the ends. You can see that as soon as the funding starts to round out after your first few days, it can be quite scary because you visibly see that you won’t make it without another bump. I was told by everyone that funding would jump in the last three days, and that held true for us, but we were hustling to make that happen. Some big things that happened to cause that spike at the end:

Peter Berkman did a lot of outreach to friends and fans. This ultimately got lots of attention including a tweet from Bryan Lee O’Malley.
I managed to get an interview with Thomas Brush for his Full-Time Game Dev podcast, which also went live the morning that spike started.
The spike continued the next day as Kickstarter began emailing project followers to let them know the project was ending soon.

Ad Buys

A quick note about buying ads: we did fiddle a bit with this, spending about $500 on Facebook ads targeting interests and demographics, and it didn’t quite work out 1:1 for us, but it nearly recouped spending. Although we didn’t spend much on ads, I did discover from talking with other project creators and looking at other projects, that doing a thoughtful and well-planned digital ad campaign could have been a game changer. Our campaign did really well with whoever we got it in front of (we had a bounce rate of about 78% according to Google Analytics, which as far as I can tell is pretty good for a Kickstarter, and a common refrain from backers was “I wish I had found this sooner” or “how is this not going viral?”). I suspect if we had worked with a marketing partner, we could have greatly expanded the audience. Hopefully that is a learning I can apply to our launch late next year.

Things We Didn’t Do

I figured I would just call out some things we didn’t do, that are common practice:

We did not offer early bird rewards. I personally find these disincentivize me as a backer when I get there late, so I was kind of against the idea from the get-go, but my old friend Dan explained that they clutter up your reward tier list which can make your Kickstarter more confusing for a first-time backer, and that was enough of a push to jettison the idea entirely.
We did not have an “Any Amount” reward tier. Same reason as above in that it simply clutters your reward tiers, and there is already a “pledge any amount” option in there by default.
No physical goods in the campaign. This was for personal preference. My worry here is that, aside from getting caught up in the difficult of fulfilling physical reward pledges, they would simply make it much more difficult to set a funding goal that would guarantee I had the money I needed to make the game. Because the margins would change so drastically between digital and physical rewards, I would need to have spot-on estimates for that spread to be able to properly budget the Kickstarter.
The campaign only ran for three weeks instead of 30 days. This was more advice from my friend Dan (he’s been doing this for over 10 years in the board game space and has lots of insight). Running a Kickstarter is exhausting and time-consuming, but also, that lull in the middle can become a problem if your supporters start to worry that you’re not going to make it. The longer you spend in that lull, the more backers might lose faith. This also ensured we both started and ended on a Thursday (Tues to Thurs are generally the best days for both) and that ended on a very obvious date (last day of the month). I think having the last three days be Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday was probably a big win. Overall I’m pretty happy with this choice: if you look at how much we were making during the lull periods (usually ~$1,100 a day) you could argue we would have made another $10k with that extra time, but I suspect that doesn’t hold true. We will be doing “late pledges” soon and I certainly don’t expect it to keep doing those numbers.

And That’s It

I don’t think I have much else to share that would be helpful (though feel free to reach out to me if you’re a project creator with questions). I hope this recap of the campaign will be helpful for other indie devs out there. There is a lot about our campaign that makes it a bit of an outlier, but I think more is better when it comes to Kickstarter data so hopefully this is helpful. Feel free to leave questions and feedback as comments down below or reach out on our Discord server.

Also you can give our game a pre-order if you want to support the campaign even though the Kickstarter is wrapped up. Thanks for reading. ❤️

-Dave