I’ve seen a few Kickstarter-adjacent creators share some really helpful resources recently (including a truly enlightening analysis of Kickstarter leads), so I wanted to share them with you today.
The Validity of Kickstarter Leads (Crowdfunding Nerds)
After I posted my recent article about Gamefound, a game-specific crowdfunding platform that I think actually has a chance of competing with Kickstarter, one of the most common responses I heard was that a major benefit of Kickstarter is the potential for discovery. If you look at any Kickstarter dashboard, you’ll see Kickstarter take credit for a significant number of backers.
Granted, I think Kickstarter does a good job of supporting creators on their platform. While the number of people randomly browsing through Kickstarter to find something interesting to support is probably very low (compared to someone who hears about, say, Darwin’s Journey, and searches for it on Kickstarter), their recommendation engine is solid, you might appear in their newsletters, and their killer feature is that you’ll get a notification whenever an acquaintance backs something.
However, I’ve really wanted to see an analysis of how many people truly discover something thanks to Kickstarter first telling them about it versus them hearing about it elsewhere. You can read this article for the full details, but the conclusion is shown in these two charts (click on either to embiggen):
As the article notes, “Between all the campaigns, on average there is a 21.64% discrepancy between Kickstarter’s referrals and what is most likely happening.”
I think it’s really important to keep this in mind. Kickstarter may help backers find your project, but don’t expect them to. You’re in charge of getting the word out about your project.
KS TODO (link)
Planning for a Kickstarter campaign is a daunting task. While I think it significantly increases your chances of success if you take the time to research using resources like my chronological list of KS lessons or my crowdfunding book, it’s a lot to read through.
So I was elated to learn that a creator named Zoli took the time to distill my Kickstarter lessons (as well as those from a variety of other resources) into a bite-sized checklist app that saves your progress. Simply start on the primer page, read a short paragraph (or sometimes a linked resource) and check the box when you’ve completed the task. Even if you’re just considering the prospect of a Kickstarter, you can start with the first step today and almost immediately have a sense of progress.
I think this is an amazing contribution to the crowdfunding community, and I appreciate Zoli for making it! Check it out this free resource here.
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I’d love to hear your thoughts about Kickstarter leads and KS TODO!
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19 Comments on “2 Things to Know Today About Kickstarter”
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Thank you for the warm intro, Jamey.
I was one of the people that commented about Kickstarter’s reach, and I was also skeptical about it, but one of the questions I asked in the pledge manager (and got a very high response rate because I said it helped me as a scrappy indie publisher) was, “where did you find out about the campaign,” and 56% said they found it on Kickstarter, which correlates pretty closely with how Kickstarter reported it on their dashboard. So yeah I’m still pretty convinced Kickstarter brings people! IF, of course, and BIG IF you do the groundwork to get your people in FIRST. So I agree with you, Jamey.
Thanks for sharing our article Jamey! Would love to get you on the Crowdfunding Nerds Podcast sometime to chat more about your experiences in marketing!
Thanks for creating this great content, Andrew! I’d be happy to join you for an episode. :)
Hi, Jamey, Thanks for your insight on Kickstarter! I’ve just finished your book and found if so helpful and also found so many mistakes I have made on my projects. You are 100% correct when you say it is a mistake to rely on Kickstarter to promote your project. Don’t get me wrong, I love the platform and the opportunity–but it is not a project promoting site, nor was it meant to be.
When I first started making games (about the time the earth’s crust cooled) I also thought retailers and wholesalers were there to promote my games (the foolishness of youth).
I once asked Scott Gaeta of Renegade games how to get retailers and wholesalers to carry my games. His response, “Have a hit game.”
Understanding what each business is, what their goals and roles are, is so crucial.
Fortunately you have given a concrete path to making that a much better possibility with your book. I thank you for it!
Thanks Mark! I appreciate you checking out the book. That’s a great point about retailers and wholesalers. While I think the best retailers promote some of the games they sell, there are simply so many games now that they have to pick and choose the games they focus on, and being a “hot” game for other reasons (i.e., it’s a great game and people are talking about it thanks to your marketing efforts) can inspire retailers to elevate it too.
Great articles! I especially love the nice list at the KS TODO! Although, I kind of wish there was either a printable version of this, or that it would allow you to log in to be able to view what you already checked off when you log into different browsers (like when I’m on my phone vs my computer). But, it’s still super helpful!!
However, this is just a reminder of how much more we are still needing to do to be ready for our Kickstarter. Sometimes I forget how much work is needed, until I start looking at lists like this. Just got to keep focusing on continuing to take one step at a time, and eventually we will get there!
Thanks again for all you do to continue helping out those of us who are still in the beginning stages of this crowdfunding journey. :)
Thanks Lydia! Perhaps Zoli will read this and consider a printed version. :) Good luck with the preparation process!
Hey Lydia! I planned it that way originally, but then figured people wouldn’t want to bother with signing up. I may add it in the future if the site becomes more popular. I wish you good luck with your project!
Also, thanks for the kind words!
Hi Zoli! Thanks for responding. :) I totally understand. This is still a great tool, and I appreciate your hard work in getting this put together! I have it saved as a bookmark on my computer so I can easily just go back and check my current progress. So far this is great for helping me make sure I’m staying on track with everything!
I did see the Crowdfunding Nerds article, but I’m not certain I agree with their assertions. For one thing, they include 100% of searches as User generated leads which I think is quite a stretch, I’ve certainly seen things on Kickstarter first and then gone back to search for them, I also think its a stretch to say that people who follow your project on Kickstarter came to Kickstarter looking for you, which I don’t see the logic of. Also, even if it is true that 60% of backers come from User leads and 40% from Kickstarter in the cases analyzed it clearly doesn’t follow that if you bring in six that Kickstarter will therefore bring in four, otherwise it would follow that if Kickstarter brings in four you will somehow bring in six, and its that somewhat spurious argument that they use to suggest the central idea of the article, that advertising is 67% more useful than you might expect. Their argument is that because if 4 backers come from Kickstarter for every 6 from user leads that means that for 100 you bring Kickstarter brings 67, and 67 of 100 is 67%, so advertising is 67% more effective than people might think. But the point is that Kickstarter leads are Kickstarter leads, there’s no argument to suggest that they come because of User leads in some sort of 6:4 inherent ratio.
I’m not certain what Crowdfunding nerds mean by “clients”, but if they’re offering a charged service to assist with crowdfunding advertising, I’d take with a pinch of salt their analysis which concludes that advertising is more important than people might think.
Thanks for sharing your perspective, Glenn! I think these numbers probably vary widely based on the creator too.
Hey Glenn! Andrew from Crowdfunding Nerds here. Thought I’d chime in and add my 2 cents on your feedback:
You’re probably right that the margin for error on this assumption is beyond what we give it credit for — We had to generalize so we could draw conclusions.
“Search” is when people find your project by typing in your project on the KS search bar. There is a chance they type in a very similar project name to find your active project. While I find that it is common to see more than one project when searching, it’s rare that the search intent is to find anything other than the project they originally intended to search out. This is also true about Google — When someone searches for “Scythe Stonemaier Games” on Google, it is certain that they first heard about it elsewhere.
Project followers are also earned by the creator. Kickstarter, for the most part, isn’t going to create followers for you.
About the 6 / 4 ratio, it’s definitely not a hard and fast rule, but it’s what we found. What I can’t say for certain is that if you bring in 6 from a marketing campaign (like BGG or Facebook Ads), then Kickstarter will give you 4 more — I would be suspicious of someone that asserted that, too! It’s not a hard-and-fast rule, but it’s an average that should help inform your decisions.
If KS allowed us to track things using Facebook Pixel, we would have a lot more hard data to make conclusions with. Gamefound allows this, so I’m sure we’ll be sharing more as we see progress here.
Most of our work is actually in pre-KS marketing, because that is where the highest effective ROI is, and it is also very easily measured after the fact. The whole goal for us is to get a project to fund within the first 24 hours — I don’t often take campaigns that have already started, because results are really hard to determine for certain (as you correctly pointed out)!
Hi Andrew, thanks for the response.
I understand your point about the search function, but my point is that its entirely possible for someone to see your project for the first ever time on the Kickstarter website, remember the name but not follow or back immediately and then type the name in and search for it. In fact, since they are on the Kickstarter website to conclude that none of them are in this position seems strange.
I understand that you may have found the 6/4 ratio to be true, but I’m not clear on what the relationship would be that causes one to bring the other. If someone did zero advertising they would get some level of backers from being on Kickstarter and I’m not sure that a project like Frosthaven or Exploding Kittens has the same ratio. I would imagine rather that a project has a fairly set level of funding that comes based on the professionalism of their page from Kickstarter and that a far lower ratio of the Kickstarter funding comes because of leads bought from outside. I would think that as a project brings in more and more of their own backers that ratio would shrink significantly. It certainly seems a stretch to say that due to the Kickstarter leads that advertising is worth more than it appears to be.
The thing about pre-kickstarter advertising is that it can be extremely tough to maintain attention when there’s nothing to actually back and even harder to track investment that translates into followers or mailing list participants through into backers. What would you estimate your client’s dollar investment into actual backers to be?
That’s totally possible. Some of our ratios are on the “100% Kickstarter” or “100% Creator Driven” sides that definitely have some possibility of a % that might be credited toward what is vice-versa, so there is definitely a margin for error one should factor into these numbers.
What’s funny about the 6/4 ratio is that it is an observation, but even I am not totally clear on causation. One important distinction is that we’re using ALL creator-driven effort, including organic Facebook posts, etc in our calculation. This is much beyond paid ads, which should generally represent 25% or less of this traffic. When developing this article, I didn’t intend to make a case for ads, but instead wanted to point out this clear correlation and curious ratio that was similar across 5 campaigns (Mike Gnade from Rock Manor Games was the original inspiration for our article — check that out here: https://rockmanorgames.com/2020/10/22/deciphering-kickstarters-referral-metrics/).
For pre-KS advertising, we have much stronger data on this. One thing that is critical to mention is my methodology is to design a killer landing page and have a funnel set up that I call my “Virtuous Cycle” (you can hear me talk all about that here: https://www.boardgamedesignlab.com/how-to-market-a-board-game-part-1-with-andrew-lowen/). I expect 10% of the traffic I send to that landing page via FB ads to convert to e-mail subscribers, and then 10-15% of those e-mail subscribers to convert to actual Kickstarter backers on day 1. I have seen this fund campaigns on day 1 on 21 occasions in the last year running Pre-KS marketing, with 17 of those campaigns being for first-time creators that didn’t have an email list.
There are many metrics that we look at for data points, but the most important that allows us to prove how many backers and the $ raised came from the pre-KS marketing is when we compare the emails we gathered from the landing page to the KS backer list. One campaign we actually showed a 30% conversion rate with an average $ pledge value that was $15 higher than their overall average. The return on investment was wonderful for them. I will probably be writing a blog post on case studies like this every so often on crowdfundingnerds.com, but we don’t have any written up yet.
Here’s a quick stat for ya:
Total spend (Ad spend + our fees): $3680
Revenue generated: $13,936
ROI: $3.79 earned per $1 spent
The tragedy is that for those that need information like this to move forward, they can’t get it until after a campaign is over. By then, it’s too late! Spending on KS ads always carries with it the risk of not knowing the true effectiveness until later. You have to rely on other theoretical data points in the meantime until you can be certain with data collected after the campaign concludes.
I’d be far more interested personally in that sort of case study, in the end its the ROI and if it makes sense in relation to the often tight profit margin for a Kickstarter that matters. Its great to have a return of $3.79 for every dollar spent on advertising certainly, but of course that’s still a significant percentage and could obviously potentially end up as a false economy. Also of course, for Creators who are paying out of pocket for Kickstarter set-up costs, $3680 is a significant investment.
The thing is that however true the 6/4 correlation is, it can’t be said to mean that advertising is 67% more effective than it appears to be any more than it can be said to mean that advertising is 100% less effective than it appears to be. Correlation is not causation and concluding that Kickstarter’s leads mean that advertising is 67% more effective is no more of a fair conclusion than that since Kickstarter leads generate without advertising and they result in 6 non-Kickstarter leads for every 4 Kickstarter leads that therefore advertising does nothing at all. Without being clear on causation there’s really no conclusion that can reasonably drawn from the correlation. In fact, since the correlation is so solid it undermines any conclusion that can be drawn to do with advertising. It would seem reasonable to suggest that there is a base level of backing that Kickstarter brings and a different level that advertising brings, there should be a slight causal relationship as advertising pushes projects up the Kickstarter algorithms and success on Kickstarter brings word of mouth backers, but it should still be true that if advertising is effective it should be able to shift the 6/4 correlation in some way. As it is, if a project with zero advertising budget and little or no crowd has a 6/4 correlation and one that spends $5k on advertising and comes with a massive following still has a 6/4 correlation that seems to suggest that advertising has very little effect and that if anything creators should spend their budget on a very high end Kickstarter page for a stronger return.
It is difficult for Creators to know if an idea has any real chance of success before launching, which is why spending before launch is such a high risk prospect. In the end, one of the strengths of Kickstarter is that it provides a chance to gauge demand before commitment. Suggesting greater commitment in order to drive demand therefore always seems to be a strange way round of running a Kickstarter to me.
AMAZING site.
I wish there was a NEXT button on the bottom for when you check off the last thing on the page! I just tweeted at Zoli, hopefully he’ll add it, haha
Thanks, Wonmin! It’s a good thing you wrote here as well, because somehow I completely missed your tweet :(. I’ll add the next buttons soon. 🦄