Lies, damn lies, and Kickstarter statistics

I got this email recently from Mailchimp showing a 4,800% increase in my campaign clicks. Well done me, right?

4,800% increase

Well no, not really. What this actually shows is that I’m not very good at doing consistent newsletter marketing. An increase in campaign clicks is great in itself, but a steady, reliable increase would be preferable, rather than this massive change which represented a big spike.

Beware the denominator

There are always a lot of numbers thrown around when it comes to Kickstarter, and you need to be careful how you interpret them.

A common boast you’ll see from Kickstarter creators is that they’ve been funded in ten minutes, or that they’ve raised several thousand percent of their target. I’ve certainly used those lines myself!

But what’s behind those numbers?

Over 2,000% funded

In my last Kickstarter my final funding was 2,195% of my goal. It’s a big number and sounds great in marketing.

In that particular case, my project was for a deck of playing cards - a printed product where the fixed upfront costs are relatively small and minimum order quantities (MOQs) are quite low. I could’ve made it work if I’d only hit 100% of my goal, but there was plenty of headroom to shoot way over the target without jeopardising the project delivery.

The big percentage was because my final funding was just over £100,000 and my goal was only £4,900.

Contrast that with a complex electro-mechanical product where component MOQs may be larger and an investment in expensive tooling is required. Such a Kickstarter campaign may need £50,000 to make it viable, and raising £100,000 becomes a less noteworthy 200% of the goal. But that project is arguably a more impressive achievement.

Creators will sometimes set an artificially low target so that a) they’re more likely to reach it, and b) their final numbers flatter them. So watch out for that when you’re evaluating a project as a backer.

Funding goal-setting strategy on Kickstarter is a whole discussion in itself and I’ll talk about that another time.

Bamboozling numbers

When searching for crowdfunding advice on the internet you’ll often hear people say that you need to have x number of project followers before launch, or hit y% of your funding target in the first 24 hours.

Beware of the illusion of accuracy that precise numbers can sometimes give. I once received an unsolicited email from a marketing agency saying they could increase my Kickstarter funding by 867%!

When it comes to things like project followers there are clearly some correlations between high numbers and eventual success, but there are no hard and fast rules.

You need to understand those numbers - what they mean and how to influence them, but don’t get too fixated on them.

Fixate on your product and on your customers and the numbers will come.