My Kickstarter campaign dashboards - part 2

Last week I looked at the dashboard data behind my first ever Kickstarter project, the Ockham Razor.

This week I’m going to do the same thing for the two projects I did after that. As with last time, every dashboard tells a story of how a project went.

Project 2 - The STICKER PROJECT

I launched this second campaign almost exactly a year after my first. There was no real strategy towards building a coherent product portfolio at this point. I just thought it was a cool product idea and wanted to make it.

The project was to produce a set of small icon stickers that you stick on your plugs to identify them.

Stickers for your plugs

The Sticker Project on Kickstarter

Compared with my previous project, the nature of manufacturing this time meant that my target was a lot lower. The total funding reached was also a lot lower, although slightly higher as a percentage of the target. However, as I’ve mentioned before, the percentage of funding can often be nothing more than a vanity metric.

Sticker Project - project dashboard

For this project I did no paid marketing and relied on my previous tactic of trying to get organic backers and earn organic converge.

The relatively steep trajectory at the beginning of the campaign is something you’ll see for many successful projects and it’s a good sign. Getting a strong start is critical and this shows that I achieved that.

As with my previous project I also had a significant boost a couple of weeks into the campaign caused by some press coverage. This time, that bump catapulted me over my target and was a big relief after things were starting to slow down.

The boost was caused by my project being picked up by Gizmodo, and then subsequently Wired and Mental Floss. That kind of bumpy ride is stressful and isn’t necessarily how you want things to go! Nevertheless I was ecstatic to see it go beyond 100%.

Oddly, from a press coverage point of view this has been probably my most successful Kickstarter project, yet it might be the one I’m most disappointed with overall. I still think it’s a perfect product for Kickstarter and wonder why it didn’t to a lot better.

If you’re interested, I still have some stock left and you can get yourself some stickers here on Etsy.

Project 3 - Cocktail Cards

A combination of life circumstances, and maybe my disappointment after that second campaign, meant I didn’t launch another Kickstarter for a few years.

This next one was a lockdown project, and marked my entry into the world of playing cards.

Cocktail Cards on Kickstarter

The premise was quite simple - Cocktail Cards are a deck of regular-sized playing cards, with the normal suits for playing card games, but each card also contains a cocktail recipe.

Back in 2020 many of us were stuck at home and I figured plenty of people had a cupboard full of spirits they rarely used, so it was a perfect time to learn how to make some cocktails with them.

That timing probably helped this project succeed and I was pleased with how it went. In terms of number of Kickstarter backers, it far exceeded my previous projects. I also had a relatively low target which also helped as it allowed me to hit 100% on day one. The mostly-green graph was great to see.

Cocktail Cards - project dashboard

In many ways, the number of backers is a more important metric than the funding amount. Reaching over a thousand backers is a very respectable performance.

That’s one key strategy I took forward after this project: focus on number of backers rather than the amount pledged. This is especially true as you build momentum at the beginning of the campaign. It’s very exciting when you launch your first campaign and strangers start giving you money. But getting lots of individuals to care about your project is the most important thing. The money will follow.

This was my first Kickstarter campaign where everything felt calm and under control. I got my marketing strategy more or less right and I also boosted the project with a small amount of paid advertising. Thankfully that calmness has been something I’ve been able to reproduce consistently since.

I created a new brand, Cartesian Cards, to launch these cards and have been selling them via regular ecommerce ever since. As you’ll read about next week I’ve subsequently launched several decks of playing cards on Kickstarter, and although other Kickstarters have been much more successful than this one, Cocktail Cards are still my bestselling cards on my own ecommerce website.

Next week

Next week I’ll share a breakdown of the dashboards from the Kickstarter campaigns that followed these ones.

You’ll see that all my next projects have stayed on the playing card theme, and I think that kind of product continuity is something I would highly recommend. I didn’t do that when I first embarked on my Kickstarter career and my success has been much better since I did.

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