A Classic Funding Curve & Topping £100k. My Kickstarter dashboards - part 4

Here’s the final part of my series looking into the funding dashboards of my latest three Kickstarter campaigns.

Project 6 - Wine Cards

As I said last time, my Kickstarter projects have all been about playing cards recently. This consistency has many benefits. It makes a difference even for simple practical things like how to take photos and videos of a particular type of product. Probably the more significant benefits however, come with having a ready-made audience who have an appreciation of playing cards - on an individual level, and on a press/marketing level.

This was my third playing card Kickstarter and was for a deck of cards all about wine - a similar idea to my first deck which were all about cocktails.

Of all my campaigns up to this point, my Wine Cards project had the most classic funding progress curve. You can see below how the curve starts steeply, levels off in the middle, and then ends steeply. The funding goal was also again reached on day one which is always a good thing.

This data shows that things went pretty much to plan. I had done a good job of getting people lined up and ready to back the project right at the start. That momentum then continued throughout the campaign, boosted by some paid ads on social media, but also made up by almost 50% of funding coming from within the Kickstarter ecosystem. Getting pledges via Kickstarter is a great source of funds because it’s free and relatively low effort.

If a campaign has already reached its target then the last couple of days almost always show an upturn in funding. Potential backers can ‘watch’ a project, and if they haven’t backed it by 48 hours before the end of the campaign they’ll get a reminder email from Kickstarter and this usually results in a bump at the end as people don’t want to miss the chance to back the project.

It’ll be interesting to see if Kickstarter’s new late pledges feature affects this pattern. It’s an optional feature that gives backers the chance to back a project once the original funding period has ended. It could reduce the incentive to back a project before it ends so might reduce the end-of-campaign upsurge.

Project 7 - Mini One Deck Game Cards (£100k)

My seventh project was another card deck, and furthermore it was a V2.0 of a previous deck.

Following on from One Deck Game Cards, Mini One Deck Game & Score Cards are, as the name suggests, a mini version of that original product, and they also have a few more features.

This has been my most successful Kickstarter campaign so far, and by quite a way. It’s been the only one that’s hit six figures - even in GBP.

Again, the funding curve has the distinctive shape, although not as pronounced as the previous project. There's also a noticeable increase in gradient a week into the project just before the ‘early bird’ pricing ended.

Why it did so well

There’s no real secret here. I didn’t ‘hack’ Kickstarter. I just executed well with a product that people got excited about.

The first iteration of this product was previously my most successful Kickstarter project and clearly this one still resonated with Kickstarter backers.

The campaign felt like it went smoothly, and that’s literally visible in the funding progress graph.

This is particularly evident if I compare the relative smoothness of this curve with some of my earlier projects.

Take my razor project and my sticker project. Their funding graphs below both show a bumpy ride, with some massive jumps caused by lucky breaks on the PR/marketing side.

For this Mini One Deck project I had no massive marketing wins that distorted the progress in the same way. It was just a steady accumulation of funding, helped by a strong start which brought good organic traction, and then augmented by some paid advertising.

I think this partly tells the story of a Kickstarter platform that’s evolved over the last decade. Getting free marketing coverage seems to have become more difficult and it’s more a case of putting in the hard miles (and paying for marketing).

Project 8 - The Smallest Cards in the World

My eighth campaign was a ‘Make 100’ campaign¹ with a much reduced scope. My fifth campaign was also a Make 100 one, and I wrote about that last week.

At the time of this campaign, I wrote a series of posts in real time as I was running the project. If you’re interested, they kick off with this one: www.roastmykickstarter.com/sunday-roast-blog/record-attempt-kickstarter-part-1

As you can see below, the funding progress chart is completely different to any that we’ve looked at before. The reason for this was that the limited 100 rewards sold out in a few hours so the project effectively topped out and the funding was done on day one.

You may be wondering how I got 131 backers when there were only 100 rewards available.

As with any Kickstarter project, people can chose to back a project without a reward. This is usually because people believe in the idea and just want to support it, even if they may not want, or be able to afford, the rewards. In the case of this project, people got quite excited about the world-record-breaking cards and were backing the campaign for a nominal amount in the hope of effectively being on a waiting list in case anyone else pulled out or more rewards were produced one day.

Eight Down; More to Come

If you enjoyed my analyses of these campaigns, check out my last few posts in which I did the same thing for my other successful Kickstarter projects. And if you’d like to catch more in the future, make sure you sign up below to my newsletter.

Later this week I’m launching a new Kickstarter project which I’ll no doubt discuss further at some point!

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¹https://www.kickstarter.com/make-100