Do repeat backers back early?

A quick follow up to last week where I was looking at the backer data for my four playing card projects over the years.

After finding out how many of those backers backed multiple projects of mine, and where those backers came from I left myself with two questions:

1. Digging into geography a bit more - where in the US are people backing? (Since the US is by far my biggest source of backers.)

2. Do repeat backers back early?

US backers by state

Firstly, I looked at a breakdown of which US states backers were coming from. This is just for my last Kickstarter campaign, Mini One Deck Game Cards, which was my most successful project with over 3,000 backers.

Mini One Deck - backers by state

No massive surprises here. California and Texas are the biggest states and also my biggest source of backers.

(There were also six backers with US forces post codes.)

Digging a little deeper, I normalised the data based on state population, as below.

Mini One Deck - backers per 100,000 by state

This looks like it shows quite a big variation, but maybe the sample isn’t really big enough for it to be that meaningful.

The Pacific Northwest of the US is well represented. I thought there might be a correlation between Kickstarter backers and average incomes in states, but a quick glance shows California and New York are pretty low so possibly not. Maybe that’s a subject for further exploration.

Do repeat backers back early?

My original analysis last week was about repeat backers — i.e. the backers that come back my Kickstarter campaigns after they’ve already backed one of my previous campaigns.

You can read the whole of that here, but my overall finding was that it was fewer than I thought — less than 10%.

Given that, does it mean that I shouldn’t spend too much effort trying to court return backers? Instinctively I think I still should. One reason to do so would be if return backers back earlier in the campaign than average, and are therefore more valuable from a project momentum point of view.

I looked into that and the short answer is yes, repeat backers back early.

For each Kickstarter campaign the backers are assigned a ‘backer number’ in the order they back the project. The first backer backer being backer #1 etc.

Below is a histogram showing all the backers of my Mini One Deck campaign who had previously backed one of my earlier campaigns.

On the x axis is their backer number, grouped into buckets of 50, and it clearly show that if a backer is a repeat backer, they’re more likely to back the project early.

Repeat backers by backer number

Furthermore, of the very early backers, numbers 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 were all people who had previously backed one of my projects.

This perhaps isn’t that surprising. The chance of people finding your project on Kickstarter organically is relatively small, and if you have a slow start to your campaign that becomes vanishingly small. The people who find your project, especially right at the start, will be people you’ve actively told about it, one way or another.

As I said last week, you already have an open channel of communication with any previous backers so you can leverage that.

It’s all part of the typical advice that prelaunch is critical. You want potential backers to already have your project on their radar and be ready to back as soon as it goes live. In this case, the 50th backer of my campaign came in only 38 minutes after the first, and about 40-something minutes after I hit the launch button.

Existing backers from your previous projects are the perfect targets for this and it’s nice to know that these backers are as important as I thought they were.

Of course, if it’s your first campaign then you won’t have any existing backers.

Although existing Kickstarter backers are uniquely primed to back your new campaign, the same logic applies to anyone who you can make aware of your upcoming project.

The key is that as many people as possible must be waiting, ready, and willing to back your project the moment it launches.

Without a strong start, your whole campaign will be an uphill struggle.

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