After 8 Kickstarter campaigns, is it the same people coming back each time?

As with anyone selling a product, I want to know as much as possible about who my customers are. When it comes to Kickstarter that means analysing my backers.

A couple of high-level questions:

1. Where in the world are my backers?

2. Do the same people come back to each of my Kickstarter projects?

The answer to the first question is useful but not unexpected. The answer to the second question surprised me.

Geography

Firstly, let’s look at where my backers are in the world.

This data is easy to come by as I just looked at all the shipping countries from my last four playing card projects on Kickstarter.

In total that’s nearly 8,000 pledges from 81 countries across the four projects.

That isn’t necessarily 8,000 different people backing my projects though, and we’ll look into that in a moment.

6,000 pledges by country (pie chart)

From what I know about other Kickstarter projects this distribution is not unusual. It pretty much just mirrors the Kickstarter user demographic, with the US being by far the largest, and in my case with a slight skew towards the UK because that’s where I’m based.

Looking at the same data in a slightly different way you see how long the tail is.

6,000 pledges by country (bar chart)

The top three countries account for almost three quarters of everyone, and at the other end there are 23 countries only represented once or twice.

In a trivial way I find this data fascinating. Thinking about people receiving my products in the Faroe Islands and Lesotho always puts a smile on my face.

But it’s useful too.

Shipping things around the world can be painful and now I know which places I should focus on. This could mean optimising delivery by using a local distributor in places where there’s enough demand. Or it could mean that I chose not to ship to certain regions. Unfortunately for backers in South America, the amount of returns and missing shipments I get as a proportion of backers there is very high and means it may not be worth shipping to in the future.

Knowing where your potential backers are can also help you target your marketing message.

For a start, I’m fortunate that I’m able to present my campaigns in English which I believe covers the largest amount of Kickstarter users.

I’m also introducing a bias towards English speakers which I need to be aware of.

Primary language is an obvious point, but there are more subtle things to think about such as making sure I don’t use words and terminology that might not be clear to some audiences.

For example, given that the US is my largest single source of backers, I make sure I add imperial units along side metric ones when showing the dimensions of things. (As much as that pains me to do so!)

Showing imperial and metric dimensions

How do people find my projects

Perhaps even more interesting than where people are is how my backers find my projects.

Some backers of course might know me personally, but most will hear about my projects from somewhere else.

For example, they could find me by browsing Kickstarter, receiving a newsletter from me, seeing an ad on Facebook, or maybe by seeing my campaign on TV!

I’ve written before about the difference between backers coming from Kickstarter and backers coming from external sources, and those are key variables to watch.

Repeat backers

If you’re fortunate enough to have a previous Kickstarter project under your belt, a group of people who you’ll want to tell about your new Kickstarter project is those previous backers.

In theory, their attention should be much easier to grab than other people’s. They’ve already appreciated something you’ve made before and trust that you can deliver.

Another upside is that you can target them for free within Kickstarter.

The Kickstarter platform doesn’t handle the management of previous backers particularly well, but you are able to post updates on previous projects to announce a new project. Those updates will land in the inboxes of all those original backers.

I’ve successfully completed eight projects on Kickstarter now, with many thousands of backers. I think it was a natural assumption that many of those backers return to support my projects having backed an earlier one. But that’s not actually the case. Certainly not as many as I originally thought.

Based on an analysis of the nearly 8,000 backers across my past four playing card projects, I learned that over 90% of those backers only backed one of my projects.

About 7% backed more than one project, and fewer than 1% backed three or four of my projects. (Thanks, mum!)

What does this mean?

When I first started seeing these patterns I found them surprising. I thought there would be more repeat backers.

So does the fact that there aren’t that many mean I shouldn’t bother targeting my previous backers when I launch a new project?

No, I don’t think so. For a few reasons.

Firstly, I’ve found that my previous backers are an amazing source of knowledge an inspiration, so keeping them in the loop is valuable in itself. I often send previous backers questionnaires about new ideas and have even sent them prototypes of new products I’m working on.

Some of them may even become super evangelists for my work.

I need to look into the data behind this, but I think that if a previous backer does choose to back a new project from me, they will do so early. Early backers are arguably more valuable than late backers as they get the funding momentum going in the critical first couple of days of a campaign.

I should be able to pull out the numbers to test that assumption, so I’ll share an update on that in the future.

Another good thing about all the new backers each time you launch a campaign is that they all add to your overall reach — whether that be within Kickstarter, or more generally in terms of brand awareness or as future customers.

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Kickstarter is an amazingly global platform and it’s incredible how easily it opens your ideas up to people all over the world.

Knowing where people are will definitely help you improve your Kickstarter performance, but there’s a lot more insight to be had by digging a little deeper into the backer data.

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