Is Kickstarter worth it? After 8 Kickstarter campaigns has Kickstarter delivered?

I often hear two extreme opinions about Kickstarter.

Some people think that just by putting your project on Kickstarter, plenty of people will find it and you’ll make loads of money.
Others think that you have to do all the work to bring your own audience to Kickstarter anyway, so what’s the point.

The second attitude is probably a more realistic one but, as with most things, the truth is somewhere in the middle.

It’s certainly true that you can’t expect all your backers to find your project organically within Kickstarter, but some backers will.

I looked at the data from my eight Kickstarter campaigns over the years to see exactly how many actually do.

If you don't like pie charts, the short answer is yes, Kickstarter has brought me a big chunk of backers and is well worth doing. If you like pie charts, read on.

Average of averages

Firstly I took all the funding data from all my campaigns to see how much of it came directly from Kickstarter.

For context, this data is shown in the project dashboard, where it’s automatically divided into three categories - pledged via Kickstarter, pledged via external referrers, and pledged via custom referrers.

I’m focussing here on the first category which essentially is backers who found my project within the Kickstarter ecosystem. You can read more about what these categorisations all mean in a previous post here.

So, looking at my eight campaigns, of the over $350k raised in total, about $177k is classed as “pledged via Kickstarter” - 48%.

I’d say that makes Kickstarter well worth it.

`Funding breakdown from eight campaigns`

Project variation

I had a look at each campaign separately and they’re reasonably consistent. More or less 50% of all my backers have come from Kickstarter each time.

A few things to note

My first two campaigns don’t have any “custom referrers”. For the first one I think that feature didn’t exist then. That might’ve been the same for the second, or maybe I just didn’t really know how to use it at that time!
Projects five and eight are Make 100 campaigns. These are mini campaigns where the scope is constrained to only 100 rewards. For these I made less effort in driving traffic to my projects, which I think explains why relatively fewer backers came from outside Kickstarter.
More generally, referral tracking isn’t a perfect science and there are definitely ways that backers could be misclassified within this data.

Project sizes

To put things into a bit more perspective, and in case those small projects are skewing the story, the chart below shows that same data from the eight projects, but with the area of the pie chart proportional to the total project funding.

`Overview of my eight campaigns with area relative to funding`

Conclusion

As I said before, referral tracking data can included errors, but I think it’s safe to say the traffic you get directly from being on Kickstarter is significant. And I’m not just saying that - I already have at least two more new Kickstarter projects lined up so I really believe it.

Nevertheless, you still need to put in the work to get visitors to your Kickstarter page. This is especially true at the beginning of the campaign. As is often said, a strong start is critical to the success of a Kickstarter campaign.

Largely, you are responsible for that. If you can generate that early momentum, it will massively increase your chances of picking up more backers organically from Kickstarter. Once you start to get backers, your project is more likely to appear in front of people browsing Kickstarter.

I would suggest you think about it this way: you find a backer and then Kickstarter will match it. So if you don’t put in the work, Kickstarter will provide you with an additional half of nothing.

Kickstarter has definitely evolved over the ten years I’ve been working with it, but I don’t think it’s fair to say that Kickstarter doesn’t bring organic backers like it used to.

If you put the effort into your campaign, Kickstarter is an excellent place to host it and it will reap rewards.

…

Next week

Next week I’ll have a closer look at the top-level data behind all eight of my campaigns. How have they differed and are there any noticeable trends over time?

`Dashboard data from my eight campaigns`

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This week marks one year of my weekly posts about crowdfunding and you can see the whole back catalogue here.