One piece of luck. My Kickstarter campaign dashboards - part 1

Last week I looked at the high-level data behind all eight of my successful Kickstarter campaigns.

Now I’m going to look in more detail at each project and go through my interpretations of my project dashboards.

The project dashboard is a page that only the project creator sees, and it shows funding progress throughout the campaign, and also an overview of the different sources of backers. (You can read more about project dashboard here.)

Every dashboard tells a story of how a project went. This week I’ll dig into the project dashboard for my very first campaign.

Project 1 - The Ockham Razor

My first ever Kickstarter project was in 2015 and was for a minimalist cartridge razor, the Ockham Razor.

Ockham Razor on Kickstarter

It’s still the most complex product I’ve ever launched on Kickstarter and it’s crazy to look back on it and see my naïve ambition!

In the end it did succeed. I reached 128% of my goal, but only getting to 100% near the end so it was definitely an uncomfortable ride.

I came very close to giving up.

Ockham Razor - project dashboard

Looking at my funding progress graph, the first thing to point out is the small green section on the right. The graph turns green once a project reaches its funding goal, so you can see that I only reached my target a few days from the end of the campaign.

My goal was £19,000, which is relatively high, particularly for a debut Kickstarter. I’ve not had a goal anywhere near that high since then.

The high goal was a big reason why I came so close to failure, but it was necessarily high because I needed to fund tooling to get the razor diecast in metal.

Another reason the campaign was difficult was because I didn’t have much of an existing following and I guess I just wasn’t very good at Kickstarter back then.

I believed in the product though, and persevered.

I spent a lot of time getting in touch with journalists, bloggers and anyone else I could think of who might spread the word about my project.

And it worked. My project had a worryingly slow start, but then one morning in the second week of the campaign I woke up to find a big spike in pledges. That’s clearly shown on my project dashboard as my funding pretty much doubled in a couple of days.

Lucky break

That was caused by a write-up in the gear and style website, Uncrate. That then lead to it being picked up and published on a few other websites.

It’s still possible to get free publicity, but I believe it’s harder to come by these days, not least because many publications feel much more reluctant to write about Kickstarter projects now. Which makes me even more grateful for that coverage in Uncrate.

My project could very easily have gone on to fail even after they wrote about it, and they took a punt on me which I think wouldn’t happen now.

Frustratingly, these days it feels like you’ll only get coverage once you’re guaranteed to succeed.

Without that single piece of luck I believe my first ever Kickstarter project may well have failed and my life would be very different now. Fine margins.

Epilogue

Getting that press coverage wasn’t just luck. I sent hundreds of emails telling people about my project. It wasn’t the most efficient process and the response rate was low, but the cliché is true — you make you’re own luck.

After the successful Kickstarter project I founded the Ockham Razor Company Ltd and the razors are still available today.

Kicktraq

If you’re interested in this kind of data, and would like to see it for other Kickstarter campaigns, you can see the funding progress of any campaign on a website called Kicktraq. It’s a very useful tool when you’re researching for your own project.

Below, for example, is that one great day I had after I was covered by Uncrate.

Kicktraq data

Next week

Next week I’ll share a breakdown of dashboards from the Kickstarter campaigns that followed this first ever one.

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