Kickstarter live case study. Step 3: Launch

On Wednesday I launched my Kickstarter to raise money to make the smallest deck of playing cards in the world.

It went better than I expected.

…

This time last week I still had quite a few things to do.

Firstly, my project was still in review by Kickstarter. There wasn’t much I could do about that, but it was a bit nerve-wracking as approval only came through late on 30th January when I had to launch by the end of the month to be part of Kickstarter Make 100.

In parallel, I still had to polish my video, images and Kickstarter pitch.

Once I’d been able to borrow a macro lens for my camera, the photos came together nicely and I was pretty happy with how the general storytelling was developing.

And I found a great short piece of stock music to add to my 17-second video.

Shipping planning

Other than general project presentation, I also still had to make sure I was happy with my reward pricing and figure out my shipping costs.

The goal is not to make money from shipping, but it’s something that can easily get out of hand and you don’t want to lose money on it either.

From a fulfilment point of view, this project is about as simple as it gets. One product shipped from one location. (Well, actually two products once I added the framed add-on option.)

Knowing the size and weight of my package, I could simply go to the Royal Mail website and test some dummy addresses for UK, EU, USA and RoW.

I often see people intimidated by shipping planning on Kickstarter and you need to do your homework here but it’s not difficult.

It’s possible to limit the countries you ship your Kickstarter rewards to, but I always offer global shipping. It opens up my potential customer base, even if it does add a bit more effort to the planning.

When I do that, I only break down the granularity to the four regions I mentioned. That obviously means that RoW (rest of the world) covers a lot of countries, which is a potential risk.

For example, it’s very possible that I’ll lose a bit of money on postage if someone from New Zealand backs the project, but that might get cancelled out if someone from Turkey does. But it will be a pound or so in either direction so not a massive deal.

I’m willing to do this because I know that the majority of my backers will likely come from UK, USA and EU. So I make extra sure I understand the shipping costs to those regions and can accept some risk in other areas.

You should also look at where your backers are likely to come from- either from past Kickstarter campaigns, or any other data you have from sources such as your website analytics. Make sure you accurately estimate shipping for at least your key regions.

The Kickstarter project page

As I mentioned last week, for this project the pressure was somewhat off because I only needed 100 backers. I could’ve put more work into the Kickstarter presentation but I decided not to. One extra thing I would’ve done is some video footage of me talking to camera, but film editing is not my strong point so that would’ve been a lot of work.

The key things you need to get right for any project, big or small, are:

1. Main project image (see my previous posts here and here)

2. Project video (this isn’t strictly required but Kickstarter, but you should always have one. Even if it’s literally only a few seconds long like my one here)

3. Still photos (clear product images, design details, behind-the-scenes, etc)

4. (Animated GIFs are also supported by Kickstarter and are great)

5. Graphics (people are lazy and replacing words with graphics can be a powerful tactic)

6. Copy (it’s important to get the words right, but this is at the bottom because the visual assets are nearly always more important)

Showing potential backers behind the scenes

Launch day

Again, because this project is constrained in scope, the launch itself was a bit less consequential (and stressful) than usual.

I set the project duration to two weeks, so had plenty of time to play with. In hindsight I probably should’ve gone for just one week. On a “normal” Kickstarter campaign I would go for 30 days, and Kickstarter allow anywhere between one and 60 days.

I’ve written before about launch timing. For this project it was less critical but I wanted to launch at a time that gave North Americans a chance to back the project in case the 100 rewards went quickly.

It turned out that they did.

The limited edition 100 rewards were gone in a couple of hours. I didn’t even have a chance to send out updates to all my previous backers and my mailing list.

Because of the short time in putting this project together I’d only had my pre-launch page live for less than 24 hours so had fewer than ten people signed up to that.

This feels a bit premature since the campaign is still live, but looking at the data showing backer sources, 64% came from within Kickstarter, and the next two biggest sources were “Direct traffic no referrer information” and then a couple of posts I made on Reddit.

I’ve previously written in more detail about the breakdown of backer sources for my last campaign before this one.

Next steps

Obviously this campaign is still live so I’m not counting my chickens yet. Kickstarter backers can cancel their pledge at anytime before the campaign ends, and invariably some people do. But in this case I’ve already had a few people asking about the cards so they would be waiting to jump in if others pulled out.

So I’m bringing forward some of the next project tasks in order to try and get ahead of my delivery schedule. These are mostly around getting the cards made at production-level quality and production-level quantities, albeit relatively small quantities in this particular case. That last point also means that I can afford to make some more labour-intensive choices compared to if I had to produce 10,000 decks of cards.

After printing the prototype cards for this project I’ve learned about a few things I can improve so need to do some work on finalising the design files for print. There’s a difference between “good enough” for prototypes and “good enough” for production.

And lastly, I have to finalise the packaging. There is a lot more involved here than for my regular decks of cards. It’s been really fun though and I’ll share more about that later.

The Smallest Deck of Playing Cards in the World - prototypes

So there we are. There are still 11 days left of the campaign but I’m thrilled with how it’s gone so far.

I’m really excited about getting these tiny little cards made and delivered to backers. Then after that I’ll need to submit all the evidence to Guinness World Records, and all being well, I’ll be able to say I’m a world record holder.