I wanted to share some of the key metrics of my Kickstarter campaign to help first time creators peer behind the curtain a little.
For context, this is my first campaign I’ve launched. It has a $15 base tier, $50 deluxe tier, and a $4 PnP tier. It funded at 226% the goal, with 274 backers.
I’m by no means I did everything perfect, or think that these metrics will represent every campaign, but I wanted to share the details and give some background on the decisions I made or my interpretations of what I was seeing. In the end I’m extremely happy with this as my first campaign and am hoping to carry lessons learned into future successes!
100%
of first day backers were from my existing audience
If you want to fund on day one you need to have an existing audience to take you there. Some people will be browsing Kickstarter and might stumble on your project, but to quickly hit your funding goal and please the Kickstarter algorithms, you need an ready and eager audience to be successful.
In order to keep my audience warm and ready for launch, I changed my email frequency from monthly to weekly for the final 4 weeks pre-launch (which includes the email I sent as soon as the campaign was live. I also increased my activity on social media and made reference to my launch date, with links, as much as possible while also not just posting spam.
$2k
funding goal
Setting a funding goal is tricky. Backers are smart, so if you set an artificially low goal they’ll know you’re trying to game the system to fund immediately and will be turned off. On the other side, if your goal is way higher than similar games it will look like you don’t know what you’re doing and they’ll lose confidence.
For me, $2000 represented a significant amout of my costs, and would bring in at least 100-130 backers, which would be worth my time to produce and start the ball rolling for my publishing journey.
Having gone through it now, I am thinking about the funding goal a little differently, where it relates to your pre-launch followers.
303
pre-launch Kickstarter followers, 526 emails
I get asked a lot how to set a funding goal, and how many pre-launch followers are needed. The two answers I believe are connected. Your funding goal should allow for 2 outcomes, 1) to provide the money you need to deliver your project, 2) to let you fund on day 1-2.
By working with an assumed conversion rate, you can then figure out how many followers are needed to reach your funding goal quickly. Or, if we want to make this a little mathy: R = F x C x P. – Where R is the revenue generated, F is number of Kickstarter followers, C is your early conversion rate, and P is your average pledge amount.
Let’s run the calculation with my campaign values as an example.
- F: 303 followers on Kickstarter
- C: 20% conversion rate. General Kickstarter conversion rates are 10-20% – though these published rates are usually end of campaign rates. My conversion rate on day 1-2 was about 20%, where my final conversion rate was 31%. So select an assumed day 1 conversion rate but be conservative.
- P: $18 estimated average pledge. If you only have one tier, average pledge price is an easy estimate. If you have more you tiers you’ll have to make some assumptions.
That comes out to $1090 – which is quite a bit shy of my goal. However this calculation doesn’t take into account additional backers from an increased ad run on day 1, friends/family you reach out to, or email followers who haven’t followed your page that might back when that final email comes out.
So use this calculation as a planning tool, play around with some assumptions and figure out how big of an audience you need and how realistic your goal is.
31%
conversion rate of pre-launch followers
My pre-launch funnel was to direct people to my landing page which had an email sign-up. After signing up for emails they then got a link to my Kickstarter to follow. This means most of my pre-launch followers very high quality leads since they had good exposure to the project before signing up. I’ve heard expected ranges are 10-20% for conversion rate. The fact that I had a quality funnel and cheap but very attractive game is what I believe led me to the higher end of this range.
About two weeks before the launch I switched my funnel to direct straight to the Kickstarter. So I’m very excited to cross reference my pre-launch email list and see what that conversion rate looks like. I estimated about half my email sign-ups followed my Kickstarter page. And if 31% of those converted, that would mean my email conversion is ~10-15%, which would be really high.
21%
conversion rate of post-launch followers
Post-launch followers are likely all people who came from my post-launch ads that bypassed my landing page, or from Kickstarter itself – I can’t see the breakdown where the followers came from, just the backers. This path provided a pretty different conversion rate than my more well tended to pre-launch audience.
This validates the advice you’ve likely heard, which is to prioritize email collection over Kickstarter follows. You can take emails from campaign to campaign, but I will lose contact with 79% of these post-launch followers when this campaign ends. Additionally, of the 21% that did back, I will only be able to add them to my email distribution list if they opt into marketing emails.
So even though I gained Kickstarter followers faster than I was getting emails, my conversion rate of email followers is so much higher that it negates any gains, and it’s an overall negative when I factor in losing these leads post-campaign.
20%
of my overall backers came from Kickstarter
Kickstarter makes this one hard to understand, and they sort of pad their stats. On my dashboard I see this pie chart:
This makes it look like Kickstarter is responsible for 54% of my backers. However when you look at the breakdown, you see that this 54% includes people who were following the project and got the automated Kickstarter launch email. Well, 100% of those people were people I brought to the Kickstarter page. The 51% also includes people who had saved the project – again, mostly people that I brought in.
Going through the referral sources and pulling out just things like Kickstarter’s Discover Page or recommended pages brings the real total closer to 20%.
20% is still a good chunk, but that’s again validation that you need a pre-launch audience. I went into the project knowing this, but still thought, well my game is so beautiful, so well received, I have such low costs per click… there’s a chance it really can take off through Kickstarter discovery. That of course can happen, but it’s hard to break the system so plan accordingly.
20%
of my funds are from 5% of backers on the deluxe tier
Since a main priority for my first campaign was simplicity, I wasn’t sure I wanted to manage a deluxe tier. But the reality of advertising is that it costs money to get backers. If you can increase the average amount a backer spends, you make your marketing more efficient – which is extra important for a cheap game with a not great marketing ROI.
I focused on quality additions for my deluxe tier. I sourced a nice neoprene playmat from Board Games Makers, as well as large (but shippable) art prints from FedEx. Using print on demand I was able to avoid large MOQs and but got a lot of quotes to make sure my costs were as efficient as possible.
The result is that 5% of my backers brought in 20% of my funds. This means the average pledge from backers who backed the physical product was $21.
Now you might have noticed from my graph above the actual average pledge was $16.54, which is due to the 76 backers who opted for the print-and-play. The question I therefore have to ask myself is, did offering the PnP tier actually make me earn less, or did it open the it up to backers who would have backed nothing. It’s a hard question to answer, though I do know for a fact several of the PnP backers came from communities that focused on PnP as well as OUS backers that didn’t want to pay the very expensive international shipping costs. Tough to say, but I believe the PnP brought in an audience who wouldn’t haave backed the physical product, making it worthwhile.
50%
of of my funds came in the first 2 days
28%
of of my funds came in the final 4 days
Nothing shocking here. The spikes at the beginning and end of campaigns is well documented. This is just another data point.
1.5%
of of my funds came after the campaign closed
I’m not sure what caused a few backers to trickle in after the campaign ended. I had turned off my ads, so it was likely interacting late with their emails from me or Kickstarter notifying them of the campaign ending soon.
The takeaway here is that unless you have a good reason not to, you should keep your campaign open to late pledges.
499
people watched my campaign video
l waffled a lot on how much effort to put into my video since I never watch Kickstarter videos. Luckily I followed good advice that they are key for some backers so I made a good effort of it. Seeing that almost 500 people watched it, and 53% completed it, definitely colors how I approach future campaigns, knowing how much visibility it had.
0%
of backers came from reviewer referral links
I provided the reviewers with custom referral links so I could track where backers came from, and I saw 0 backers using these links. Like discussed above, this one is tricky to parse out based on how Kickstarter tracks backers. So, it is possible though that someone clicked the link, followed the project, and then backed later – but I can’t see that.
I’ve heard from other creators though that almost no direct traffic comes from reviewers. However you need to have reviews on your page for credibility. So when you’re planning your marketing spend remember that reviewers drive credibility more than actionable traffic.
27
day campaign
From everything I’ve read, the beginning and end is when most funds come in. Some people think the longer the campaign the more time to get backers, but you’re more likely to fatigue backers and lose momentum. Some experienced creators run even shorter campaigns. I ended up landing on this date so I could launch on a Tuesday (a must) and end on a Sunday so I could be available for any sort of closing ceremonies and last minute questions.
6
weeks lead time for Project We Love outreach
I found the Project We Love form and submitted it about 2 weeks before my launch. I never heard anything back. After my project funded I reached out to a random Kickstarter email I found online to say thank you for the platform that gave me this opportunity, and update on the campaign, and a follow-up for the Projects We Love status.
I received a very kind and considerate email back and I was told that for future campaigns it’s best to reach out about 6 weeks ahead of launch so they have time to review and provide feedback.
I’m not sure how these metrics would vary if I had the Project We Love status – so I guess I’ll just need another post for my next campaign when I get it!
If you’re interested in seeing the campaign page for additional context for these points you can follow along here.
And let me know if there are any other metrics or details you’d like to better understand!
Updated 2/28/26 with post-campaign statistics and perspective.