Business Post: Breakdown of Climbing the Ranks 2 Kickstarter Campaign

by | Jul 31, 2024 | Uncategorized

So the Climbing the Ranks sequel Kickstarter campaign finished this past Monday. Figured a little transparency post was in order.

So the Climbing the Ranks sequel Kickstarter campaign finished this past Monday. Figured a little transparency post was in order, since people helped promote it.

Most interesting, was the average pledge amount at $66 (pretty damn high and why we made so much with so few (relatively) backers). More breakdown coming later; but the other thing to note is how Kickstarter is claiming 64% of our backers came from them.

That’s not exactly accurate, but we do tap into a different customer base.

Worth noting, because this work is a sequel; for the original Climbing the Ranks Kickstarter, we made CAD$10k and had 191 backers. So we had roughly a 57% drop off in number of backers and a 68% drop-off in revenue.

That’s actually GOOD, since the rough estimate is for sequel Kickstarters, you generally only get 50% of your backers coming back.

Now, I generally want a readthrough rate of 60%+ for a series, but again – this is NOT pure readthrough like on a retail stie. 57% is happy making.

Here’s a backer breakdown taken from Kickstarter.

Now, E-mail as I understand it, comes from the follower and update e-mails we send out. I generally don’t really consider them something Kickstarter helped us get (since followers are who we pushed initially).

However, there’s a lot that they do do. Search, Advanced Discover, Ending soon, Recs, etc.

~25% of the backers came from Kickstarter’s website itself. Or ~CAD$1.8k. Since Kickstarter takes 10%, we still made ~CAD$1k more than going alone.

Project followers are important.

We had fewer followers for this project than CtR 1 (which had 130+ if I remember correctly compared to 106 here) and converted fewer (30% compared to 25%).

Still, 27 backers chose to back us, which is pretty damn good. Generally, I think we see between 20-40% conversion rates for backers from previous projects.

Next, our various reward kit breakdowns.

Particularly interesting is the sheer number of ebook only backers, though we still have over 55%+ who want a paperback of some form.

The second tallest graph (39 backers) are for the hardcover backers and the third tallest, for books 1 & 2 (which makes up 35% of money raised but 14% of backers).

Big $ rewards are good. They push your total $ raised up significantly.

Let’s talk about things we did:

  • Author swaps
    • Okay, not a lot of direct conversion but good for visibility.
  • Newsletter pushes
    • Very, very good
  • Social media
    • Useless. Dropped off SIGNIFICANTLY. We used to get at least a dozen, now 0
  • Stretch goals
    • Only did 3. Stopped at $6k. We limited stretch goals as we wanted the books out fast and this was NOT a big deluxe edition)
  • No audiobooks
    • Getting audio codes for book 1 was a pain so we didn’t bother with book 2.

Last thing, we are making use of Kickstarter’s late pledge option and it’s working for us. So far, we’ve seen 2 new backers which is really cool. Also 5 backers have dropped out, so far but that is likely to change once paychecks hit on the 1st/2nd. I still expect to lose 2-3 (that’s very common).

And that’s it. Email me any questions.