Business Post: Let’s Talk Kickstarter – Immortal Connections

So, we recently finished the Immortal Connections Kickstarter, and it did amazingly well. Much more than expected. Here are the final results:

Pretty good, right? So let’s talk about what we did, the referrers and the rest of the promotional details that might be of use.

Follower Details

Right, here’s the breakdown of follower details. We did not have a lot of launch time (barely a couple of weeks), which was not the smartest thing to do. The more people you can get on your follower list beforehand, the more chances you have to convert them. Having a longer pre-launch timeline would have been better, but it was what it was.

What’s interesting is that Kickstarter started showing new conversions. The pre-launch followers converted at a 59% rate, while we had was 10% low. Now, compared to our previous Kickstarters, the pre-launch conversion rates were between 33% to 23% for the most part, other than a few weird ones that jumped up to 65%. Figure 23-33% works, while post-launch followers are between 10% to 13% on average.

Backer Sources

Alright, so Kickstarter gives this really interesting pie chart that gives information on where your backers come from. If you used the information as given, you’d think that Kickstarter drove over half of my backers. That, however, is a bit of a stretch of the truth.

They do provide much more detailed breakdown, including the ability to create Referral tags, and we do use those. I’m going to summarise the information because it’s broken down quite deeply, and I’d rather split the information in a way that makes sense at least to me.

So, for those that came directly from our efforts, without a doubt (socials, our newsletters, Discord and our blogs and website, etc.); we had 95 backers (i.e. 41% of those who pledged) and $9k of the total.

Next. We have 72 backers (31% of the pledgees) who generated $6.3k who came from past Kickstarters, E-mails going out from our profile, Automated e-mails to followers and Launch Updates for followers and the like. Basically, people we had driven to Kickstarter who further backed us afterwards.

In that sense, you could say that 72% of those who pledged (and 71% of our revenue) were all from people we drove over.

That left the 64 backers (28%) and $6.2k of our revenue coming from Kickstater’s direct efforts. These include things like being showcased on their Recommended – Ended Project Footers, Discovery Landing and Category Pages, Homepage features and all of that. These would be individuals who might never have heard of us without Kickstarter’s aid, or who might be reminded to back us from all the promo work we’ve done.

Obviously, some of these things are hard to track exactly, but getting 28% of our backers from KS is huge and one reason we keep doing it.

Revenue and Reward Popularity

If you haven’t seen a funding progress chart before, this is what it looks like:

You get the vast majority of your increase in the first 48 hours (the grey line is the first 24 hours, then we get another 24 hours afterwards of decent increases). Generally speaking, the rise in revenue afterwards is slow (comparatively) with another jump in the last 48 hours generally speaking.

Note that, because of late pledges being available, there’s an extended line after the end (the 26th) that shows no new pledges coming in. So you could cut the flat line after the 26th off since we’re not pushing the KS anymore (even though we do take late pledges!).

Again, big jump at the end with the last 24 hours.

This is what it looks like without the final late pledger side (this is for Climbing the Ranks 2).

Pledge Breakdown & Revenue

Alright, let’s talk about the last part, how pledges and their breakdown can make a difference in how much you fund for. Let’s take a look at the difference between two Kickstarters, with nearly the same number of backers, but completely different revenue levels.

One is $18k, the other is $7k and there’s only 8 backer difference, with the KS with the higher backer count having more backers. The difference was an average pledge of $67 and $184 – one was a Special Deluxe Edition Kickstarter, the other was for a basic launch of a book.

So, yeah, don’t worry as much about the big numbers, because those will vary depending on how your pledges shift.

For those curious, this is the breakdown of backers for Immortal Connections. The highest was our hardcover rewards, while the ebook version and finally, the paperback pledge was next.

Again, that’s part of the reason why we funded at such a high rate, because of the higher pledge levels.

And that’s really about it. There might be further breakdowns, on what worked best for promo (our newsletters drove the largest % of backers by far with socials only contributing about 10 backers or less than 5% of our backer total), but I think I’m done. Feel free to ask questions if you have any.