If You’re Going to Fund — Fund Fast
Any Kickstarter creator knows that funding is in large part determined by early traction. However, few ever present facts about how much initial traction truly impact a campaign’s success. As a two-time Kickstarter creator we’re here to show exactly the extent that early traction has on a campaign’s success.
A little over a year ago my company, Atheris Games, launched our first game, Cul-De-Sac Conquest on Kickstarter. We were met with great success! We were able to raise our $10,000 goal in a mere 52 hours and ultimately raised over $20,000. We’re now working on a second campaign which has not funded as rapidly. We believe due to the fact that we were not able to get the early traction as quickly as we did with Cul-De-Sac, though we’ll present all the data and you can evaluate for yourself.
Though, since it was our first project and I was a young, first-time entrepreneur we were overcome with support from family and friends who wanted to see our dreams come true.
We led several launch parties and family and friends pledge for the game, and some even pledged incredibly high dollar amounts to see the game come to life.
The first day we had raised $6,050. Not bad for a first-time creator. However, we didn’t have a tremendous amount of backers because our marketing prior to launch had not been all that thorough.
Though, Kickstarter noticed our quick upswing in funding and the campaign began to gain serious traction on Kickstarter and started getting people talking.
Day 2 we saw a huge uptick in backers, but not as significant in our total funding amount as now people were supporting the project strictly because they wanted the $20 game we made. The most common pledge level was for $35 (which included the game and a not-safe-for-work expansion pack). An increase from 48 backers to 113 was a pretty big deal for backer count. We over doubled our backing the second day, which is huge.
The third day of Cul-De-Sac Conquest we only increased about $1,000 in funding and only added 27 backers. The campaign started growing super slowly, and was fairly stagnant from the 4th day until the last few days of the campaign. The early traction of the campaign led us to our success.
If we had not had family and friends back the campaign as soon as it launched we likely would not have funded. This is deeply contrasted our second campaign, Mutant Crops, which as of this writing is on its third day, has not had nearly as much support from family and friends.
Launching Mutant Crops we’ve had some marketing prior to the campaign and have worked to address our backers from Cul-De-Sac Conquest to get them to support Mutant Crops as well. Though, we have promoted our third gaming project significantly more as we were waiting on finalized licensing agreements for Mutant Crops and received them just about a month before the campaign launch.
With Mutant Crops it is clear our average pledge level is more in line with our most common pledge level ($19 in the US and $24 international). We’ve also seen a higher pecentage of funding via Kickstarter, but feel most of this might be attributed to garnering support from our Cul-De-Sac Conquest backers.
On day one Mutant Crops funded significantly lower than Cul-De-Sac ($2,058 vs $6,050). However, the campaign also did so with far more backers (92 vs 48).
Unfortunately, without some heavy initial pledges to bring the campaign funds up and with really stiff competition from much larger games the campaign did not receive as high of a day-1 funding percentage.
Even though Mutant Crops had reviews and more press coverage we knew we needed to garner more backing going into our second day. Day-2 we had a podcast go live to help emphasize the Kickstarter and show who we are as a company.
We planned on having a few articles, but none of them were complete so we had to roll them over into day-3.
Day-3 is still not complete, but so far we’ve got to 37% funded, with the hope of reaching 40% funded by the end of the day.
We have a few more backers than we did for Cul-De-Sac, but not by much. Though, we had 7 retailers for Cul-De-Sac throughout the campaign and already have 3 on-board for Mutant Crops, which is definitely a positive sign.
We also are planning on participating in several more podcasts, have been promoting posts on Facebook, post regularly on a large industry site (BoardGameGeek.com), and post regularly in all the Facebook groups for board games.
The campaign still has a lot of time so we’ll see what comes of it. We’re hoping it will fund early and that we’ll be able to start reaching our stretch goals. It is hard to say exactly what will happen. Consumers are incredibly difficult to predict.
For anyone interested in the Kickstarter please do check it out: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/holeshotheroes/mutant-crops-quick-worker-placement-tabletop-game?ref=user_menu
