Here we go:
Kickstarter Post-Mortem
I wanted to talk a little bit about the campaign, how it played out from start to finish as well as what went right and what went wrong. I've heard this kind of thing commonly referred to as a post-mortem. So I'm calling it that.
The Campaign
It's apparently common for Kickstarter campaigns to have most of their funding arrive in the first 48 hours and the final 72, with everything pretty flat in the middle. This is kind of how it played out for me, as you can see from the chart below:
The flat bit at the start is because I launched at 4am GMTThe campaign hit 19% of its goal in the first 48 hours. If only things continued at that rate! It took a further 10 days to hit 50%, by which point I was starting to get a little worried.
I was repeatedly reassured that the last 72 hours would be the busiest, and it proved to be the case.
The final 72 hours brought in a total of £2,204 - which is roughly 31.5% of the target!
But where did all those backers come from?New Reward TiersI introduced 3 new reward tiers with 72 hours to go:
- Soundtrack instead of art book (£12 - the same as art book tier, or you could get both for £17)
- Your name in an epitaph (£30)
- Contribute to the music (£95, limited to 2)
These were very popular! Despite clearly stating that I didn't want people to up their pledges for the sake of it, but only if they wanted the new rewards, a LOT of backers did actually up their pledges.
The increase in pledges over the last 3 days accounted for around
£500 - about a quarter of the total money raised during that time.
Reminder EmailsI'd heard a lot about the mystical '48hr' email that Kickstarter sends out to anyone who has starred the campaign. These are simply emails that are sent out to remind people that the campaign is ending soon. This brought in 35 new backers for a total of
£381, making up 5.4% of the target - certainly not an amount to be sniffed at!
ReferralsThere were over 2,000 visits to the page in the last 3 days of the campaign. 65% of these visitors came from Twitter! This made me wish I'd taken the time to build up as much of a presence of other social networks such as Facebook.
Other big referrers in the last few days were Reddit, TIGSource (love you guys), itch.io (from the demo),
indiemag.fr,
Killscreen and
Rock Paper Shotgun. Indiemag.fr and Rock Paper Shotgun were actually 2 of the biggest referrers to people visiting the itch.io demo page, so that cannibalises the stats somewhat, as some of the visitors who came from itch.io will have originated from one of those sites. Ah well!
Kickstarter V External
From the various post-mortems that I'd reviewed, I expected around 70-80% of backers to come from external sources. The lowest I'd been able to find was around 65% external, so I was VERY surprised when I saw this:
Clearly I'd not done a very good job of spreading the word about the game!
It was very positive to see that the Kickstarter community rallied around the campaign so much. I couldn't keep up with the number of tweets that were showing up and there were some lovely messages of support sent to me through the whole campaign. I'd 100% run another Kickstarter based on what I've experienced so far.
Here's the referral data in more detail:
A lot of that direct traffic is, from what I can make out, from various websites that covered the game.
Siliconera and
Slickster were nicely timed in the middle of the campaign (which you can see as the little bump)and I think they contributed a lot of the 'no referrer information' backers (obviously alongside the other gaming websites).
It would also be unfair not to mention
indiegames.com,
Gamasutra and
Cliqist - indiegames and Cliqist in particular do an amazing job of raising awareness of and supporting small, interesting indie developments. Cliqist is also just a really nice site to use
Reward Popularity
I think I got this wrong:
Ideally, I would have liked for the tiers to have contributed almost evenly to the total. As you can see, that really wasn't the case. I don't know if this was the pricing, or if it was that I hadn't done enough to really sell any of the higher tiers.
I think it is most likely to be a combination of the 2.
The £1 was a bad idea. I think it devalued the higher tiers and didn't really contribute much to the total at all. Having 200 early birds worked well, and the £7 feels like it was priced about right. The jumps after that are maybe too big, particularly when I didn't really have any concept art on display and there was only 1 (albeit amazing) song for people to listen to.
What Went Right
Press: I tried to have an honest approach with people from the press. I love this game, but they know nothing about it. I tried to make sure that whenever I emailed them, there was a good reason for it - there was a story in the email and not just "Hey! Look at my game!"
The new rewards: This really kicked off a surge of backers, as after an hour or two of announcing them it looked like we'd hit the target no problem, which obviously bred confidence in other potential backers, particularly when those 48hr emails went out.
Having a demo: This was vital. The response was excellent, despite me feeling that it was nowhere near good enough to show people what the game was going to be. It led to a number of wonderful videos on YouTube (just search Mable & The Wood, they're all lovely).
Delaying the Kickstarter: I still wasn't prepared enough, so if I had gone ahead with the original launch date I would have been well and truly screwed!
What Went Wrong
Preparation: I should have had the demo done. I should have been more active here. I should have already had some press for the game. I should have had an active Facebook group and Subreddit for the game. I needed more time to prepare before the launch, but the next point on this list kind of got in the way:
Working a full time job: I didn't book any time off to prepare the game or during the campaign. This was a massive error. I totally underestimated how much time commitment was required to run the campaign. Getting the demo finished off meant I was up until 2-3am for several nights in a row, and then up at 6 or 7am for work (with a few wake ups from the baby during the night). I have no doubt that this had a significant impact on the performance of the campaign.
Getting ill: Seriously, slapped cheek syndrome is hell! Perfect timing the day after I launched the campaign too. I know this couldn't be helped, but it definitely had a big impact as it really hit the momentum at the start.
No Thunderclap: Thunderclap is great. Use it.
Releasing the demo too late: I think it was too late by the time the demo came out. It had a great impact on the campaign and helped me get more press mentions, but I don't think it had enough time to push as many people to the campaign page. The itch.io page is still getting a lot of views and downloads now, so those people could potentially have been backers had I released earlier.
It was also swamped a little beneath the Ludum Dare games - the theme of which was 'shapeshifting' (I mean, come oooooooooon). So yeah there was that.
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I've probably missed off a million things here, but there's just so much to take in and try to comprehend. If I've missed anything you'd really like to know, then just comment on here and I'll answer it.
Ask anything, I'm happy to share whatever you need to know if you think it will help you.
Thanks everyone and I'll be back soon!
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