The Other Side of Kickstarter
I've backed 88 Kickstarters, but Gods And Icons is the first one I've run. I always wondered what it looked like to the people running a Kickstarter. Let's take a look.
Obviously this is my data, and if you run a Kickstarter, everything will be different. This is just a peek at the Kickstarter UI.
Project Activity
Here's the top view of the Kickstarter dashboard. It graphs the funding of your kickstarter. You can see the first few days were fast and furious, and then it calmed down. I've been told there will be another flurry of activity at the end, so fingers crossed.
Referers
This chart tells us that 17% of the support came from people finding it on Kickstarter. Maybe they just went to Kickstarter and searched for tabletop games. Maybe they saw a Kickstarter friend had backed it.
The rest came from somewhere on the internet and went directly to my Kickstarter page. The top three are #1: "Direct traffic no referrer information," #2: Facebook, #3: G+. I suppose my blog would fall into "direct traffic," and who knows what else. A mystery.
This also tells me the average pledge amount. If only it were $33.91!
Reward Popularity
Sorry about the lack of contrast. I had to darken the image for you to even have a chance at seeing the bar graph. It's a very pale green on white bar chart. I don't know why.
What's cool are the tooltips. Here you can see at the $35 pledge level 17% of my backers pledged 22% of the funds. And shipping is included in the funds, so I have to remember I have printing and shipping costs to cover. Not to mention art, editorial, layout, and writing.
Activity
This just shows me who is doing what. My updates show up here, as do comments on the main page.
Surveys
It's not time for this yet, but I went to take a peek, so you can too. It looks like I can send a different survey to each pledge level, but I'm not sure about anything here yet. Your first Kickstarter is a serious learning experience.
Can you spot the grammar error? Headdesk!
Do You Want to Kickstart Something?
My top two recommendations are 1: look at Kickstarters you like, and do what they do and 2: Check out Kicking It by Monte Cook and Shanna Germain. I read it three times before launching mine, and was very glad I did.