The Anatomy of a Succesful Kickstarter
Our Kickstarter continues to kill it. We continue to be off-the-wall grateful for your support. And our index fingers continue to throb from clicking ‘refresh’ all day.
The admin section of Kickstarter breaks down where all that money came from. (Surprise twist: it wasn’t just our grandmothers who donated, even though we painstakingly explained to them what crowdfunding is.) If you care to know how we suddenly ended up with $27,000 in 3.5 days, allow us to drop some knowledge:
The average backer gave $27.55. Not bad, seeing as a copy of the magazine itself only costs $15. But it shouldn’t come as a surprise that people really love stickers and tote bags (especially when designed by someone as rad as Dylan Lathrop).
Accessories aside, $15 was still the magic number—the most popular pledge level by a long shot. The only shocker is that our big ticket item—a personalized voicemail from James Deen—isn’t helping us up our average at all. No one’s bought it yet. Our theory: many of his fans are so young they probably don’t have $500 lying around. (Possible side project: starting a Kickstarter to help a cohort of Deen fans afford our Kickstarter incentive.)
This (bigger version here) is a ranking of our top referrers by dollar amount. Big thanks go to Twitter (which drove 32% of our donations), Facebook (11%) and this very Tumblr blog (6.4%). Another big shout-out to New York, one of the Tomorrow’s favorite magazines and apparently an excellent mobilizer of people with deep pockets (1.1% of donations).
A few takeaways (if any) from our success, for people who may try to Kickstart something in the near future:
- Little incentives worked best for us. People with the money to afford the big ones aren’t the ones who follow us on Twitter.
- Your network is worth more than Kickstarter’s. We were listed in the “Popular” section on Kickstarter’s homepage for a while, but it only drove eight donations.
- Any publicity helps. Most of our donations were driven from external referrers: The more people chatting about a project, the more donations.
We’ll keep you posted as the next 26 days unfurl.
—Zak
