I thought it would be interesting and helpful to do some numbers-crunching on my first-ever Kickstarter. With graphs!
(I’m composing another post about the raw investment/return numbers, for the edification of others thinking about doing this kind of project, FYI – this one is long enough for now!)
I was primarily interested in my survey responses – what was the primary reason for people to back the project, and where did they hear about it in the first place? (click to embiggen)
And I got a couple of good questions on Twitter as well. More graphs after the jump.
And I tried to make a chart showing the pledge levels over time (like, did all of the $25 pledge happen in the first couple days, stuff like that) but illustrator started acting weird and I ran out of patience with it. However, I can reproduce the graph that Kickstarter generates showing the pledges over time as a total amount.
So What?
I’m looking at these numbers primarily as a way to sharpen up my next micro-game project. First of all, it looks like there’s a pretty decent “safety net” of interest in the publishing effort as an idea and of support for me as a creator divorced from the game content itself as a driver for support. This doesn’t mean that I can just throw anything out there, but it supports my conclusion that this is a worthwhile endeavor for trying out different game ideas that aren’t necessarily connected to one another.
Second, Kickstarter itself is a really, really important discovery engine. I’m not sure if there’s a way to leverage that other than just paying attention to what’s currently up for backing, but I was surprised with how many people found the project through browsing Kickstarter specifically. Also, Twitter is by far the most effective way for me to spread the word through word-of-mouth – nobody reported finding the project through my actual website, for example. That may change in a year or two, but for now, very good to know.
As for how many other projects backed, it’s interesting information, but I’m not sure how to utilize it for future projects. There were 6 people that (I assume) created accounts just to pledge to my project (represented by the dark orange). It seems like most Kickstarter users are backing 1-5 projects at a time, with a tail “up” (I cut it off at 50+, but there were a couple folks backing over 100 other projects). This supports the idea of a Kickstarter community, for sure.
Anyone else see anything interesting in these numbers?
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