Update!
First things first: the void cat/kitten sticker and magnet kickstarter is live and at 286% funded, with 8 days to go! This campaign has a ton of add-ons, too, so if you like any of my other stickers/magnets, here’s a way to get them with cheap shipping. Link here!
Business Rambling
On a related note, I’m working on an update to the Kickstarter book I wrote 12 years ago after wrapping up four campaigns. I was high on my success and eager to share my strategy, which was more achievable for the average creative without an enormous fanbase… a strategy I still use, twenty campaigns later, because I prefer “quick and repeatable” to “enormous and overwhelming.” Understanding your psychology is an important part of business process modeling. Having a ton of deliverables hanging over my head for half a year doesn’t work for me; I’d rather run lots of small, easy-to-wrap up campaigns. Other people might find it more stressful to run multiple Kickstarters a year when a single large one might take care of more of their bills at once. It’s all in the head game.
Anyway, I’ve learned a lot running those 20 extra campaigns that I’d like to share, and since I’m already thinking about revamping the book I am paying better attention to what I’m doing this year. Part of my plan for 2024 is to run 4-7 campaigns, just to see what that’s like. I’d also like to vary the style of campaign, so I’m going back to my prior successes for inspiration… not just on theme, but to guess at how much work each will entail. To that end I’ve been updating my Kickstarter data spreadsheet and (for kicks, and maybe the serendipitous insight) asking Claude to examine it and tell me what kinds of campaigns I should run to maximize my effort-to-reward ratio. Doing this has taught me how much data I’ve left out of that spreadsheet if I want it to make sense to anyone else.
- For instance: I put no expense data in this spreadsheet. I have yet to run a campaign that lost money, but I didn’t think to centralize any of that information, which is now spread over 12 years of email, receipts, and other spreadsheets. Oof.
- Next: I put no information on prizes. How can you tell whether a crowdfunding campaign earned less than another without the context of whether there were any big ticket prizes? Or whether I purposefully limited the prize pool to keep the workload down?
- Speaking of workload, I didn’t record how long fulfillment took me. Some of these small ticket campaigns took me less than three days to fulfill. Is it better to run a large-earning campaign that takes me three months? Or lots of these little one-week campaigns?
- Then there’s the stretch goal variable. Lots of stretch goals, or interesting ones, make for more money… but also more work. Unless I’ve planned it so that the stretch goal is already complete beforehand… which is also data I didn’t bother to write down….
Claude came up with a list of other variables it would consider helpful for analysis, like retention (how many of my backers are repeat patrons) and referrals. Possibly the most useful one it suggested was tracking post-campaign sales, because some of my Kickstarters produce products that continue selling (like most of the books), while others don’t move unless I’m pushing them actively (like the art). Then again, I haven’t put down on this spreadsheet that I’m now using add-ons to move the stagnant prizes from previous Kickstarters, and some of them are almost entirely used up now…!
I’m not sure if it’s “too late” to gather all this data, or even if it’s necessary for my personal use; I have a sense of what works for me. But I find this kind of business analysis is entertaining so I might make a habit of it going forward.
The void cat campaign is my third this year, and I’m already learning a lot—this time about consecutive campaigns—but it’s all good. I’m enjoying the process.
Good Marketing
Also, randomly, a shout-out to Sticker Mule. I use them for magnets, since they give the best prices on them, and they sent me this email completely out of the blue. Is that some kind of automatic trigger? “If cat, then discount?” Is it a template? Or did someone decide to handwrite this deal for me? Hilarious! I’m going to have to do one more cat campaign, just to use it!
