Doing the Kickstarter thing was quite the experience. Since this is a relatively new way to get a project funded, i decided to publish some of the Data I acquired through my funding campaign. And I’ll also have some words on it.
This is going to be a three part post. In this first post, I am giving you lots of numbers and Data on how things went. In a second post to follow shortly, I will tell you about my personal experience during the whole process, what I think went wrong and what went right and what I’ve learned. And then finally, in the third post, I will tell you how the whole thing wrapped up – how the software got released, how the reward packing went and so on. So that last one will not show up until August.
Also, this one is fairly long. So grab some coffee and follow me along…
I created some charts with the Data Kickstarter provides and mapped the overall progress to the individual day-to-day steps. It’s all in Javascript, so you can hover your mouse over the spikes to get a feel for why they are there. Most often, it’s because there was some coverage on a blog or, as with the large increase in backers close to the beginning, I was featured in the Kickstarter blog or front-page (which made for the biggest increase in backers: 12!).
Some basic stats for those who didn’t follow the project on Kickstarter:
People were nice enough to give the humbling amount of 5,466.00 USD, which Kickstarter tells me is 130% of what I originally asked for (4,200.00 USD).
There were a total of 108 noble souls who contributed to the Moviesandbox cause, and I cannot thank each and every one enough.
The project was featured on Wired’s geekdad, Make Blog, Arduino Blog, Hack-a-day, Machinima.fr and others. I have put some of those features into the javascript charts below.
Here’s a chart for the Backer Data:
Notable things: Kickstarter frontpage made for the highest increase in Backer numbers (12 people). Make and Hack-A-Day did not get many people through to the funding button, but lots of clicks to the videos I made (more on that later), which may or may not have a lot to do with the fact that the project was almost finished when it got there.
And here’s the amount of money per Day:
Even though the Kickstarter Front Page thing (Thank you Kickstarter People!) yielded a considerable influx of backers, the amount of money pledged was modest. Not that that’s a bad thing, mind you – I was so happy that people got to have a look at my project! And I know that I am not fabricating iPad lap-holders. But it’s noteworthy. I’ll talk about some of the money stuff further below, when analysing the amount of backers per reward…
And an overlay of the two:
(just a picture this time)
Not that much to see here. I got a huge boost from some very generous people at the very beginning (you can see the distance of the # of backers to the # of money in the last chart) and then the amount of backers pretty much follows along the amount of money that is donated.
Some more interesting factoids:
Number of (identified) People I know that donated: 32 (30%)
Number of People I do not know that donated: 76 (60%)
This one was important to me. While it’s still a large percentage of people more or less close to me that supported the project, I was really hoping for people to be interested in the project itself, without knowing me. And I think that went rather well.
Average amount of money donated per person:
50.61 USD
Now that is a lot!
It is a lot more than what I anticipated and what Kickstarter suggests in their super-friendly tips when you create your project. So I guess there’s something different in my project than in most Kickstarter projects (they say most people don’t give more than 20$).
Numbers pledged, sorted by amount of donators:
(they don’t add up! There’s people not wanting a reward and some pledging more than necessary for the reward!)
1. : 38 people gave $24 for a total of 912$
2. : 21 people gave 1$ for a total of 21$
3. : 14 people gave 8$ for a total of 112$
4. : 14 people gave 120$ for a total of 1680$ (!!!)
5. : 9 people gave 96$ for a total amount of 864$ ( also !!!)
6. : 3 people gave 64$ for a total of 192$
and some.
The 64$ reward didn’t prove too popular. Which is okay. All of my animation work really is a bit of a hit-or-miss and not necessarily something i expected too many people to be all crazy about. What’s most amazing though, is how many people went for the 120$ reward! And how 10 backers giving 100$ are equivalent to 50 backers giving 20$. It’s math, I know, but I don’t think I was really aware of this fact before…
Also, I wanted to show you the numbers on the Kickstarter movie I made. These are straight from vimeo, so they do not count the people that have seen the movie on Kickstarter itself! It’s an indication on how much the movie works if it’s the first thing you see, and if it manages to keep your attention for three minutes.
Graph away:
And here is the Data on the “Two fish example” movie that got embedded in Make, Arduino and other places:
This movie was hugely popular. Of course, this is mostly due to the fact that it was posted on MAKE and Arduino, but still, some 2,000 finishes came out of it, and if you have seen the movie, you might have a feeling for how surprised I was that so many people stuck with it. Total plays on that movie were some 5k. It did not manage to get people to contribute to the Kickstarter campaign, but that’s okay. It wasn’t supposed to.It was an update and an addition to show what I am planning to integrate into the software. But I think it shows that I could have targeted this specific audience and highlighted the hardware-interfacing more from the very beginning. Now, I am not someone who “targets audiences”, I just want to produce an animation tool. It’s still interesting numbers, especially if you look at the Viewers-To-Backers conversion (you can check the dates in the above graphs).
And finally, my website statistics from google analytics. This is to show how many people started browsing around the website after I started the whole K thing:
Waaaaaay more than ever before. I usually had around 8 Visits a day, and now things are at a healthy 50 (after the Funding period was over). Which means that not only are people nice enough to see something good in the whole Moviesandbox project, they’re also interested to see how it develops! And that’s super-gratifying.
So that’s it for the numbers. Please let me know if you have any questions or comments or would like to know any specifics. Personal experience writeup to come.
