Whaaaa?

If you’re lucky, your kickstarter campaign will have a day like our most recent Tuesday.

This is the sort of day that “isn’t supposed to happen” in the normal life-cycle of a main sequence kickstarter. Many kickstarters start out with a big opening-day spike that can play out over about three days, then they level off for most of the campaign, then they see a big spike on the final three days.

While we’ve had a good track record so far of upward movement on our graph, the kind of spike we had on April 3rd — at the start of the third week — is more of a rarity, unless something comes along that really points a lot of traffic your way (celebrity shout-outs, for example, or strong coverage on a popular media site). All in all, it was the second strongest day in our campaign, full stop, even including the first three days.

So what happened here?

Aside from the graph you see to the right, the Kickstarter dashboard does not provide a sort of day-to-day data breakdown, particularly of traffic sources. (I’m tempted to contact them & ask for it, but that might be best done after it’s all over.) You can see, tho, that starting the day before, we were already beginning to see an uptick. Just not one on the scale that occurred.

A few notions of what MIGHT have happened come to mind:

• PAX factor: I’m speaking on the Kickstarter panel at PAX East, and that got us on a nifty promo page on the Kickstarter site of the projects of various participants in the PAX East Kickstarter presence.
• We started showing up on the website’s front page in the fiction category.
• New sample chapter came out, on Tuesday.
• We did our weekly update, on Tuesday, announcing new stretch goals involving Harry Connolly and Stephen Blackmoore. (You can see from the above data that we tend to have an update-day bump.)
• We broke $20,000 on Monday, making C. E. Murphy’s novel a certainty, and improving the value proposition of our $10 tier.
• Folks (Including TV/Film writer John Rogers, of Leverage) backed us and tweeted about it.
• We busted the 600 backer mark (now past 700), so there’s some sheer critical mass of numbers potentially going on.
• Some folks got their paychecks at the end of the month, so they were able to make some financial commitments starting Monday.
• Mild increase of the supply of our higher-dollar-value upper tiers.

I’m sure there’s more, but that’s a lot of aggregate factors, and it’s entirely possible that our spike came from all of them rather than any particular one.

Luckily, a few days ago I took a snapshot of our usage data, so I can run a comparison to see where the “deltas” are. Here’s the usage data after our banner Tuesday:

So where were the gains? Here:

Nearly a full third of our source data remains mysterious, due to no referrer information coming along to the party. Another third (at least) of our traffic came from the sum total of all the various ways Kickstarter has provided to drive people to our project. The remainder is a spread of all the various other ways we’ve reached out, both directly and through our talented pool of authors.

Ultimately, this doesn’t answer the question “where’d it come from?” so much as to say, “Yep, it is the aggregation of many smaller streams, and a sort of critical mass of several factors at once.”

I’ll take it!

Hi. This isn’t an April Fool’s post.

We’re coming up on $20,000 with the Dinocalypse Trilogy (and more) Kickstarter campaign, and I wanted to share some data from the dashboard:

When it comes down to it, a Kickstarter campaign doing well (I think I can safely say we’re doing well without that being boasting) is an aggregation of many smaller audiences into a bigger one. You can see, above, how the various means of project discovery on the Kickstarter website helps drive traffic to us as we pick up momentum. You can also see how very potent social media has been for us (which is, itself, an aggregation of many small audiences). What’s left from those is a variety of blog sources, some of which I control directly, some of which represent review sites, community sites, and blogs of the project’s contributing authors. (You’ve heard that we’re offering up novels by Atomic Robo‘s Brian Clevinger and Urban Shaman‘s C. E. Murphy, too, right? And you get them all in e-book for a low backing price? Plus, we’ll announce even more this Tuesday…)

The upshot, then, is that you can’t plan on a “single channel” to bring you success with your kickstarter campaign. You’ve got to think “okay, here’s my one audience … but where are others that I can add into this?” Not a fan of facebook, twitter, G+? Tough — you’ll get another audience if you’re over there, so consider how to establish yourself and gain a following before you launch. Is your project a single creator gig? Well, maybe you should think about how to involve other creatives, too — you’ll get both the fruits of their talents and their audiences when the project launches. Every little bit counts, and it’s only when you start adding all of that up that you can reach for that self-sustaining critical-mass reaction that can really make things fly.

That’s the theory, at least. I’m only 12 days into this thing. Three weeks yet to go, and more kickstarter campaigns beyond this one. We’ll see how well the theory holds up.

So, the Dinocalypse Kickstarter is going really well — lots of “heat” in its first 72 hours, busting through stretch goals, forcing us to get more out there as quickly as possible (but with careful consideration — avoiding panic is critical). It’s a fun ride, and it’s easy to simply look at the big numbers (backers and dollars) and think, yay, yay, yay!

And I do, because I get to look at (and spasmodically refresh) this (click to embiggen):

But it’s important — well before this point — to make sure you have your cold shower handy. In essence, you should prepare for your worst-case success scenario, and make sure that’s acceptable to you, because once you cross that green line above, you’re going to have to deliver (short of canceling the project before its conclusion date).

What’s a worst-case success? It’s the one where the greatest possible proportion of the money you’ve received goes toward your costs-to-deliver. These costs to deliver can be manifold, but I’m going to focus solely on the cost of shipping, because it’s something that, once you spend money on it, “just” gets the product to the customer, and doesn’t produce any lingering positive for you as the publisher/creator (aside from, hopefully, a prompt and pleasant delivery experience for your customer). By contrast, money spent on, say, a print run, at least has a likelihood of producing additional, salable inventory for you — a lingering positive, an asset. Not so with shipping (nor, for that matter, the transaction fees and cut for kickstarter.

I’ll use Dinocalypse as an example, focusing on the moment that we hit our $10,000 “deliver the full trilogy” goal.

First, let’s look at our best case: our $10 tier. Here, the backers get three e-book novels for the cost of 2, and the cost to fulfill — to deliver — those to the customer are very close to nil. If we got 1,000 backers all buying in at this level, we’d hit our $10,000 goal, and we’d only lose money to the kickstarter cut (5% — $500) and the transactional cut for amazon, the payments processor (3-5% — $500). So our best case leaves us with 90% of the actual cash folks put towards the project.

Now, our worst case: that’d have to be our $25 tier, as launched. Here, we’ve got a single book with a shipping budget baked in of about $10. We might be able to shave off a couple bucks from that by trading sweat equity for dollars, packing it ourselves instead of using our shipping service, going for media mail, all that, but for right now we’re looking at a sort of rough, UPS-like basic ground shipment cost. Better to slightly overestimate that, especially, because you’re also on the hook for packing materials (padding and structure are as important as postage here; you want folks to get their spiffs in great shape). If we had 400 people buy at $25, that’s our $10k, but $4,000 of that would be marked for shipping costs. Add the $1k in kickstarter and transactional costs, and that’s $5,000 out of our $10,000. Massive! So our worst case is that this is the only tier folks buy in at, and we walk away with only half the cash we’re looking to have.

Knowing your bracket — in my case, 50%-90% being the actual take — gives you context, expectation, and planning. If I absolutely need all my costs covered, I have to look at that worst-case percentage and ask myself: should I be increasing the target to accommodate the cost of delivery? It’s pure algebra at that point, and will give you a more realistic sense of your ability to get what you’ve got to the people who want it. In my case, knowing that worst-case prepares me for how much cost Evil Hat might have to bear, period, in the face of big success. Potent and valuable information there.

Reality is, almost no project sees uniform backing. I ran the numbers — guesstimated and rough — on what things looked like when we hit $10k yesterday. Roughly eyeballed, it looked like it was coming out to about $1,600 in shipping fees incurred so far, so adding in the $1k transactional costs, meant that we were still likely to see about $7,400 of that to go towards our development costs. That certainly doesn’t cover all of the costs we’re looking at to develop the first three novels, but it’s a nice solid chunk that we’ll have taken care of before/as we take the product to market following the kickstarter campaign. Importantly, seeing that 26% of the cash so far was going towards that stuff did not produce a moment of sticker shock for me — instead, it looks a lot more like “at least we get to keep 24% more than we would in the worst case!” And that, for sanity and for financial planning, is worth gold.