Anybody who has run a Kickstarter is familiar with the U-shaped curve–a big number of pledges at first, a long slow flat middle, and then a spike at the end again.
In recent years this has become closer to a reverse J than a U. Kickstarters are so front-loaded now that the tail spike is much, much smaller than the initial burst of pledges.
The data below reflect EN Publishing’s own 50+ Kickstarter campaigns, and we’ve found it holds generally true. Other creators may have different experiences; we can’t speak to that. But we hope an insight into our own experiences might be interesting to those thinking of running their first KIckstarter.
Generally, you’ll make one-third of your funding total in the first day. When running a Kickstarter, after one day, look at the current funding and multiply it by 3–that’s your projected total. Assuming, of course, you don’t have some kind of gamebreaking promotion planned partway through; if Oprah is going to promote your campaign on day 15, then all bets are off. But for most Kickstarters, this holds true.
Now, just HOW front loaded is it? Let’s look at our current Kickstarter, Monstrous Menagerie II: Hordes & Heroes. Kicktraq show you the traditional shape, as expected:
No surprise there. Pretty typical for a Kickstarter campaign.
BUT, Kickstarter now offers a more granular view of these stats. Instead of daily, you can see them by HOUR. And that shows us just how front-loaded these things are. The big spike isn’t just the first day… it’s the first couple of HOURS. This is the first 7 days of Monstrous Menagerie II: Hordes & Heroes:
Look how much of that funding happened literally in the first couple of hours. The first day is busy overall, sure, but it’s the first couple of hours where the big spike is.
The old maxim — first day times 3 — still hold true. But we can also say that the first 3 hours x 5 is a strong guide of what a campaign will do. In the first day, MoMe2 did £38K. Three times that is a projected £114K total. That’s the region we’re projecting it to end in, and that tends to be fairly accurate over our 50 campaigns. Yes, we keep a spreadsheet which includes every campaign we’ve run, it’s funding totals at various points, pre-launch followers, all sorts of stuff, and that lets us make some fancy little algorithms to predict our Kickstarters pretty accurately.
But let’s look at those first 3 hours. £14,797 + £5,501 + £3,102 = £23,400 in the first 3 hours.
Our projected total is £114K, so dividing that by £23.4K we get 4.8. Close enough that we could guess that the funding total will be 5 times the 3-hour total.
- 5 x the 3-hour total.
- 3 x the day-1 total.
Of course this will vary a bit depending on how long your ‘day 1’ is. This isn’t the first 24 hours, it’s until midnight at Kickstarter HQ, which is Eastern Time, US. We usually launch at 4pm UK time, which is 11am ET, making ‘day 1’ a 13-hour period. You could run these numbers using 24-hours, or other time zones, etc., but we went with that because when we started the big spreadsheet, years ago, Kicktraq was the only platform tracking this stuff and that’s the time zone it runs on.
Anyway, I don’t know if this is useful to anybody. But it’s a glimpse into what we’ve learned about our own Kickstarters.
Also, please back Monstrous Menagerie II: Hordes & Heroes!
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