What I learned from my first Kickstarter (Part 3/3)✨
The final part: the financials of the Kickstarter!
Welcome back to part 3 of “what I learned from my first Kickstarter”. As I write this, I’m prepping for my second Kickstarter for D&D Dress Up. It seemed like a good time to gather all my notes on my first attempt and bundle them all into a write-up for both your benefit and mine.
Yesterday, I covered what I’d learned regarding “during”. Today, I’m going to note 2 tips for “after”, and give you some insights on the financials of my Kickstarter:
After: Pledges will drop or have to be refunded
During the campaign, one person canceled their pledge. After the campaign, one person’s pledge couldn’t be processed and their €12 pledge dropped 10 days after the campaign ended. And like I said yesterday, 1 person wanted their pledge refunded. All in all, 7% of my pledges didn’t go through for one reason or another. My Kickstarter was a small one, and I have no idea if these are representative numbers or not. But take this into account when ordering or prepping rewards before all orders are processed.
After: Take into account processing time after campaign end
My campaign ended on 5 May 2023 after running for 2 weeks. I got the funds in my account on 18 May, almost two full weeks after the Kickstarter finished. So while you can have everything prepped and ready to go as soon as the Kickstarter ends, keep in mind that the thing you did the campaign for - the funds to order the things you were advertising - might take a couple weeks to get into your account, and it might not be the full amount pledged to you at the end of your campaign.
Some nitty gritty numbers
Something that fascinates us all: the cost breakdown. I didn’t crunch the hours I put in until now, because I’m a bit scared of the result. I know I put way more hours in than I got back in revenue, and if this were my sole income then it wouldn’t be sustainable. But just to add one more data point to the articles already out there, here are some numbers, assuming a freelance hourly wage of €55:
So all in all, I LOST somewhere between €6,221 and €6,471 depending on how much tax I need to pay at the end of the year.
Now this is assuming that I could have filled all those hours with paid work, which I probably couldn’t have. Still, if I wanted to earn a living wage and this would be the average, I’d have to release a pack per week (which would mean making 120 hour weeks, haha). So any way you put it, I’d need future Kickstarters to do better if I want to keep doing them.
A few nuances to make after those shocking numbers:
The packs are now for sale as well in my shops, so with time I might be able to earn back the time I spent on creating the packs, at least. I haven’t made any sales since the Kickstarter though.
For this second Kickstarter, I probably won’t have to put in more than 5 hours to get the app side of it working.
I spent about 10 hours editing a Kickstarter video. I hope to be able to reuse some of that for the next Kickstarter, and use my Kickstarter description as a base. Hopefully that’ll knock down the prep & promo time to about half.
After the Kickstarter ended, I wanted a central place to host all the polls, updates on future packs, etc. I landed on Patreon. Though pledging isn’t a requirement to participate, some people have since joined, and I’m now earning about $10 per month from the Patreon! Yay! :)
In conclusion: Kickstarters are hard, y’all. But they’re also a lot of fun, and I’m really grateful for the support I got during the campaign, both from people pledging and people hyping the project. So on to the next one, and let’s see how that one goes!
Thank you for supporting my work. As always, if you want to have a chat, feel free to leave a comment or email me.
For now though, I'm back to working on the new pack and other cool illustrations :) Will update you with some new art in the next newsletter!
-Rengin