I honestly don’t know why I went for a D&D adventure as my first Kickstarter. I think it is a combination of fear that a solo product wouldn’t fund, and I am a part of a discord with some big name D&D publishers that are all driven by Kickstarters, it seemed easier to be supported by people in that space.
One of the pieces of advice was to use your post-Kickstarter survey to ask people if you could add them to your Kickstarter mailing list. The object is to tell these people about your next project so you are not starting from scratch every time. Over a few iterations, you should end up with a substantial list of people who like your stuff and end up supporting each new project.
When I came to do that, 75% of people said that they wanted to go on my list for next time. That is great, but what I really enjoy is not D&D; it is solo play and trying out all these new cool games. My 130 new Kickstarter followers would not be interested in that, or maybe one of them maybe.
So, why not start again, and do it right this time?
I searched for solo roleplay kickstarters, as solo is my niche, and found about a dozen that are genuine solo projects. The kind of project I was thinking of would be typical of the #zinequest but not run in zinequest.
That suggests a backer count of about 140 people. With tiers at about $5 and $10, ending up at $700 – $1400, or an average of $1000 per project. Those numbers would work for me.
My production process would be create the title for my Patreons, kickstart the most interesting title each month, list the title on my storefronts post Kickstarter for longtail sales.
I have the solo expertise, I have a mailing list reach of about 8000 names, and that is growing every week.
If the adding backers to a Kickstarter mailing list also works, then $700 could be realistic for my first solo Kickstarter, but some of the projects that I have looked at are making $3k-$4k. That seems entirely viable in a years time.
What I need to do now is pick the first project to kickstart and set up the prelaunch page.
Exciting times!