Designer Diary: Kickstarter 1 week in

My total Kickstarter project length is 17 days, this snapshot is 9 days to go, so 8 days in.

I had privately hoped for make a net profit of about $500, and I am well past that, so the money side is great. The real goal is to start building a Kickstarter-friendly mailing list. There is nothing as efficient as email marketing. It does take longer to build a good mailing list. You only want people who have opted in, and I don’t believe in trying to swell your list by offering constant giveaways. All that is doing is tell people that if they stay on your list for long enough that they will get loads of stuff for free.

I do give things away for free, but they are not massively promoted. Some of the games I write for do not allow me to sell my rules. So I give them away.

The other important thing about email marketing is that I will own the mailing list and I can move it around. If I change website host, I can move my list with my site. This is the problem with social media sites, they come and go, but they own your followers, you don’t.

As things stand, I would hope to get an email list of Kickstarter friendly people of about 30 addresses, of which 10 or more will be completely new to me.

If I stay on the ball for all of 2023, I could in theory run 12 more kickstarters. Each should be bigger and more successful than the previous one, because I will have a small but growing list of people that I can announce each project to. More successful projects should have a greater chance of being picked as a “Project we love” which is a marketing boost provided by Kickstarter.

If everything is entirely linear, which they rarely are, I would hold to end up with a list of nearly 400 people to announce my kickstarters to. If I can get $700+ from just a standing start, I should be able to do a lot better with a supportive list behind me.

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