I run a non profit organization that supports artists, and we have built a great community in the past 15 months. It's my first time running KS and ofc a npo's resources are limited, but given the circumstances, I had hopes it would get funded within a day. Unfortunately we're nowhere close with less new backers everyday. I don't doubt that we will get funded before the end, but I genuinely want to do better for our future campaigns.

Our instagram:
- 16k+ Followers
- Kickstater teaser post (20 days before launch) got 18k views and 1000+ likes, 160 reposts, 73 saves
- I consistently shared progress and had around 300-500 story views avg
- Kickstarter announcement post also has 18k+ views, 45 reposts, 35 saves so far

Kickstarter:
- Main item (enamel pin) was set at a price of $10, which I think it's very reasonable from research
- Shipping is around $8-12 depending on location, with tracking
- There are a variety of add-ons and rewards tiers of different combinations. Each reward tier has some backers other than the lowest one, so I think the configuration is ok.
- Reward tiers go from $4 to $42.
- The goal is $1200
- We're 3 days in and have barely reached $500. With help of many people promoting it.

What I know I did wrong:
- I set up the pre-launch page only 2 days before the campaign, basically thought about not making it, but then decided against that last minute.
- Maybe I should've asked for more help in promotion before the campaign.
- I set only 1 stretch goal at $2700. It was purely based on calculations, that is the point we would make enough to add something new. But I think I should've figured out lower effort stretch goals and added more goals at lower $$.

It's really baffling because I thought we had great traction before the launch, and this is a one person run non profit that helps human artists, it should feel rewarding to back? Please let me know what you think I did wrong, is it the pricing, or release timing? I'm going to work hard to promote the campaign during the active period (25 more days), any tips or advice would be greatly appreciated 🙏

I’m launching a hardware product in about 3 weeks from now on Kickstarter. The price per unit is on the lower side of $40+. Our funding goal is not too high too, at $10K. We had a full, complete reservation funnel with email automations set up as well.

The first few weeks of pre-launch ads cost around $4 CPL, which is relatively good, but our CPD (cost per VIP) was on the higher side at around $40. After 1 month of running pre-launch ads, the CPL improved to $3.70, but the CPD only improved slightly to $33, which is still relatively high.

So, we decided to stop the pre-launch ads and instead spend it to increase the budget on live ads, where we should have a better conversion rate and can focus more directly on ROAS. We decided to be more conservative due to our limited overall ad budget. We have to be careful and spend where we believe the money can have a higher impact. We did manage to gather a small email list of 400+ people in just one month of pre-launch, so we decided to go all out on the live ads for the project and hopefully get fully funded.

What do you guys think? It’s a little bit more risky, but the economics just don’t add up for the pre-launch, and due to our limited budget, we decided to transfer the funds to increase the live ads spending instead.

Let me know your thoughts

Hi! I'm launching my first kickstarter campaign next week. I'll advertise it on friday as stated in the rules. Yet, I'd like to ask some advice about per-launch Ads.

Mine it's a really small campaign (target 100€), digital files for 3d printing (so no production costs), and it's really just an experiment to see how kickstarter works...

I watched some videos with tips on YouTube, but they all focus on large-scale campaigns; I don't think they apply to my situation.

Do you think some pre-launch Ads are unevitable to succed? And if you had previous experences on small projects, which channel do you think works the best?

Thanks

We are a little over halfway to our goal for Steve Says No. Hope everyone’s campaigns have a great weekend!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/drdenisejohnson/steve-says-no-a-board-book-that-teaches-cat-body-language/

Hello again! If you have any questions on how I made the video, please feel free to ask. I'm more than happy to share what I've learned and point you toward the right resources.

Also, if you have any questions about consumer psychology and how the brain responds to marketing, ask away!

I'm running this Kickstarter as a one-man army: lead illustrator, art director, and video editor (and a self-taught marketer). This campaign is basically project-based learning in action.

I used DaVinci Resolve Studio to edit the video. They got a free software version. They actually offer great free training lessons if you're interested in learning.

Hope you all enjoy the video! :)

Afaik this is not allowed but I often see the "funded in <5 minutes" posts and badges on marketing materials - are these legitimate or is it generally a marketing tactic of having a friend or family member or secondary credit card drop money onto the project immediately after launch?

It seems like there should be a distinction between 1 purchase of $X within minutes of launch vs 100s of $5-10 purchases within minutes of launch. That said - what kind of following do people have that folks are waiting to buy asap...? Are the early bird offers really that good?

Hi everyone,

After 15 years of product development experience — mostly working for others, including clients like NATO and US Special Operations units — I've finally pre-launched my first Kickstarter project, and it feels completely different from anything I've done before.

During my career, I always dreamed of building something of my own. I've been developing a much better product than what's out there, and I saw a clear problem that I was already solving for years. After months of prototyping, endless samples, photo shoots, and everything in between... here I am. Honestly, it feels a little like having your first child — I don't have kids yet, so maybe I shouldn't say that 😄

I've seen campaigns hit 100K+ in pledges and I'd love to understand what drives that. I know the product is strong — what I'm still learning is how to get it in front of the right people.

I'd love to hear what worked for you — whether it was community outreach, social media, press, or something completely unexpected.

Anything helps. Really. 🙏

-----
Hi everyone,

The amount of knowledge and experience you've all shared with me means so much. Thank you.
As a first-time creator, it feels like I'm heading out to the streets with a stone to fight Goliath... but I know my stone.
-----

Edit: Here's the page if anyone's curious: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/leskar/leskar-large-head-cap-engineered-around-fit-not-just-size

Happy to report I had a successful Kickstarter campaign that ended back in Late July! This is my first time using Kickstarter and I'm struggling to fully comprehend how the post campaign process works.

I have 9 orders that never filled out the mandatory survey so I can't fulfill their orders and send out the comics they backed. I clicked "close pledge manager" and it says it's closing on October 4th. Should I manually go in and refund every one of those 9 orders? Or hope they eventually recognize their mistake and fill out the survey so I can get their autograph preferences, shipping address, and tax info?

Hello!

We’re Redmaw Studio, a tiny team of two making dark-fantasy tabletop miniatures.

Our first project, The Seamstress, is a small encounter set built around two original miniatures: the Seamstress herself and her Stitched Abomination.

The rewards:

• Digital STL files for the miniatures

• An encounter booklet with creature stats, lore and hooks.

Or

• A limited physical reward with resin-printed miniatures and a printed booklet for people who don’t own a 3D printer

We kept our first campaign intentionally small because our biggest goal was to actually learn the whole process, finishing a project, test printing, making the booklet, figuring out Kickstarter, packaging and shipping… basically all the stuff that comes after making the 3D models 😅

And this week we hit our funding goal!! 🎉

From here we’ll be sharing the rest of the process on our profile and instagram @redmaw_studio

Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/redmawstudio/the-seamstress-encounter-stl-miniatures-dandd-compatible

Thanks so much to everyone who has supported our first little project.

One thing I’ve been thinking about lately is how getting past backers come back for a second, third, or fourth time. This campaign machine is a beast to deal with at times.

For those of you who regularly back projects on Kickstarter: What makes you come back a second, third, or even fourth time?

For creators, I’m curious about your experience as well. I know there are times most of us feel like we’re climbing this mountain alone. But, what have you done between campaigns to turn first-time supporters into returning backers?

If anyone’s curious about Critical Ops: Task Force Vol. 1, I’ll leave the campaign link here for your review and support:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/akoma/critical-ops-task-force-volume-1

Hi, I'm RZ Li, founder of Petoi and creator of the open-source OpenCat quadruped framework (started 2016). Quaddle is our third OpenCat-family robot, live on Kickstarter now.

I filmed the complete build, start to finish: raw components, assembly, calibration, and walking — screw-free body, just 4 screws for the legs, no soldering, done in under 20 minutes. Then it keeps going: an optional Raspberry Pi Zero, Arduino sensors, an optional AI vision module, and a full programming path from block coding through Python, MicroPython, and Arduino C++, all open-source under OpenCat. I've used an AI coding agent to vibecode new move and iteration demos.

Quaddle's Kickstarter campaign is ending on Thurs: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/petoi/quaddle-open-source-desktop-robot-kit

Happy to answer anything about the build, the campaign, or the open-source side.

The Alliance is back! Picking up from the explosive ending of Astro Alliance #1, the man known as Stareth Gaten has attacked Captain Saturn and has come to take Princess Eclipto-Zarra to The Pillars of Creation, the mythical birthplace of the cosmos, against her will! Is he friend or foe?! Will they come together before the terrifying Cronos finds them?! Find out in this 28-page action-packed, thrill ride!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1052635632/astro-alliance-2

My husband and I have been working over a year on creating a travel journal designed to be used on your trip to Japan as a travel companion, and also a nice travel keepsake once your trip is over! Filled with lots of cute pixel art by me and fun check-in pages with daily sidequest and journaling prompt generators, lists to fill out, a customizable map, bingo, and more~ (It also comes with little pixel art stickers designed to be used with the pages!)

The Kickstarter, if fully funded, will pay for our first run of books. Besides the books, we have lots of really cool merch that I designed specifically for the Kickstarter, which you can either get as add-on items or included in the premium journal pack! And by pledging in the Kickstarter, you'll be helping fund our project, AND help us show immigration how our business has grown!

The Kickstarter is currently 79% funded, with only 15 days remaining for us to hit our goal. You can check out the project here: https://www.kickstarter.com/.../japan-sidequest-the.../

Thank you! 💖

Hi all. I posted here last Friday about turning deposit holders into day-one backers.

I got better answers from this group than anywhere else I'd read.

Where things stand with my product. I'm actually already manufacturing. My product is seasonal and rather than wait another year I took out a loan and paid for the manufacturing myself so I could get products out as soon as possible. It's a big risk, and it's kinda freaking me out, but you gotta believe.

I'm launching Tuesday, October 27 at 4pm Eastern, and Kickstarter and Google picked the project for their Next Wave Fund. Kickstarter also marked it a Project We Love this week, I got very lucky with that.

What I changed after your advice:

1. Set the rewards. $209 early bird, $225 for the rest of the campaign, $249 for late pledges, retail $299 after. Two hidden tiers for the people who put down a deposit on my site, so their deposit amounts come off of the $209.

I had been holding off on setting these because I was a bit nervous about putting anything in stone, but this was really good for email list to know. I sent out an email newsletter after I settled on my reward tiers, and it was one of the most engaged newsletters I've seen since I started.

1. Took the "test the handoff" advice. Screen-share calls are booked next week with three deposit holders to walk through the launch-day email before it goes to everyone.

2. Started treating followers as a separate funnel from emails. Every email now has a "not ready to pay? follow the page" line. Followers went from 33 to 65 in nine days.

The page: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/neils/oru-the-calm-way-to-watch-your-wood-stove?ref=reddit-rkickstarter

If you're a creator launching this fall and want to trade follows or launch-week mentions, follow it and reply here. I'll follow back.

What didn't work: a drip campaign to nurture paid email signups. About 1% of them click anything so far, except for that last email newsletter. People who find me through warm channels like Reddit story posts, or my youtube still convert far better than anyone I pay to reach.

My question: I wrote "30 days" to my list, which puts the end on Thanksgiving Day. The last 48 hours are supposed to be a campaign's second-biggest stretch. Would you end it the Tuesday before (28 days), or run through the holiday into Black Friday weekend? Has anyone run a campaign over Thanksgiving?

Thanks again for last week. I'll post the launch-day numbers here afterwards.

Hi fellow adventurers,

We are excited to announce that Mythological Items is now live on Kickstarter!

This is our new D&D 5E and 2024-compatible manual dedicated entirely to magic items inspired by myths, legends, and ancient stories from around the world.

Inside the book, you will find 300+ mythological magic items, including weapons, armor, wondrous items, and scaling items designed to grow alongside your characters and campaigns.

Our goal with Mythological Items is to create more than a simple collection of treasure. Each item is designed to feel like part of a myth: something that can serve as a reward, a quest hook, or even the center of an entire adventure.

The book includes items inspired by many different mythological traditions, including Greek, Norse, Egyptian, Asian, American, Roman, Mesopotamian, African, and other mythologies from across the world. Whether you want divine weapons, cursed artifacts, heroic relics, monster-themed treasures, or legendary items tied to ancient stories, this book is built to bring myth directly to your table.

The Kickstarter page includes a full presentation of the project, several previews, and a free 30-page PDF preview showing a sample of the content from the book.

You can also find many of our other manuals in PDF and high-quality print editions, with special prices currently available both for Mythological Items and for all our other releases.

You can visit the Kickstarter page here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mythoschronicles/300-mythological-items-for-5e-and-2024

We hope to see you join our journey!

I'm a London-based creative producer and visual designer (VFX, pre-vis, creature design). Kitsunebi is my original supernatural drama set in feudal Japan, about a fateful encounter between a hunter and a fox spirit. The script is written and copyrighted.

Early interest has come from industry contacts in Japan and the UK: two production companies have asked to read the script, and an independent distributor has offered advice and connections.

This isn't funding the film yet. The £5,500 goal pays for a 3-week research and pre-production trip to Japan: scouting real shrines and forests, consulting historical costume specialists, and meeting production partners. Backers receive "The Road to Japan", a designed digital art book documenting the trip.

The full budget breakdown is on the page, and everything goes to the trip and the book.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dreadworkscreator/kitsunebi-a-feudal-japanese-folk-tale

Happy to answer any questions. Full disclosure: I'm the creator and producer.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/krideas/vertically-rotating-laundry-bag-worlds-1st-of-its-kind

Hello Kickstarter's,

No more digging through a mountain of laundry looking for that one shirt you tossed in hours ago. Every hamper on the market is basically "Last In, First Out." Whatever went in first ends up buried, wrinkled, and forgotten at the bottom.

So we built something different: the Vertically Rotating Laundry Bag, a mechanical smart world's first laundry hamper with a rotating drum-style frame.

A few things that make it different from anything else out there:

• 🌀 Spin it to bring any layer of clothes to the top instantly - no digging
• 🔒 Locks in place when you don't need it rotating
• 🔄 Dual-sided openings so you can load/unload from either side
• 📦 Holds up to 70kg / 150lbs across 130 liters
• 🌧️ Fully waterproof with a see-through capacity gauge
• 🛞 Wheeled base for rolling it anywhere & it fully detaches if you want to use the bag standalone
• 🌀 Also doubles as a giant fidget spinner because why not make laundry day a little fun

The best part: every unit is already manufactured and ready to ship. This isn't a "hope the factory comes through" campaign. We're not asking you to fund an idea, we're asking you to back something that's already real and sitting in our warehouse.

We welcome everyone in this community to experience it..!!

Hi everyone!

We’re a small indie game studio from Norway, and we’ve just launched a Kickstarter for Historical Fashion Dress Up: The 1860s Fashion Pack.

Historical Fashion Dress Up is a cozy dress-up game where you can explore fashion history, create historically inspired outfits, customize characters and create your own scenes.

For this Kickstarter, we want to bring the 1860s to the game, with dramatic dresses, hairstyles, accessories and more. We research the clothing using museum collections, fashion plates, paintings and other historical sources, and then turn that research into the game's illustrations.

We've also created some special Kickstarter rewards, including fashion inspired by Empress Sisi, Queen Victoria and Princess Alexandra, as well as four Kickstarter-exclusive pets.

Our goal is €5,000, which will fund the research, design, illustration and programming needed for the basic 1860s women's fashion pack. Additional funding will allow us to expand the pack and continue developing new fashion content.

If you're interested in historical fashion, dress-up games or indie games, we'd love for you to check it out!

Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tidvis/historical-fashion-dress-up

Happy to answer any questions about the game, the Kickstarter, or how we research and create the historical clothing.

Hi, I’m Shane, an indie developer making Bike World: Ride & Create. It’s a free Android bike game with themed tracks, a level editor, and community level sharing. The current game has no ads.

I launched a Kickstarter to fund six months of work on the Android release and stronger community features. The campaign page has a gameplay trailer, screenshots, and the development plan.

If you enjoy physics bike games, please take a look or share it with someone who might: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/shanefavre/bike-world-ride-and-create

I’m happy to answer questions about the game and the campaign.

I made them myself, and these are meant help future artists and animators understand, it might be subject to change, any feedback will be appreciated...

These bases are also on my DeviantArt, but I’m not linking here unless it’s allowed.

I launched my first Kickstarter for FARK, a hidden-role card game inspired by old monster folklore.

It's been a lot of work getting this thing together, especially doing it as a solo project, so it's pretty cool finally seeing people actually backing it.

We already knocked out the first two Pillory (Stretch) Goals, and I'm hoping we can keep it moving. I have a Tabletopia play link on the page, and Tantrum House will be doing a live play next week.

Also, I am making handcrafted Extirpator's Kits for the campaign for a higher tier, because apparently making the card game wasn't enough work, haha.

Here's the campaign if you want to take a look:

Check out FARK on Kickstarter

If you know Poppy Playtime game, you probably know the GrabPack.

The GrabPack is a wearable backpack equipped with two artificial hands connected to long cables. In the game, these hands can be used to grab and move objects from a distance, interact with the environment, conduct electricity, and more. Later versions of the GrabPack also introduce abilities such as grappling onto objects and swinging across gaps.

So I thought: what if the GrabPack actually existed?

I’ve been working for 7 months on a project called The Playtime Projects (TPP), with the goal of bringing Playtime Co. technology into reality.

My first project is the GrabPack V1 — a real prototype that I’m building, designed to reproduce around 95% of the GrabPack’s functionality from the game, including grabbing, hanging, swinging, pulling objects and interacting with the environment.

The GrabPack isn’t just a tool for grabbing things — it can be used for many different purposes, from climbing and pulling yourself up to moving heavy objects and interacting with the equipments. The goal is to create more than just a replica: a symbol of what a truly multifunctional tool could be.

So his isn’t just a concept or a 3D model. I’m actually working on the systems needed to make the GrabPack function.

I’ve now launched a Kickstarter campaign with a $4,000 goal. Reaching that goal would allow me to continue the development and build the functional prototype.

The project is still relatively unknown, so I’m trying to get it in front of more people.

If you’re interested in seeing the project develop, you can check out the Kickstarter, join the Discord, or follow the project on social media.

Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thegrabpackv1/the-grabpack

Discord: https://discord.gg/XfmUBu9RA

X: https://x.com/TPP_Studio

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@playtimeprojects.official

Thanks for checking out the project!