On October 2, 2024, I launched my first Kickstarter campaign to fund the production of The Worldbuilder’s Almanac, a handbook of weekly prompts for worldbuilders of all kinds to help create more consistent, plausible, and dynamic cultures and worlds. The campaign met its initial funding goal of $3,000 within 22 hours, and went on to raise a total of $11,533 by the time it closed on October 30, 2024.
Despite the fact that I had first announced my intention to run a crowdfunding campaign back in July of 2023, and had prelaunch signups open for nearly a full year before launch, I strongly feel that I still went into the campaign underprepared. There was a great deal that I learned on the fly, and many aspects of the campaign that I could have been better prepared for, both logistically and emotionally.
So in the spirit of spreading the knowledge I wish I’d had, here are some general lessons and tips I’ve learned from running my first TTRPG crowdfunding campaign.
Before the Campaign
When to schedule your campaign. There’s a lot of generalized Kickstarter advice out there for what day of the week and even what hour of the day is best for launching a campaign. My advice is to ignore all that – the effect of that level of granularity is generally negligible. (And much of this advice is disseminated by companies who have a vested interest in making you feel uninformed and overwhelmed so that they can market their “expert services” to you!)
Above all else, schedule your campaign for a time that works for you. If possible, plan to launch your campaign during a period where you don’t have other priorities competing for your attention. I freely admit to making a mistake by scheduling my campaign launch directly after two major larping events, meaning that I was on the other side of the country from all my project files for five out of the seven days leading up to launch. But on the other hand, I found it important to schedule my launch early enough so that the campaign would not overlap with the 2024 US election, which would have been an even bigger stressor.
Another consideration to keep in mind is timing for business taxes. If you are paid out a large amount of money from a crowdfunding campaign and you don’t spend the money within the same tax year, that money is considered taxable profit. You may want to avoid scheduling your campaign late in the year, in order to allow yourself enough time to spend it on what it’s meant for. (My understanding is that the IRS cares primarily about your year-end balance, so if you have other large business expenses from earlier in the year, this will be mitigated – but I am not a qualified tax expert by any means.)
Build up a fanbase well in advance. Tell people about your project, involve them in the process, get them invested in your success. This may take the form of posting teasers of your work in development, or building up a mailing list, or soliciting collaborators whom you know can reach a different audience. It may also look like joining an active TTRPG community and actively building friendships – meaning supporting other people and their projects in a long-term way, not just sliding in and expecting to advertise!
Dropping a crowdfunding campaign completely out of the blue doesn’t set you up for success. You may get a substantial amount of foot traffic from Kickstarter as a platform (more details later in the section about backer traffic sources), but random people browsing on Kickstarter are much more likely to take a chance on a project that looks like it already has a ton of support than they are to be an angel investor on a project that doesn’t look likely to go anywhere.
Make a realistic budget. Take the time to price out the costs of materials, manufacturing, shipping, and storage. (Shipping in particular is a notorious crowdfunding budget-killer – I was very glad I could opt to collect shipping just before fulfillment rather than trying to roll estimated costs into tier pricing!) And figure out how well you’ll be able to scale for different breakpoints. Some items you’ll be able to get more economically in bulk, but others cost more per item the more you get. You don’t want to find yourself in a situation where the more backers you get, the worse your finances are. This is especially important for stretch goals and limited deluxe tiers – make sure you’re not so dazzled by the shiny things you want to offer that you’ll actually lose money on each backer.
Don’t forget to factor in taxes and fees as well! The guideline I followed recommended setting aside 30-40% of the total gross income for taxes, and an extra 10% for payment processing and Kickstarter transaction fees, to have a safe buffer.
Set a realistic funding goal and pledge amounts. When you set a funding goal, take a moment to estimate how many people would need to pledge at what you would consider your “standard” tier in order to reach your funding goal. Twenty? Sixty? Five hundred? Would you rather receive funding to create a product for a smaller number of people, or would you rather aim for a lofty goal and run the risk of not getting funded at all?
When deciding on your reward tiers, make sure that none of the tiers are something you’ll lose money on, but also be sure to offer a spread of different price points. In particular, make sure that you have something at the $5-$10 range. My $13 Digital Edition tier was by far the most popular tier; it was set at an accessible price point and was a digital-only reward, meaning international backers didn’t have to worry about hefty shipping fees.
High-priced reward tiers can be a mixed bag. My $95 Deluxe Box tier completely sold out, which was a surprise – I did not expect a full forty people to pledge for it. On the other hand, my $500 tier was completely untouched. This was not only unsurprising, it was a relief. I’ve come to believe that “chat with the creator” tiers really only work when the creator is someone of considerable fame in the field already, and I’m not certain that I could provide enough intangible value in a one-hour video conversation to justify the additional price.
Open prelaunch signups for a moderate amount of time. My prelaunch signups were open for nearly a year: from October 10, 2023 to launch day on October 2, 2024. In hindsight, I consider this too long. I’m certain that by the time my campaign launched, there were people on the prelaunch signup list who had completely forgotten about my project and were no longer interested.
Keep prelaunch signups open long enough to collect an interested fanbase. Don’t hold out for launching “when the project hits X number of signups” or anything similar – at best that causes early enthusiasts to get restless and does nothing to attract newer signups. At worst it might come off as a gimmick to chase empty statistics rather than setting a timeline based on when your campaign is ready, and people may lose faith in your campaign and drop out.
Provide a sample. The downloadable sample that I provided for The Worldbuilder’s Almanac is not anywhere near close to my ideal standards. (After all, I was across the country from my working files during the period of time I should have been finishing up writing it!) I was too embarrassed to look at it for at least a week after the campaign launched. And yet, within the first twenty-four hours I had not one but two people tell me that reading the sample had directly convinced them to back the project. (Imagine how many more people might have backed if I’d had a quality sample!)
People are innately skeptical of highflown marketing promises with very little to back it up. Providing a sample of your actual product goes a long way towards cementing their trust in you as a creator. To that end, I made sure that my sample was as easily accessible and sharable as possible: a simple link to a PDF publicly accessible on Google Docs. It may have been arguably more “professional” to host it somewhere like Itch.io or DriveThruRPG, but I believe that it would be counterproductive to make potentially interested backers jump through extra hoops – steps where you might lose their interest – before they can see your best source of self-advertising.
During the Campaign
Spread the word! Once again, if you go in with the mindset of “if you build it, they will come” you will be bitterly disappointed. Crowdfunding campaigns are not a method to magically pull money and backers out of the air – they’re best thought of as a method to mobilize an existing community. If passing strangers wander in to join the community, all the better, but you can’t count on building a successful campaign entirely on the idle curiosity of strangers. Tell your communities that you’ve launched your campaign, and ask friends to spread the word to anyone they know who might be interested.
Set up referrer links, and use them to track where traffic is coming in from. There will be a point in the middle of the campaign where you go a little neurotic, analyzing data to try to figure out where you’re most likely to get more backers. Be kind to yourself and set these up beforehand, then make sure to use the links consistently.
Be aware that embedded picture links on Twitter and Bluesky will cut off your 16:9 banners. This is a bit of a niche tip, but it’s one I learned the hard way, so I want to pass it on! My estimate is that if your image is 2400 x 1350, the top and bottom 50 pixels will be cut off. This will be most embarrassing if you add any sort of “funded in X hours!” banners along the bottom. I provided more details and pictorial examples in my Bluesky thread on the topic.
Be prepared for the fact that not everyone on your prelaunch sign-up list will back. The statistical average is that maybe 10% of the people who signed up will back the project. I was scornful of this figure at the start of the campaign – surely my community was better and more supportive than the norm! – and was humbled when that really was the conversion rate for most of the campaign. (The figure climbed up to 27% by the end of the campaign, which I consider blessedly high.)
This isn’t personal, and it’s not a mark against your project or against the people who signed up. People will sign up for pre-launch interest lists for anything that mildly interests them, because it costs them nothing to do so. The threshold of interest required for them to actually back a project is much, much higher. Just like any other form of advertising, the mouth of the funnel that catches passing interest may be wide, but it’s an active challenge to keep people intrigued and excited enough about your project to continue investing time and attention into it, much less investing their money!
The crowdfunding doldrums after the first two days are real. Enjoy the first frenzy of backers while you can, and don’t get discouraged when the pace of new backers drastically drops after that! This phenomenon is also why so many people advise setting a low (but realistically workable) funding goal so that you’re guaranteed to hit funding within the first two days; it eliminates a major source of anxiety over the rest of the campaign. It also lets you advertise to other backers out there that this is a campaign that is already successful, making it a more reliable and attractive option to stake their money on.
People will drop their pledges. It’s not personal. It’s hard to get over the disappointment of a little red tag alerting you to the fact that someone has reduced their pledge tier or dropped their pledge entirely. For your own peace of mind, do your utmost to not take these drops personally, and bask in the much larger number of active pledges you do have instead. There are many reasons why a backer might drop their pledge, and most of the time it has nothing to do with you.
Schedule active distractions for yourself. It takes a real toll on one’s mental health to continue monitoring and analyzing a crowdfunding campaign for weeks on end. Make an active effort to pre-schedule reasons to step away from the screen. I packed my October with hikes with friends, a trip to the local Renaissance Faire, a road trip down to Los Angeles and San Diego. I embarked on a playthrough of a strategy video game that I knew would give my mind something to chew on that wasn’t backer numbers or traffic sources.
The Worldbuilder’s Almanac Traffic Sources
So where did all the backers for The Worldbuilder’s Almanac come from?
The answer is: a variety of places, at a variety of times. The makeup of my backers changed substantially over the course of the campaign as well. I’ve divided the campaign into three periods: the first 48-72 hours, the entire middle stretch of the campaign, and the last 48-72 hours. The following are only a select few stats from each period, not a comprehensive tally of all backers.
Note that I did not pay for any advertising whatsoever. Having seen the advertising conversion statistics from other TTRPG project post-mortems, I did not see any breakpoint where the potential new backers from big ad platforms would come anywhere close to breaking even with the cost of running an advertisement, much less the greater intangible cost of my time and effort spent researching, writing, placing and monitoring the ads.
The First 48-72 Hours: People who were already primed to back
Determining the real source of a backer in the first 48 hours is especially difficult because these are likely all the people who make up your core supporter base: people who are actively excited about supporting you and who have been following your project for a while. The only question is what they happened to be browsing at the moment your project went live. Did they click the link from the Kickstarter launch email first? Did they notice your launch tweet first? Did they see a Discord post first? Kickstarter wants to claim moral credit for the 25 backers who pledged within the first 12 hours after following a link from the Kickstarter project launch email, but don’t let “referral type: Kickstarter” fool you: those were people from my pre-established community who signed up well in advance to be notified when I launched.
Selected stats on backers from the first 48-72 hours:
- Kickstarter Existing Followers (“The project you saved has launched!” emails, saved projects etc.): 43 backers
- Kickstarter Discovery (Backers who found the project through Discovery pages, recommended projects, etc.): 13 backers
- Discord: 36 backers
- Twitter and Bluesky (combined total): 6 backers
The Middle Weeks: Kickstarter Discovery
After the first two days, pledges came in at a trickle. At this point it’s easy to become increasingly desperate, feeling like you have to do something, anything, to pick your numbers back up. I tried to resist this feeling as much as possible, and to turn it into productive action by spreading the word to new audiences.
I got lots of support on Twitter and Bluesky on my regular advertising posts in the form of likes and reposts, but not much in the way of new backers. This makes sense, though, because the people interacting and reposting on social media would be my core audience, who already backed in the first two days.
A more effective source of new backers was a combination of TTRPG news outlets and newsletters that could reach potential backers beyond the audience that I already have access to. I posted a community press release in one and a free one-line ad in another, and got a brief shoutout in a third. Other designers aim to secure interviews in news outlets and podcasts that coincide with their crowdfunding campaigns to get more eyes on their projects; I’d be interested in finding out how well the increased exposure scales to yield more backers.
I had moderately high hopes of reaching a new audience through TTRPG-themed subreddits. I identified three (r/TTRPG, r/worldbuilding, and r/DnD) that seemed well-populated and active, and whose mods granted me permission to post. However, the yield was pretty disappointing. By the end of the campaign, I had collected a single-digit number of backers from all of Reddit combined. And judging from the timestamps, a sizable portion of them came from r/TwiceBittenDnD, which is a tiny subreddit, but one where I’m already a well-established figure. It’s a long-standing stereotype that Redditors are hostile and suspicious of outsiders coming in to advertise, and I think it more or less bore out in my case. It also reinforces the importance of building up genuine community bonds beforehand in general, and not treating communities like a source of profit to plunder.
Ultimately, the majority of backers during this time period, as you can see, were from random discovery on Kickstarter. By this point I had posted a new headliner image advertising the fact that the campaign had funded in the first 22 hours. It’s unclear whether the backing patterns from Kickstarter Discovery would have changed if I hadn’t done that, or if my campaign was still unfunded.
Selected stats on backers from the middle weeks:
- Kickstarter Existing Followers: 24 backers
- Kickstarter Discovery: 66 backers
- Discord: 23 backers
- Three TTRPG news outlets/newsletters (combined total): 17 backers
- Twitter and Bluesky (combined total): 5 backers
The Last 48-72 Hours: Last-chance backers
At 48 hours before the scheduled end of the campaign, Kickstarter starts weaponizing FOMO, featuring projects on “ending soon” lists and sending “last chance to back” emails to people who have the project saved. It’s common wisdom that you’ll pick up about 20-30% of your backers in the final 48 to 72 hours, and this held true for me. In the final two and a half days, my campaign surged from 250 backers to 355 backers, and picked up around 22% of the final funding total.
Selected stats on backers from the last 48-72 hours:
- Kickstarter Existing Followers: 36 backers
- Kickstarter Discovery: 36 backers
- Discord: 26 backers
- Twitter and Bluesky (combined total): 7 backers
After the Campaign?
It’s been a little over two days since the campaign ended, and I’m sure there’s much more in store for me to learn! I have already picked up two important things to know, however: first, it’s normal for a handful of backers to run into payment processing issues, and second, don’t be afraid to leave Late Pledges on! I was apprehensive about keeping Late Pledges on because it could potentially be seen as a naked cash grab, in some nebulous way that goes beyond the entire point of a crowdfunding campaign as fundraising. However, I’ve already received four late pledges in the two days since the campaign closed, so I’m pleased that at least four people who otherwise would have been locked out of pledges were able to register their interest in my project.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned through this process that I wouldn’t have otherwise realized, it’s how big and effective a marketing platform Kickstarter is in its own right. I keep repeating that you can’t expect Kickstarter to do all the work in finding an audience for you, and that remains true. It is simultaneously true that The Worldbuilder’s Almanac would not have gotten off the ground if I hadn’t laid any groundwork for publicity for it, and that The Worldbuilder’s Almanac would not have done nearly so well on any other crowdfunding platform with a smaller userbase and a less robust discovery system.
I sincerely hope that this helps someone else preparing for a crowdfunding campaign! This is just one campaign and is not broadly generalizable, but I hope that the lessons I’ve learned and the analytics I’ve emerged with provide a guide-lamp to light your own paths.
You can check out The Worldbuilder’s Almanac Kickstarter campaign and, if you so desire, make a late pledge for a digital copy up until the end of January 2025.