How long should a Kickstarter project run for?
Julian Hicks
Experienced Manager and Designer, development Consultant Owner Tabletop Towns - Photographer, eBay and Kickstarter guru.
In the past I have always opted for a 30 day run for my Kickstarter projects. With Tabletop towns Gaming Mats I selected the date I wanted the project to end on to be around the end of the month so at the point of Kickstarter trying to collect funds everyone would have been paid, but I then failed to do the maths properly and ended up setting a 40 odd day duration....
I also opted to be a Kicktraq Day One project - this mean that you can all share in the analytics to some degree - there should be a link from the top of the KS page or you can try here... https://www.kicktraq.com/projects/1680924898/1748777895/
The project funded quickly and has done well but I have had far more backers drop out during the project then I have ever seen before...
There will be a number of factors contributing to this - the project delivers product that more people run kickstarters for than my previous ones... - the project has evolved more during its life than any I had before, changes in approaches to lamination and then mat size had an effect here.
To ensure that I was able to manufacture all of the products to be delivered I staged the reward tiers in waves with delivery windows that I felt I could beat or at worst match...
But even taking all these things into account I have experienced a lot of drop out from backers who I can only assume just got bored of waiting...
As it stands today with 5 days to run I have 82 backers but have had 115 - which means 33 backers have looked liked and backed and then decided against the project and cancelled....
At least some of this may be due to the overlong duration...
So my conclusion and advice to others is (along with most of the perceived wisdom on the subject) Go short not long - 30 days or less is best.
I will be running another of course and will be adding to the range of mats and sizes I am able to offer - I will run that next one for a shorter period and no doubt I will update you here as to how I find it :)
Experienced Manager and Designer, development Consultant Owner Tabletop Towns - Photographer, eBay and Kickstarter guru.
9 年All in all I lost less than 30 backers during the project duration, several who left came back again and several who appeared to have cancelled had in fact just cancel so as to change their chosen reward tier - as people upgrade early deliver tiers became available again etc.
Thanks for sharing your experience. The modern shopping mode is 'buy today, get it tomorrow' - perhaps, if you target your advertising pitch at a slightly older audience, you will get a lower drop out rate?