Kickstarter 2 - What proportion of each pledge counts towards your goal?

This is the second of my short blog posts about my path towards kickstarting Starguild. How much money do you need to raise, and what should you set your kickstarter target at?

It is easy to start off thinking that you need to raise £2000, so your Kickstarter goal should be £2000. But you will need to take into account Kickstarter and payment processor fees, so a £2000 Kickstarter might leave you with £1800 – a £200 shortfall!

Then what about your rewards? If it costs you £20 to fulfil a £40 pledge, then your 100 backers may have pledged a total of £2000 to your cause, but £1000 of that goes to fulfil their rewards. So we are now left with £800 of that £2000. A successful campaign but a £1200 shortfall on your actual production costs!

Did you cover shipping in your pledges, or is that separate? I understand that many projects have failed to deliver (or proved considerably more expensive than budgeted for) on the basis of underestimated or suddenly changed shipping costs.

You probably have a variety of reward levels. It is worth calculating for all of them what amount/percentage of the reward pledge will count towards your total. What does your best case and worst case look like? When I worked this out for my planned reward levels I realised that two of my planned reward levels were really uneconomic and so I dropped them.

For a more detailed treatment of how to spreadsheet your Kickstarter costs, I highly recommend this blog post:
Marion Call – Kickstarter math is weird

Marion’s blog post is long and detailed but definitely worth reading and thinking through; it really helped me to get to grip with the costs and implications of what I’m planning to do with my kickstarter. I hope that this might prove useful to you too.

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Cover photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash