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

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.

Cover photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

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