This is going to be just a general look at how things went, and an attempt to find meaning in the numbers. Nobody ever talks about this stuff in public, and I sort of understand why, but data is data and I hope somebody will find it useful. It’d be nice not to guess as much, right?
Okay. To start: the Fermi Resolution Worldbook actually came in over expectations. I was forecasting getting revenues somewhere between two thousand and twenty-five hundred dollars, and was surprised to have it end at just over thirty-four hundred. (It matters because if I had known that, I might have flipped stretch goals and used the spur of an adventure to push even more people to sign up.) Here’s how it shook out…
…and here is a comparison with my older crowdfunds.
Green represents first place, yellow second, blue third. As you can see, the worldbook came in second when it came to number of backers, amount raised, and RBR (Returning Backer Rate), and first when it came to the new/old ratio of said backers (the actual percentage was a surprise). If my RBR had been higher, I would have gotten closer to Frozen Dream’s baseline, but this is still an excellent result for a first-time Backerkit crowdfund.
So why wasn’t the RBR higher, and why was the new/old ratio completely opposite to my usual results? Probably because I was running a TTRPG crowdfunding project instead of a book. People who buy fantasy games may overlap with people who buy fantasy books, but not perfectly – and they also don’t necessarily overlap with people who buy my books. I tried to boost that percentage by pointing out that the worldbook will serve as a ‘bible’ for the Fermi Resolution series; I think it helped, but not as much as I was trying for. Which, again, is fine, and something to consider in the future.
Now let’s compare this project to the Tinsel Rain Kickstarter:
Here’s a day-by-day comparison of the two.
The major things that jump out at me here are both that the Backerkit was consistently better at getting me new backers (their pre-launch system in particular is very good) and that it provided a smoother ‘ride’ through the project. The ‘doldrums’ of crowdfunding are well known: you get a burst in the beginning, a burst at the end, and sometimes a bump in the middle. With the worldbook I was getting pledges virtually every day.
By the way: a large part of that is because I was doing a cross-collaboration project with Lead & Chrome, to our mutual benefit. I wasn’t really sure ahead of time how many of his backers would back my project, and vice versa, but it paid off. I’m curious to see whether this is a feature of cross-collaboration generally, or something unique to TTRPG projects, but either way it still highlights that Backerkit generally has a good toolset when it comes to boosting projects.
Summing up, it can’t be argued that in a lot of ways Backerkit is just better than Kickstarter when it comes to finding new backers. One thing that I do find Kickstarter to be better at is at direct communication with current and future backers; there was an issue during the campaign where somebody tried to get in touch with me with a question, and simply couldn’t. I’ll be offering feedback to Backerkit on that later, but I’m still overall impressed by the way the company has put together a genuine competitor to Kickstarter.
Which is not bad at its job! But they should definitely take notice of their current business environment. They’re no longer in a position to automatically dominate the crowdfunding market.
Hope this analysis helps people!
Moe Lane
PS: Be sure to check out the preorder store.
#commissionearned