We Did It!

I’ve not had a chance to prepare a proper Kickstarter debrief post so here’s a quick and dirty ‘it’s done’ post for the moment.

Funded! In 3.5 days as opposed to with 4 hours to spare!

We did it! We ended up 188% funded (£13,162 before payment errors) with 304 backers.

We had 85 backers of our first campaign return to get the expansion (that’s pretty much one third!) which is amazing. I’m amazed and delighted that so many people loved FlickFleet enough to want to get more.

And another 220-ish new supporters. I’m slightly disappointed that with ten times the advertising spend we didn’t get more people than last time but I think that it’s at least in part due to the video being too long and too serious. Lesson to learn there.

Even with funding really quickly (3.5 days) the Kickstarter process was still uncomfortable. The app on my phone notified me every time we got a new backer, but not cancellations (we had a lot again) or adjustments (positive or negative), so I was constantly checking to see where we were. Cancellations and negative adjustments still felt awful, like we’d failed in some way, despite the few people who explained it saying it was nothing we were doing wrong, just financial pressure.

Again I was completely thrown by the pledge levels people chose. Last time I was expecting a few deluxes and mostly standard but it was pretty much 50-50. This time (learning from that) I expected a 50-50 split with maybe a third of new backers wanting the expansion. This time it was 2/3rds deluxe and 85% of new backers opted for the game and the expansion.

And then the campaign ended with a (literal) whimper. On Wednesday afternoon I managed to get a paper cut on my eyeball. How you ask? My own ineptitude. Still it was very sore Wednesday evening so the stuff I had hoped to do (video editing) fell by the wayside. Thursday morning it seemed ok, so I went to work but as the day wore on it got worse and worse and I had to leave early. Thursday night we were into the last 48 hours and I dosed myself with painkillers and went to bed at 8:30. Friday morning it was agony, so I went to A&E and got prescribed all of the eye ointments. I spent most of Friday in a dark room with my eyes shut. Saturday morning was agony again so I got my hands on some codeine which did the trick, enough to do the bare minimum at campaign end.

Thankfully it’s doing much better now, my vision is returning (still a bit blurry at long range) and the pain is pretty much gone. Still I can’t help but think we could have had a better finish if I had been more on the ball.