My Kickstarter Experience

I've recently concluded my first experience of using Kickstarter to launch a project and have been pleasantly surprised by the experience.

he project in question was The Twelve Quizzes of Christmas, a compilation book of twelve of my former Christmas Quizzes, lightly edited to ensure relevance to a wider audience. The main draw of Kickstarter was that it provided a convenient platform to collect preorders (ordering in volume reduces costs) and to promote it to an audience outside my core friends.

From my perspective I felt it went extremely well. Including a couple of late entries, I got 45 backers, about half of whom weren't people I know personally, collected around £650 and will be shipping nearly 100 copies of the book. All but one of my backing tiers was used, with the most popular being 'one for a friend', which at £10 clearly hit a sweet spot for people wanting to support the project without being too expensive. As well as reaching my funding goal, I hit two stretch goals, which - combined with some of the backer questions - means that purchasers will be getting 35 brand new questions; a nice enhancement to the core product.

As a platform, Kickstarter was very user friendly. It was very easy to set up the project and set the different tiers, the postage costs function is brilliant in that it allows you to charge differently to post to different countries and the means of communicating with backers are simple and effective. Post-completion, the survey tools have been great at allowing me to get the necessary information such as shipping addresses from backers. I'll be going to print early next week and backers should be getting their copies in late November or early December, in plenty of time for Christmas.

Overall, a great way of sharing and distributing a hobby project in a way that seemed to work well for all concerned!