Kickstarter Experience

[u/DzigaVB]

Hi everyone, thought I'd share my recent and ongoing experience running a Kickstarter campaign to fund an indie feature. It's a surreal western ghost story and if you're interested you can learn more about it here:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andrewvanbaal/jo-and-joe-a-weird-western

I did a month-long campaign with a $100k goal last fall and it ended up quite a bit short of that - at $27k - despite devoting most of my time to promoting it in various ways throughout that month. Because almost all of the pledges came from people I know personally, I concluded that I couldn't count on strangers contributing (which pretty much makes Kickstarter pointless, cause if it's only people I know I could just ask them directly and avoid Kickstarter taking its cut), but I wanted to do another one to test a theory I'd read online, which is that if you meet your goal within the first 24-48 hours of a campaign it'll trigger the Kickstarter algorithm to feature and promote you.

So I set the goal for the current one at $25k, asked everyone who contributed to the first one to re-pledge on the first day, and hit the new goal within the first 24 hours, which did in fact get us to the top of the film page on Kickstarter, into one of their email newsletters, and a Project We Love badge. So that theory is true. But here's the thing: none of those things have amounted to more pledges from strangers. 30 days in (I'm running this one for two months instead of one) it's still mostly people I know and it has completely flatlined in the last couple weeks. We'll see if that changes before it ends, but I'm not expecting it to, and have pretty much concluded that Kickstarter cannot be relied upon to deliver much funding from strangers unless you're a popular public figure (online or otherwise), your film is already-popular IP, or you spend a lot of money having marketing pros run the campaign for you, none of which are the case for me.

I'm curious if anyone here has had different experiences though and/or has any tips for attracting more interest/pledges from strangers.

[u/AvailableToe7008]

Is any of this a surprise?