A Kickstarter's Guide to Kickstarter
In 2011, after running a successful Kickstarter campaign for my documentary film, I became fascinated by a question: Why do some campaigns succeed while others fail? Through research, data analysis, and interviews with successful creators, I discovered patterns that most people didn't see. Insights that could help creators who wished to use crowdfunding to fund their independent projects.
I turned those insights into A Kickstarter's Guide to Kickstarter, a 65-page book that I funded (meta-appropriately) on Kickstarter itself. Since its release, the guide has been downloaded over 5,000 times and helped creators successfully fund projects ranging from short films to graphic novels, including campaigns that raised over $50,000. The project taught me I could research, synthesize, and communicate complex information clearly, skills that now inform all my writing work.
The Situation
In the fall of 2010, my business partner and I ran a Kickstarter campaign to raise $15,000 for a documentary film we wanted to make called Identifying Nelson/Buscando a Roberto. Without really knowing what we were doing, we launched our project on September 14th at the #140 Conference in Boston. Even though we had some initial success, our campaign languished for almost two months to the point where I was ready to give up. Then something amazing happened. During the last week, we raised $9,000 in just six days.
It was an incredible experience, and I felt there was something about the site’s all-or-nothing funding model that allowed my project to succeed. Before this experience, I had been involved in a few other entrepreneurial projects, but none had taken off the way our Kickstarter project had. Curious about what made this platform so effective, I set out to learn as much as I could about Kickstarter and the other crowdfunding platforms that were emerging at the time.
The Challenge
After our documentary film campaign succeeded in 2010, other creators started asking me for advice. At first, I hesitated. After all, Who was I to give advice? I'd only run one campaign, and honestly, I'd gotten lucky, as we nearly failed before a last-minute donation changed our momentum.
But as I dug into the data and started researching the platform, I discovered something surprising. When Kickstarter released a video highlighting their first 10,000 successfully funded projects, ordered by amount raised, I found our $15,000 campaign near the end, and not in the middle where I'd assumed we'd be. Some quick math revealed we were in the top 10th percentile.
This confused me. The perception at the time was that most projects raised tens of thousands of dollars. But my analysis showed something different: 80% of projects were funded by fewer than 200 people and raised under $20,000. In fact, there appeared to be a significant hurdle at the $20,000 mark that most creators couldn't overcome. As luck would have it, we'd accidentally picked a goal below that threshold.
The more I researched, the more patterns I found. Patterns that could help creators get their project success fully funded while avoiding some of the common pitfalls. But this created a different challenge: How do you take everything you've learned and distill it into something clear, practical, and useful? And who would even listen to an unknown author who'd only run one campaign?
My Approach
Testing the waters
After some initial research, I began to outline a how-to guide that would give creators a framework for thinking about their campaigns, not just tips and tricks. I wanted to help people understand the platform's audience, functionality, and strategy so they could make better decisions.
However, I faced a significant challenge: I was an unknown author, and I couldn’t be sure anyone would be interested in what I had to say. That’s when I came up with the meta-idea of funding my guide about Kickstarter on Kickstarter itself. Not only did this approach seem unique enough to succeed, but it would also allow me to determine whether this idea resonated with others before I spent months writing a book.
So in August 2011, I launched a campaign with a $900 goal, intentionally modest based on my research into realistic funding levels. I was nervous. If nobody backed it, I'd look foolish. Fortunately, the campaign raised $1,300, proving there was demand for this information.
Doing the Research
After the successful campaign, I spent months analyzing data, studying successful campaigns, and conducting video interviews with creators who'd raised anywhere from a few thousand to over $100,000. I wanted to understand not just what worked, but why it worked. What did successful projects have in common? Where did failed projects go wrong?
I discovered that successful campaigns weren't just about having a great video or a compelling idea. They succeeded because they connected with a specific audience, combined authentic storytelling with interesting concepts, and effectively communicated credibility and purpose. Most importantly, the creators who succeeded spent time thinking about these elements before launching their campaigns, not during them.
I also realized that many creators approached Kickstarter with a dangerous assumption: that the internet would discover their project and simply fall in love with it. The data showed this almost never happened. Instead, projects were more likely to succeed when creators reached out to a specific audience in a way that deeply resonated with that group.
Writing and Publishing
Over the following months, I wrote the guide, conducted more creator interviews, hired a graphic designer to format the book professionally, and set up a website to host it. By November 2011, I published the book across all major platforms—Kindle, iBooks, Nook, Google Books—and offered a free PDF version on my site to ensure anyone could access it regardless of budget.
The Results
The guide has been downloaded over 5,000 times and helped creators successfully fund their projects. Three creators who used it stand out:
- Kira Simon-Kennedy used the guide to plan a successful $50,000 Kickstarter campaign for her film Days of Gray
- Susan Hyde Tinkham said the book "completely jumpstarted my Kickstarter plans" for Figments of a Father
- Jerred Zegelis used it to shape The Teen Voices Project into a success, despite never having thought about running a campaign before
Beyond the downloads and successful campaigns, this project taught me something crucial about myself: I could research a complex topic, identify patterns others missed, and communicate those insights in a way that actually helped people. When I launched the campaign, I had no idea if anyone would care what I had to say. It was early in Kickstarter's history, and this kind of analytical resource didn't yet exist. Proving there was an audience for it gave me confidence to tackle other independent projects.
The process of distilling everything I'd learned into 65 clear, actionable pages taught me how to communicate complex information effectively. I had to think not just about what was logically correct, but about what someone actually working on a campaign would need to know, when they needed to know it, and how to present that information so it stuck.
The core insight I wanted to share was simple but often overlooked: The internet doesn't care about you. Success on Kickstarter isn't about posting your project and hoping it goes viral. It's about connecting authentically with a specific audience, telling a compelling story, and doing the hard work of reaching out to the right people before you launch. It's about spending time on strategy before tactics.
That lesson—that success comes from preparation, not luck—has informed every project I've worked on since, from my novel to my documentary film to the case studies you're reading right now. While I no longer write for the site, it is still active and hosts a free copy of the guide if you would like to check it out.
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