Kickstarter live case study. Step 5: What happens when you hit your target

Last week my Kickstarter campaign finished and in the end it was 815% funded.

Final funding summary

That funding percentage is always something you should take with a pinch of salt. Since it’s a function of the original project target it can flatter smaller projects with simpler products.

In theory, the funding target is the minimum amount of money you need to make the project viable. For more complex products you might need tens of thousands of pounds to make the tooling before you can even make one item.

In practice people set their target more strategically, but that’s a story for another time.

For this particular project I was offering a limited number of rewards, but the project would’ve been viable even if I hadn't sold them all. That’s why my target was what it was, and why the project was able to fund well beyond 100%.

Limited edition

This project of mine was a unusual one because of the limited number of rewards. That meant there was effectivity a ceiling to how much I could raise.

I sold all of the 100 rewards on offer very quickly and then that was it. (Almost - people could actually upgrade to a framed version, and people are always able to back projects without a reward just to support it.)

It resulted in a very strange funding progress graph.

My unusual funding progress graph

To put that into context, most Kickstarter projects have funding graphs that look more like the ones below.

Funding comes throughout the project - usually more right at the beginning and end, and then with a quiet patch in the middle.

My previous four playing card Kickstarter projects

For those four campaigns, the durations were all slightly different and the totals on the y-axis were wildly different, but as you can see, the shapes are fairly similar.

What happens when you finish

So now that I’m at the end of the live phase of this project, I will receive the funding, and then I need to make the products.

The way that works is once the campaign ends, Kickstarter will collect the money from each backer. (This part simply doesn’t happen if a project doesn’t reach its goal.)

Then Kickstarter take their cut and you get the final amount a couple of weeks after your campaign ends. Kickstarter’s cut is “5% Kickstarter fee and payment processing fees (between 3% and 5%)”. [source]

Another thing to realise is that normally at this point you lose a few backers for reasons like their payment methods failing. So you never quite know exactly how much money you’ll end up with.

Production order

In my case, I don’t need to wait for the funding to arrive before I can finalise everything for my production order.

Often you’ll need to wait because you need the money to pay for designers or production deposits for example. But I’m doing everything myself on this project so I can crack on.

I’m planning to have all my graphic design ready in the next couple of days. Specifically, that’s the design file for my mini cards themselves, and also the graphic design for the tuck box.

I also need to decide exactly how I’ll package up the cards, and now that I have final numbers I know how many of everything to order.

Next week I’ll share more details on all of that.