Episode Details

Welcome Back

I have a campaign that is live on Kickstarter called Big Smoke Pulp Vol. 2, and you can get it through December 19th. If you’re paying attention, you may notice that December 19th is very, very close to Christmas.

Did I make a horrible mistake in doing so?

Hard to say.

I had a very good launch day, while being very careful not to launch on the week of Thanksgiving, which I was getting very close to. (By Thanksgiving, I mean American Thanksgiving. Hello from Canada!)

Thank goodness I did because it was dead quiet during the Thanksgiving weekend. This is understandable since most backers are from the US.

That’s just a matter of fact, even with this campaign where I’m seeing a lot of backers from the UK and from Canada. The majority always come from the US, and that is no exception here. Avoiding their holidays makes a ton of sense.

However, I’m still doing this in the thick of the holiday season. I had a Black Friday sale, which was really just an early backer sale that you would have any time of the year, but calling it Black Friday I think may have helped.

The Truth about December

The truth about Kickstarter in December is it’s a dead zone. People aren’t shopping for themselves—they’re shopping for other people.

You can’t rely on Kickstarter for gift-giving.

It wouldn’t be a good idea to say, “Hey, I backed the campaign. They say they might deliver in March. We’ll have to see. By the way, there’s a survey for your address that you’ll receive in February.”

That’s not a reasonable ask.

Not a lot of people are going to be on Kickstarter for that reason. They’re looking everywhere else.

This is why I usually tried to avoid the month of December entirely.

(To be fair, I didn’t launch in December this time, but I did give this campaign a little bit longer of a stretch.)

This campaign will end on December 19th, which is just a few days before Christmas. I may have burnt myself a little bit. It will be interesting to talk about in the post-mortem when I do that in the new year.

The Good News

Although the holiday season is slower and may be harder to get new backers in, I did see a lot of people returning this time out.

The numbers are roughly 50/50 in terms of total funded. New backers are spending a lot more, thanks to catch-up tiers, so although the count of backers isn’t 50/50, they’re carrying nearly equal weight.

This goes to show that building an audience and having people aware of campaigns you’re launching, regardless of the season, is the most important thing you can do.

We did about 80% of our business—which is still only about two-thirds of the way through this campaign—with backers on day one.

That means it was a lot of people who were in pre-launch, who were paying attention to the newsletter, or following on all the various socials (on YouTube or on Substack) knew to look for Big Smoke Pulp and made sure to back it as soon as humanly possible.

What Can You Do?

I’m on the fence about whether or not to launch holiday Kickstarter. I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad idea, but I do think there are some things you can do to make yourself succeed.

I have three strategies. Let’s go through them…

Strategy #1: Gauge Your Audience First

Unless you already have a massive audience and have people that you can draw in that are not sensitive to the Kickstarter algorithm, then avoid November and December if you can. Just wait till January.

I’ve launched in January. It’s arguably a weird time because a lot of people have been spending through November and December on other people and all kinds of gifts and parties. <