Needless to say, i made a lot of research on best time and best ways to launch the campaign. Here’s the graph from medium.com on Kickstarter campaigns from 2014.

Kickstarter campaign success per month

Obviously, i missed the train for December, which is one of the best months for launching the campaign. It makes sense, people spend more money in the holiday season and they’re a bit dry in the following month, which is January, and the worst month for crowdfunding campaigns. I don’t have time to wait for March, which is the next decent month before summer, so i suppose i’ll be biting the bullet, launching in mid January, maybe beginning of February and hoping for the best.

Project duration is a typical 30 days. It’s silly to make it last shorter than that since i don’t have a lot of visibility anyway, but lasting longer is also not an option. Why? Psychology is a strange science, shorter durations increase a sense of urgency in people and may help them decide earlier so they don’t miss the deadline.

I believe i shouldn’t press myself to launch as fast as possible, but once the wheels start turning when you press that big pre-launch button, there’s no going back and you should work on making as much people as possible subscribing for the regular e-mails that will lead to the official launch and the notification of the launch itself.

They say that the conversion rate from the subscribers is a mere 5%, so if everyone leaves a basic pledge of 10 USD, i need about 6000 subscribers if i want to be sure i will reach my goal. I don’t think i’ll manage that big of a number, but i’ll keep tracking the numbers and when the number of daily subscribes start falling down, i’ll announce the campaign start. So far, i collected 24 e-mails in a few days, which is a number i’m quite happy with to be honest, considering the scope of the project and the type of the game i’m making – a niche arcade shooter. But, to be realistic, that’s not nearly enough, especially when you take the conversion rate into account.

When you’re having a project like this, it’s quite natural to pay attention to even the smallest details. That said, even the time of the day when you launch the campaign is of utter importance. In my case, that will be 7 o’clock in the morning, which is just the time people get back from lunch on the east coast in the United States, which account for the largest crowdfunding contributor in the world. You get back from lunch, and before you get back to work, you decide to check IndieGoGo a bit if there’s something interesting, and there it is – just launched! Wednesday also looks like a promising day. On monday, people are in a grumpy mood and they need to get to speed to work, not much time for stuff like this so it’s a big no-no. Tuesday’s better, but not as good, and Thursday is too far off, you are usually starting to wind down and think about the weekend. So Wednesday it will be.

One of the most discouraging facts from the Kickstarter statistics is that two thirds of the campaigns fail miserably. I try not to think about it too much. Maybe their goals were to far off? Maybe their campaign was lousy? To be honest, there’s a lot of campaigns out there looking for much too money for what they’re offering or having a campaign that’s written poorly. Asking for too much money is one of the main issues people tend to overlook. It’s better to ask for a smaller amount since people will pledge for something that seems achievable, fair and has constant income of pledges. If you’re on a train that’s going to be hard to catch – nobody will want to ride it. The funny thing is – when you fund the project, even more and more pledges will usually start coming. People want to give their pledge to something that already succeeded and they know they’ll get the product they pledged for.

First 48 hours of the campaign are crucial on IndieGoGo, since the campaign will only appear in search results for the first 48 hours after launch. After that, you need to have at least two pledges to keep it searchable. Not only that, they recommend that you already have 30% of the funds needed secured and pledged in the 48 hours of the campaign, which, in my case, is 1.000 USD. It’s big bucks for me, and i don’t think i’ll be able to provide this via friends, family and so on. Where i live, it’s 3 monthly wages so i think it’s better that i prepare that demo for launch so i gain more traction and attract more people.

So, the thing i need to do is to step up on gaining subscribers by regularly posting the progress, work on the demo and shout everywhere. Here’s the list of the stuff i did lately:

I opened the account on itch.io, but the game is not showing up in search since there’s no downloadable content. There was a small surge of visitors from Twitter on the day i listed the game, but since then no views at all, only one follower and that’s it.

I opened the accound on GameJolt (few moments ago), the game is also invisible there, so i don’t expect anything.

I posted a teaser on r/shmups on reddit, there’s only few likes and that’s it. It’s a small subreddit, so i plan on posting the teaser and some text on few other subreddits like gamedev, indiedev, and unity2d.

I posted a devlog with teaser on tigsource, hutonggames (makers of Playmaker which i use), shmups.system11 forum, there has been no significant response.

Obviously, the way to increase visibility is to publish a demo which will be downloadable on itch, gamejolt and steam (when i make the profile) and then we’ll see how it goes. Launching the campaign now would fail 100%.

So, off to make the demo!

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