The Stats Behind Our Successful Kickstarter Campaign

Welcome back to Two Navy Guys and a Novel, the place where you get to watch two ex-Navy officers co-write the military thriller Weapons of Mass Deception, successfully crowdfund it, then publish it. Previous episodes are here.

We’re going to take a moment to pat ourselves on the back.

WE DID IT!

That’s right, the WMD Kickstarter closed at midnight on Friday, April 3^rd at 151% of our funding goal. To put it simply, we are overwhelmed by the generosity of our “crowd.”

Our funded project is moving forward very quickly now, so here’s a schedule update:

• Weapons of Mass Deception is back from the editor and being formatted for the paperback edition.
• WMD now has an official launch date: May 15, 2015.
• Pre-order your copy on Amazon right here

 A Peek Behind the Kickstarter Curtain

Today, we thought it might be instructive to look at some of the numbers behind our successful crowdfunding campaign. If you talk to a sales professional about their job, they’ll often describe the sales process as a “funnel,” where potential buyers go into the wide end of the funnel and get narrowed down to actual buyers and the skinny end.

Here’s what our “funnel” looked like for the Weapons of Mass Deception Kickstarter:

• 2000+ is our conservative estimate of how many people were exposed to our Kickstarter message, based on Facebook shares, circulation on private mailing lists, and other paths.
• 700+ is the number of people JR and I contacted directly.
• 211 people viewed our pitch video on our Kickstarter page where we explained our project and asked for their support.
• 131 is the number of people who watched the video all the way through. Our assumption is that we only received backing from someone who watched the whole 3-minute video.
• 71 people that backed our campaign.

Kickstarter gives us the ability to dig a little deeper on how our backers found our campaign:

These two graphs tell us that 76% of our backers and 84% of the funding from those backers came from Direct Traffic, in other words,  people that we sent to our Kickstarter page. 

Those two graphs really sum up the essence of crowdfunding. The service you use (Kickstarter, Indiegogo, Pubslush, etc.) is the funding platform, the place where you can send people to hear your story and they can feel confident about forking over their payment data.

YOU need to provide the crowd.

The Kickstarter campaign is over, but you can still get your very own copy of Weapons of Mass Deception by pre-ordering on Amazon. It will get delivered to your inbox when the book is released on May 15th.

David Bruns is the creator of the sci-fi series The Dream Guild Chronicles, and one half of the Two Navy Guys and a Novel blog series about co-writing the military thriller, Weapons of Mass Deception, coming in May 2015.