As someone who ran a successful Kickstarter (
here) and is about to ship rewards in the next week or two, I can attest to the fact that Kickstarter is a tricky, difficult thing to pull off.
For the honest, it's incredibly humbling that so many strangers believed in something you were working on that they were willing to donate so much.
Before I get into this, I should mention that I'm not "business minded," neither are my brother and sister, we're all artists and writers primarily. That said, we went in trying to be as organized and informed as we absolutely could.
Our initial target was to raise $9,500 to fund the creation of our comic and the associated rewards. We intended to spend ~$3,000 on printing, and the rest on fulfilling our rewards, which were incredibly ambitious considering this was our first Kickstarter, our first comic, and no one knew us.
We figured if we made that amount we'd easily be able to cover the KS costs and maybe, maybe have a little bit left over for us to pay for labor. Not as much as we'd get from a publisher, but it'd be something. We budgeted we'd need about $7,000 to fulfill everything, with a buffer of $2,000 just in case.
We were wrong.
We ended up making nearly $15,000, which was incredible, really. Printing cost a little more than we expected, but that was primarily because since we made so much more than we budgeted, we figured we could upgrade the paper quality and still be well within budget.
Rather quickly, we discovered that our buffer might not be as much as we expected. The biggest blow came from the folks making our 2.5 inch mini-figures delivered substandard work, despite us providing higher quality samples be we paid. It sucked, and he refused to offer even a partial refund. What do you do? We spent a good chunk of money on those, and it was gone, so we had to find another vendor. I could give more examples of unexpected expenditures, but I'll stop here since the post is getting a little long!
Kickstarter is an incredible platform for dreamers. I've been lucky enough that I've never lost money on any of the 30+ projects I've backed... I think... I tend to fire and forget. It's hard for creators though, even those with good intentions. I think there's a responsibility on the the part of creators to fulfill their obligations to the best of their ability. I also don't think Kickstarter does ANYWHERE near enough to prepare creators for the reality of what a campaign entails, from the beginning through to fulfillment. That really sucks.
We aimed to ship in November last year, and were ready except that a single, vital vendor wasn't able to supply their rewards until last week. They delayed us by months, during which time we've had to pay for storage, of course. Our backers have been great because we communicated with them constantly, even when things were bad. I think many creators go into their shell a bit when things go wrong, they're afraid to let backers know. In my experience, the vast majority are extremely understanding and supportive, because they want to support you. They want you to succeed.
In the end, when Kickstarter works, it's amazing. We made an African Sci-fi adventure comic of the highest quality and got 2,000 prints made. We made statues, posters, commemorative coins, t-shirts and more. It was a dream my brother and I had for years, and we did it. All thanks to KS backers.
EDIT: If anyone would like to read the finished book,
you can do so here, free of charge..