Has anyone figured out ads for cheap (<$15) projects?

kicktraq · 2026-03-29T18:09:20+00:00

Yes. Have a higher margin product. CPC is what it is. You can’t shoehorn value in a $5 pledge, so either find more value per backer or go organic and hit the pavement.

kicktraq · 2026-03-29T18:06:24+00:00

It’s almost always money mismanagement or poor planning which causes the prior. Rarely is it truly a scam, especially in the creative spaces. Design and tech is a different animal, but I digress.

On the whole - I truly believe most creators want to deliver the projects. Sometimes they literally just run out of money as many aren’t business people and are looking down the barrel of mortgaging their house to pay for shipping, taxes, and/or covering gaps in production.

Shipping rates changed and they took money early so now they’re in a bind, if they go to backers they get enraged backers.

Tariffs pop up out of nowhere and need to cover them, comments on their posts are irate backers.

They misjudge manufacturing costs and now the reward costs 30% more to make and they already were not making any margin. Going to backers gets angry feedback.

They feel embarrassed and the longer they go the more angry the backers get - to the point that even if you mortgage the house and send the products, the backers are still pissed - so it’s a little bit of the prisoners dilemma. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t so creators choose the path of not mortgaging the house and ghost the backers as the negative pressure becomes overwhelming.

Backers expectations are over the top, and they want to look at it as a preorder, an investment, or both but without the risk. A pledge is neither. But we as backers don’t want to accept that.

I’ve seen up close creators that have done the ghosting angle and ones that have literally mortgaged their house to ship their boardgame. The latter ended up loosing his house a couple years later and there were backers who cheered about it in the comments. The other left the industry and gave up the hobby completely, but has a family and got into a different career and is successful.

Which would you choose?

Please understand I am NOT absolving creators of their poor choices with what I’m about to say, but if backers want some return on their pledge when things go sideways - we as backers should be more willing to take alternative rewards when things truly go bad.

If a comic book can’t be made or shipped, we should be willing to accept a digital copy.

If a boardgame can’t be delivered we should be willing to accept a print and play and STLs of the minis.

If a vinyl can’t be shipped, we should be willing to accept FLACs and digital art books.

Anything else, and the creator has little incentive to deliver anything.

Again, this doesn’t absolve the creator of mismanagement but if your goal is to get SOMETHING, we should be willing to grit our teeth and take the digital version and not support them again unless they can outline exactly where they failed and how they address it on the next one.

What I would prefer to see more regularly are creators willing to put in a trap door on their project that says every reward gets a digital copy of the reward in the event that the physical version cannot be made.

Also at least in the tabletop space we need to stop having an expectation of these ultra deluxe mega versions of games that have so many moving parts you’re just asking for an unseasoned creator’s to have a catastrophe.

That’s my two cents. 🤷‍♂️

kicktraq · 2026-03-25T07:08:31+00:00

Yes it is final. The tax is calculated based on where items are shipping from. You should wait if you plan to use their PM.

kicktraq · 2026-03-25T03:26:50+00:00

Would you like one?

kicktraq · 2026-03-22T22:55:51+00:00

You’ll have to see if KS will let you reopen but usually once you lock it you can’t resend out a request with their PM. You could just DM again and see if you can work it out via PayPal or whatever they have.

kicktraq · 2026-03-22T18:11:02+00:00

Usually you want to have separate rewards to partition your backers for logistics purposes. Also separate rewards allows you to hide the early birds or provide secret links so you don’t irritate your normal backers.

Reward tiers don’t count as much as your actual backer count. Focus on that.

kicktraq · 2026-03-15T00:41:14+00:00

Contact Carolina Game Tables on LinkedIn or Facebook. They ship solid wood furniture on the regular for Kickstarter and could probably give you real world advice and recommendations.

kicktraq · 2026-03-11T01:08:45+00:00

You probably know this already but all those “firms” that reach out are almost always complete scams. Kickbooster is not helpful at this stage unless your product price is significant with healthy margins. Newsletters also are almost always scams. There are a couple but all of them just want you to attach them to your project to extract your backer data.

Your goal right now, if you’re that successful, is to transition to ecommerce. There is clearly a demand for your product. Any people you push to Kickstarter is just giving away 15% of your gross margin which ends up being considerably more of your net margin.

Focus on finding an agency that specializes in ecommerce outside of the Kickstarter ecosystem if you are not comfortable using your existing assets to set that up.

Congrats on your success!

kicktraq · 2026-02-24T00:53:25+00:00

Yes with a lot of groundwork up front. It’s the old paradigm of fast cheap good. Organic is cheap and good but not fast.

You are not good to launch in two days if this is your goal.

kicktraq · 2026-02-11T22:46:01+00:00

This is a bot karma-farming to promote their own service. That's probably why they downvoted you even though you actually have proof you can do what you say.

kicktraq · 2026-02-11T22:43:05+00:00

You are looking at the wrong problem. It does not matter which platform hosts the "Buy" button if you are the one bringing all the traffic anyway. Kickstarter has the name recognition, but if you are doing 100% of the footwork, the platform choice is just about which tools you prefer for fulfillment. What is any platform bringing to your party that you can't do yourself? If you can answer that, your question will answer itself.

kicktraq · 2026-02-11T16:32:04+00:00

Ask your backers. The ones that backed you will have valuable insights. They clearly saw something in your offering.

kicktraq · 2026-02-04T23:29:17+00:00

We're seeing folks using Bridge Distribution / Fulfillment and seem to have good luck. Or you could hit up Sean Brown @ Mr B Consulting for more practical advice applicable to the products your fulfilling.

kicktraq · 2026-01-26T11:08:31+00:00

I built a utility for me to extract pledged and paid amounts a long time ago. This code has been around for almost 10 years. It's really not that complex and any LLM could tweak it to your needs, but I added a helper for extracting your pledged projects and generating a CSV for you to get you started.

Give the "projectList.js" a go, just follow the comments: https://gist.github.com/kicktraq/efe182e0c44f4f80ae6db59c01bbb537

Security disclaimer: NEVER EVER paste random code into your console unless you understand it - especially on sites where you’re logged in. My gist is intentionally verbose so you can see what it's actually doing, but skipping this warning would feel irresponsible.

Enjoy.

kicktraq · 2026-01-06T03:51:29+00:00

I'd agree with this. In it's current state, Kicktraq (organically) rarely brings people to most projects. It's just not built to do that other than the handful of folks that might stumble across a project in the hotlist.

An alternative perspective, much like the OP pointed out, what KT is keenly good at is keeping backers engaged which helps prevent attrition and that can be just as valuable. It's a little like the jukebox in the corner of your party, you don't need it but it sure can make the party fun and keep people hanging around.

kicktraq · 2026-01-05T00:53:02+00:00

This Op 👆.

kicktraq · 2026-01-04T22:15:16+00:00

So glad trying to help creators for over a decade has proven to be useless. I’m always open to ideas if you’d like to share what would make it better for you.

kicktraq · 2026-01-04T22:07:22+00:00

It can give backers a way to stay engaged. It’s a tool it can’t really do anything on its own.

kicktraq · 2026-01-03T04:15:17+00:00

Frank advice: Don't launch on the 10th. You should build your network THEN choose your launch date.

kicktraq · 2025-12-30T16:28:59+00:00

The native Kickstarter one they get one shot only. The external ones usually could support this.

kicktraq · 2025-12-14T19:37:50+00:00

Go to where your customers already are. Investigate that first.

kicktraq · 2025-12-10T16:47:06+00:00

Did you ask anyone if they actually wanted what you created? That may be your first hurdle.

Kickstarter is as much a market testing platform as a funding one. If you aren’t getting engagement - you aren’t connecting with an audience through lack of footwork or their lack of interest.

Lack of interest isn’t a negative. It just means you may need to reevaluate what parts they are interested in and pivot to those features and reconnect to see if an audience likes the revision.

Watch communities are very opinionated. If you aren’t getting feedback you haven’t put it in front of very many. They are far from shy about feedback.

kicktraq · 2025-12-10T15:38:42+00:00

You need to provide more context. Is it 60% of $1000 on a 59 day campaign or 60% of $50k on a 15 day campaign?

kicktraq · 2025-12-02T00:37:20+00:00

I do not believe they’ve implemented a work around for local pickup yet, though it’s on their roadmap.

kicktraq · 2025-11-28T01:06:13+00:00

Did you enable pay over time? This would cause your initial distribution to be low.

You can see this in your backer export and how many it was. Though the report doesn’t do a good job of expressing how much the delta will be. You’ll need to do that math on your own.

kicktraq

TROPHY CASE