I want to address something I’ve heard a lot, especially during this campaign.
Many people have emailed or messaged me about being bummed that every human being they know hasn’t backed their campaign.
They’ve asked about my magic secret to get friends and family to back the Monsters and Other Scary Shit campaign and complained they can’t get people to back theirs.
So I’m going to let you in on the secret.
By all accounts, we’ve had a massively successful campaign up until this point, so let me run some numbers by you. This is how my audience breaks down, roughly.
36,000 Twitter followers
2,300 people on my weekly mailing list
3,300 additional people on my Kickstarter specific mailing list
2,300 friends on Facebook
12,200 followers on Instagram
That’s something like 55,000+ potential people in my audience, assuming there is no overlap.
Even if you assume 50% overlap…that’s still over 25,000 unique people in my audience.
That doesn’t even include the audience of the 50+ other creators working on this project. Add those in, and I’m sure the total audience is over 100,000.
That’s led to…
360 total backers
That’s a success rate of just over 1% of my audience, and .3% of the estimated overall audience for this project.
1% is a shitty number. Percentages can’t get any lower that that without ceasing to exist…and everybody says this campaign has been massively successful.
1%.
And honestly, that’s very common number. I see it crop up all the time in every industry. Even the most successful company have a success rate around 2%.
Most people believe there is some magic formula, and if they just knew it backers would come out of the woodwork, but that’s just not true.
The truth is that success is a function of your audience size, and how targeted your audience is to each product.
That’s it.
Everybody wants more of their audience to back, but what’s true is that almost nobody backs anything, successful or not, including you.
So, instead of moping about why people won’t back your project, focus on the people who do back, and try to find more of those people.
Then, enjoy your friends for what they are…friends, not $20 bills, and not people who owe you things.
Cherish those who love your project enough to back it, but cherish people who morally support you, too.
Oh, and if you like monsters, check out www.monsteranthologycomic.com.
Help us get to a 1.000001% success rate.
Or don’t. I like you either way.