Business thoughts part 3

In my previous business thoughts, I loosely figured what I would need as a Kickstarter goal to print Draftcar, and came up with a couple of unorthodox stretch goals.

Today, I'm trying to think through the best means of driving traffic to the Kickstarter.

I know it's important to get an initial surge of backers so that other potential backers see the project as likely to fund. And I know it's common to spend a few months or a year building up an audience to get that initial surge. At the same time, though, I am fairly certain I can get at least get a shout out from the upcoming darkest night Kickstarter. That by its self may be enough to get a significant initial surge. If it is it is probably worth it to spend a bit less time driving an initial audience so I can time my launch to coincide with the end of that campaign.

Assuming I can get a good initial surge, the next goal is to get those people to tell everyone they know. I'm not sure what percentage of Kickstarter backer actually post about them to social media. Based on the limited data I've seen, at most 5% of backers actually bother to make those social media post. I'm willing to bet there are ways to increase the percentages a bit. I know some campaigns have social media stretch goals. I'm not convinced those actually have any effect, though. It seems to me that the best way to get people to post is to give them something now as opposed to after the Kickstarter. One thing I've been toying with is using a service like pay with a tweet or twitter payment to give a print and play version away during the campaign. I don't think I've seen that on a campaign before. There may well be a good reason for that... but it sounds good from a marketing perspective.

I did an experiment with pay with a tweet a while back (a few years now actually) in which I gave away a PnP version of my game Pew Pew! At the time, I only had maybe a dozen followers. I had well over 100 downloads and to my surprise, the game even got a mention on Purple Pawn. So I think that with a large enough shout out seed of backers this could easily help a project go viral.