My Kickstarter recently failed, and I wrote a blog to summarise what I learnt. The tl;dr version is:
Optimisations (copywriting etc) work, but not that well
Just because people moan about it, don’t mean they’ll pay for it.
You can only depend on your own subscribers.
The full version is: http://pyskool.com/3-things-failed-kickstarter-taught/
Is 88% really a “failure”? You won’t get the money from the campaign of course, but it seems to me you proved that you could separate hard-earned dollars and pounds from their owners for this. That’s worth something.
I presume the 2000 pounds was somewhat arbitrary of a target. IMO fuzzy logic rules when dealing with arbitrary targets: 88% is a win.
It sounds like you’re kind of down, but I think if you let a bit of time pass you might come to see this in a more positive light later. Who knows? maybe you can tackle the idea again soon.
Apart from your own audience, did you do anything to try to get people to go to your kickstarter? Like guest blogging? or drawing other blogger’s attention to it by asking them if they think these topics are of interest to them?
if you leant something and didn’t lose your house, then I’d say it wasn’t a complete failure.
Yes, I did, and I got a fair number of people that way. I could have done more, but by the middle of the 3rd week, I knew I wouldn’t meet my targets, and so had mentally given up.
Indeed. A few people emailed me to let me know they are still interested. And these are the people who had gone for one of the higher tiers. I found a few problems in my approach, so I will try again, this time going direct.
Sorry to hear it didn’t work out the way you had hoped. Just like everybody else here, I agree it wasn’t a failure. You came pretty close to achieving your goal and learned a few things. Good luck with your next attempt!