Jewelbots on Kickstarter: A Deep Data Dive

By Brooke Moreland, Cofounder of Jewelbots

Raising a ton of money on Kickstarter is not as common as you may think. Kickstarter is an all-or-nothing platform, and requires a project to meet their stated goal to be able to be able to collect any money at all. Only 37.12% of Kickstarter projects have successfully funded. And of those projects, (91,322 in total) only 117 have raised over a million dollars! In fact, only 2.5% of them have ever even raised over 100k!

We only ever read about the exploding kittens and the potato salad, never the thousands that don’t fund at all

These stats are a little shocking to me. Before going into this, I assumed that most campaigns far exceed their goals, but as it turns out, there is a lot of survivorship bias going on. We only ever read about the exploding kittens and the potato salad, never the thousands that don’t fund at all, or only raise a modest amount. Surprisingly, of all the successfully funded projects, about 60% raise just $1k-10k, And 12% raise under $1,100! The high-ticket projects are actually extremely rare. Kickstarter has a really cool stats page that is updated every day with cool data on how their projects are doing. (The numbers quoted here were from August 26.)

Unsurprisingly, we had the most activity on the first day when we announced the campaign. We planned a big press push and a full-on social media blitz for this day. We also sent out asks to our friends and family, which most likely why the amount per person spent was so high. (Our friends love us.) Another key peak in this chart was July 22, the day we were featured in a piece on Wired.com. Not only is Wired a very highly read site, the piece was an insightful dive into what we are aiming to build and how it fits into the larger wearables landscape. The author even said Jewelbots were “ the most interesting wearable I’ve seen all year” (!) The piece also inspired a lot of other press, thus driving up our numbers. Not only did this piece drive more sessions, it drove a higher amount pledged per person.

Another spike was on July 13, after a post was published on Techcrunch. This post generated a lot of traffic, but unlike the Wired piece, it hardly made a difference in money pledged, we saw just a 1.01% conversion rate on that day compared with 4.56% on the day we launched and 2.87% the day the Wired piece came out. We also saw both higher traffic and a higher amounts per person on the last day of our campaign, with a conversion of 3.73%. Going into the campaign we were told that the distribution of pledges would be more of a U-shaped graph with big spikes at the beginning and end, with mostly flat sales in between. We did see a high initial spike at the beginning, and a modest spike at the end, but rather than flat in the middle, we saw varying spikes depending on press, with high spikes around favorable press in big outlets. Trade sites like Techcrunch resulted in a high traffic, but relatively low conversions.

Most of the traffic to the Kickstarter came direct. The second highest traffic driver was Twitter. This was somewhat surprising to us. I, for one, expected the most traffic from Facebook, as it has more users and more activity. News sites see the majority of their shared coming from Facebook, and I expected the same for us. I attribute the strong Twitter number to having both a CEO with a respectable and engaged twitter following and a number of influential folks that are friends of ours who shared the campaign.

It was cool to see so many international backers. Unsurprisingly, the majority of backers came from the US and Canada, but we had a strong showing from Australia and New Zealand, as well as Western Europe, Brazil, and Singapore.

This was the biggest learning for us. Our biggest reward tier was the Jewelbots 2-pack. This makes sense, as Jewelbots are a social tool, and they really work a lot better with 2. But seeing people actually vote with their dollars like this was encouraging, and will influence the way we price and package multiples with lauch. Another surprising thing was how many people sprung for the 5-pack. At $225, this reward was not cheap, yet it was the 3rd highest reward tier purchased. In retrospect, I wish we had experimented more by adding a 3-pack- more fun than a 2-pack, but not quite as pricey as the 5. This is something that we will experiment with when we launch presale.

The Kickstarter was a great experience for us. It was good to share our ideas with the public and to have see the public actually respond with their wallets to help make Jewelbots a reality. The Kickstarter audience may not be the same as the general audience we are targeting but it has shown to be good market validation for us, and quite encouraging! Stay tuned for an upcoming post with our tips for a successful campaign.

Originally published at medium.com on September 10, 2015.