Today, I want to hammer home one point and one point only:

DO NOT GIVE UP ON YOUR KICKSTARTER HALFWAY THROUGH

I looked at Pamela Devine’s Kicktraq before I saw her project and just thought, damn, why did she quit?

Let’s compare and contrast her fundraising progression compared to a few others.

GETTING 20% OF YOUR GOAL IN THE FIRST WEEK IS GREAT

Take a look at these two charts from Kicktraq.com (an awesome website, thanks Adam!).

The top is Pamela’s and the bottom is a band called Wild Child (you can view their Kickstarter here).

What jumps out at me is that both of these projects hit the 20-25% funding mark at just about the same time, within the first week.

After that, both projects made little to no progress in the middle third of their campaign.

The story that unfolds after that, however, is markedly different.

BE READY TO CAMPAIGN LIKE MAD AFTER YOUR SLUMP

Look at these next two graphics showing backers per day.

The left half of the graphs are shaped fairly similarly.  As a matter of fact, the left half of this graph will look similar for MOST projects.

I cannot nor should I speculate as to what happened for Pamela versus what happened for Wild Child, but one thing is for sure:  things start to look dramatically different on the right half of the graphs.

Wild Child threw down and campaigned hard for the last third of their project.  They earned it!

Just for fun, let’s take a look at one other graph, Murder By Death, the #3 music Kickstarter of all time!

Even Murder By Death has a relatively slump’ish middle half of the campaign.

And guess what…  MOST successful projects will have a big push at the end to successfully fund.

Sometimes it’s only the last 10%, but I have seen projects make close to 25% or even up to 70% in the last few days.  (Yes, big gifts push that along, but there were also many little gifts contributing to these projects.)

THE TAKEAWAY

Keep the faith, people!

But seriously, be prepared for a mid-campaign slump both mentally AND with a marketing plan.

Don’t let the slump discourage you.

Know that you are most likely going in to that last week or 10 days with a huge mission.  Work hard reaching out to your fans communicating your purpose, call to action, and sense of urgency.

Be ready and you can do it.