Why be Reasonable?

Of course you don’t necessarily have to play it safe. Craig Mod provides an interesting counterpoint to the “be reasonable” argument.

“Our biggest mistake was that we set our financial goal too low. It’s inevitable that a Kickstarter project becomes less exciting and loses its ‘gambling’ element when the financial goal is met and there’s still time on the clock (just look at our funding graphs above for empirical evidence!). An ideal situation for any Kickstarter project is to define a financial goal that is high enough to just be met within the allotted time.” – Craig Mod, Kickstartup

Perhaps for Craig’s project, the goal was set too low, and it might have been able to get more backers. However, I just want to point out what I think is the key sentence in his entire post.

“We took advantage of the vast contact lists we had built up while working in the design and art worlds over the past six years.” – Craig Mod, Kickstartup

To me, this demonstrates that Craig had a large existing audience before launching the Kickstarter project and therefore could have gone for more money.

Personally, I think it is better to get funded at a lower level than to be too ambitious and not get anything. Of course, the risk is yours. I reiterate: unless you have a relatively large existing audience, it is going to be very hard to generate $10,000 or more.

A Kickstart’s Guide to Kickstarter TOC:

pssst…you can read all of this offline by downloading the e-book.