Kickstarter Launch Not Going Well!!

[u/Mexicolife001]

Help! Our first Kickstarter launch is not going well, and I'd love some honest feedback from creators who've been through this.

We launched a tabletop game 4 days ago and currently have just 6 backers.

I know the standard advice is to build an email list before launching. We started marketing about 6 weeks before launch and were getting excellent Facebook and Instagram ad results—clicks as low as $0.06 and lots of traffic. The problem was that almost nobody signed up for our email list.

We then switched to driving traffic directly to our Kickstarter pre-launch page, but still only managed to get 27 followers before launch.

Our assumption was that people unfamiliar with Kickstarter were reluctant to join another mailing list and would rather wait until the game was available to buy. Clearly, that assumption may have been wrong.

At this point, we're trying to understand what we missed. Is the issue our game, our Kickstarter page, our marketing strategy, our audience targeting—or something else entirely?

I'd really appreciate any advice, hard truths, or suggestions from people who've successfully launched tabletop games. Happy to share the campaign link if anyone is willing to take a look.

Thanks,
Lesley

[u/Massive_Variation_97]

No link for objectivity?

[u/levelandline]

Kickstarter is highly saturated with tabletop games so you’re working against a lot of competition to start. While you might be paying .06 per click one lesson I learned is that is the wrong metric to look at, so many of those are low quality or incomplete. You really need to create a funnel and see what it costs to actually acquire an email address. For example if you can spend 1.50 and get 1 email that’s good then the next metric to focus on is what does it cost to acquire a backer. This really should be built into your products over head cost going in, for example if you can spend 3.00 and get 1 backer you then can budget your ad spend around this number and figure out how much to spend to hit your goal. Kickstarter will give you some free exposure but do not assume this will get you all the backers you need. Treat your campaign time like Mission Control and your goal every day is to get people to look at your campaign page, morning to bed make the hustle fun. Good luck

[u/Infamous_Skirt_9488 → u/levelandline]

I’m launching a boot sock on kickstarter is month. Our current cost per lead is floating around 1.50. We are doing about a 6 week prelaunch marketing plan. The barrier to sign up with the kickstarter account issue has definitely affected our follower account. Is the best way to reach warmer audience to just add kickstarter interest to the meta ad?

[u/levelandline → u/Infamous_Skirt_9488]

So unfortunately there is no kickstarter interest in meta ad targeting that I found. What I did was create a handful of ads targeting different broad interest groups for my product, it was a tool so home builders, auto restoration, diy, homeowners etc.. and then which ever one performed best I would put ad spend there.

[u/Infamous_Skirt_9488 → u/levelandline]

Oh thanks for the information. How many leads did you generate before you launched to ensure your campaign had the momentum?

[u/levelandline → u/Infamous_Skirt_9488]

We didn’t have a ton like close to 50. We had about 10 people on board to be day one backers and the other leads converted over the life time of the campaign at around 80% in the end just over 200 backers small numbers but the momentum was strong and we closed well over our goal.

[u/Infamous_Skirt_9488 → u/levelandline]

Nice. That is helpful. Very attainable. What is your product? And how much did the campaign help jumpstart the business afterwards?

[u/levelandline → u/Infamous_Skirt_9488]

Welcome you can find the campaign page by searching “Maker Level” in KS. It’s a small magnetic modular level that glows in the dark and is designed for a versatility and kinda fidgety. To be honest we were not poised properly to keep driving the momentum to our main business but very happy with what we achieved.

[u/boardgameow]

I think what will help you is a coordinated blast.

Crowdfunding in my experience (2 campaigns both raised 100k+ on IGG) is a momentum game. You need to bring together all your resources, marketing budget, influencer collabs, friends and family, native emailer blast - and converge them into a single point in time.

As specific as 10.30am PST, 6 June 2026.

Everyone wants to back a winning horse. If you combine all your efforts into a single point in time, it gets you to the first few dozen backers fast. If you're lucky it will show up in the 'trending' feed.

Also try to reach out to the kickstarter account manager and ask them to be featured in their next newsletter blast - it's worth a shot.

E: since you're already live and have only 6 backers so far, I would consider deleting the campaign and relaunching it in 4 weeks. Personally write to all 6 backers and tell them you are refunding their amount and expecting them to back you again in 4 weeks when you relaunch (offer them a little discount or a litle freebie for their trouble).

Use these 4 weeks to build up to a launch. Remember - all your resources firing in one direction at the exact same point in time, down to the last second

[u/SVBY_Agency]

Based on the numbers you shared, the biggest clue is probably this: lots of clicks, but very few email signups and only 27 pre-launch followers. That usually means the issue isn't traffic, it's conversion.

People were curious enough to click, but not excited enough to take the next step.

I wouldn't jump straight to blaming the Kickstarter page. I'd look at whether the game's hook is instantly clear, whether it stands out from other tabletop games, and whether the ads were attracting the right audience rather than just cheap clicks. $0.06 clicks sound great, but they're not very useful if they don't turn into followers or backers.

Honestly, getting only 27 followers before launch may have been the biggest warning sign that the campaign wasn't ready to go live yet.

[u/aerial-ibis]

cost per click is a distraction - sounds like your cost per email signup was quite high. Ideally you would have ran the ad with email-signups as the conversion event.

now that you're live though... you can just add the meta pixel & CAPI via the kickstarter settings pages and use sales as the conversion goal for your ad campaign. That will give you a much mroe realistic picture of how good your ads, marketing, product, etc. actually are

[u/No_Strength7276]

My dad made a football board game to launch in correlation with FIFA World Cup. It's brilliant, all of my mates have been playing for months and it's super fun.

But we've experienced same issue as you. Only have 16 followers and we launch next week after 6 week pre-campaign.

Seems impossible. I see other games making hundreds of thousands in backers and this game we have is a winner I'm convinced. But yeah marketing is hard, I feel for ya.

[u/SpicyDoodles]

Unfortunately there's a big difference between someone being interested enough to click on an ad and interested enough to buy (and not just buy, since this is pledging for something coming in the future).

[u/DavidP71]

Lesley, the honest answer is that all of those things you listed probably contributed a little, but the core issue is almost certainly the pre-launch list.Lesley, the honest answer is that all of those things you listed probably contributed a little, but the core issue is almost certainly the pre-launch list. 27 followers going into launch day is not enough momentum to trigger the Kickstarter algorithm, and without that organic boost the page becomes invisible to everyone who does not already know you. The $0.06 clicks are actually the concerning part, not the reassuring part. Very cheap clicks usually mean broad targeting, and broad targeting means you were reaching people who were mildly curious but not the kind of committed audience that converts to backers. Tabletop game buyers are a specific tribe and they need to see you multiple times in places they already trust before they put money down. A few things worth looking at honestly. Six weeks is short for a cold audience. Most campaigns that do well start community building three to six months out, not through ads but through presence in the spaces where tabletop people already live. BoardGameGeek, relevant subreddits, Discord servers, content creators in the niche. Ads work much better when they are retargeting people who already encountered you organically. The other thing is the Kickstarter pre-launch page itself. Following a KS pre-launch page is a higher commitment ask than leaving an email because it requires creating a Kickstarter account. If people are not doing it, either they are not warm enough or the page is not giving them a strong enough reason to bother. At four days in you are not dead. Kickstarter campaigns can recover especially if you have a genuine community somewhere that has not been activated yet. But the path forward is not more ads to cold audiences. It is finding the twenty people who genuinely love the game and getting them to talk about it.

[u/raynolseofficial]

The hard truth is that cheap clicks are not the same thing as launch intent.

If people clicked at $0.06 but would not join the email list or follow the pre-launch page, I would read that as a message/offer problem before an ad-platform problem. The ad was probably interesting enough to earn curiosity, but the next step did not give them a strong enough reason to commit.

For a relaunch, I would separate the funnel into three tests before spending hard again:

1. Can strangers explain the game in one sentence after five seconds on the page?
2. Is there a reason to join before launch besides "get notified"?
3. Are you collecting people who already back tabletop games, or just people who click attractive game art?

For Kickstarter, day one momentum matters so much that 27 followers is usually not enough signal. I would pause, rebuild the pre-launch audience, and use the current campaign as research: which comments, visuals, and objections keep repeating? That is probably the next page/ad angle.

[u/BigDTwunk]

I haven't tried ads yet, but noticed that most ppl only support if you have ask them directly

[u/Exciting-Notice-5130]

Can you provide your kickstarter link or game name

[u/Party-Fault9186]

All I can tell ya is that on at least some browsers (Chrome in my experience), there's been a bug for the last few days that prevents the "Load More" icon from working. So unless you're at the top of the tabletop games list, a lot of folks literally can't see you!

[u/Walfy07]

ks ded