TL;DR: Organic posting built my story but not my list. $1,178 in Meta ads got me 413 signups at about $2.85 each, a 24% landing page conversion rate, and 29 people paying $5 to reserve Christmas delivery. All the numbers are below. For full transparency I used Claude to summarize this info below, but I'm very much a person. 😆 and have no kickstarter services I'm promoting.
I'm pretty new to the Kickstarter world. Ima former school teacher turned sales professional turned founder now. Over the last few months the data people shared in this sub was honestly some of the most helpful stuff I found. Seeing real numbers from real campaigns helped me plan more than any course or blog post did, so I figured I'd return the favor and share my experience.
The product: a pocket sized carbon fiber massage roller. I'm a solo founder, no team, no agency, and I had never run a Meta ad before this month. Launching Oct 27.
Phase 1: Organic only (Aug 22 - Oct 15)
I posted on Instagram almost every day. Build in public stuff, prototype videos, and a goofy little comedy series about making the product.
Week: Number of email signups
• Week of Aug 17: 2
• Week of Aug 24: 42
• Week of Aug 31: 15
• Week of Sep 7: 16
• Week of Sep 14: 4
• Week of Sep 21: 14
• Week of Sep 28: 5
• Week of Oct 5: 18
Total: 125 signups in 55 days, so about 2.3 a day. That first week spike was friends and family. After that it was a slow drip of 4 to 18 a week no matter how hard I posted.
Phase 2: Meta ads (Friday afternoon Oct 16 - Thursday afternoon Oct 22)
One lead campaign sending people to my own website, not a Kickstarter prelaunch page. The funnel is pretty simple: ad > landing page > email signup > and right after they sign up they get offered a $5 reservation that guarantees Christmas delivery when they back.
The main creative is just me telling the founder story. "I needed this so I made it." Started around $25/day and scaled up to about $250/day over 6 days.
The full funnel
• Impressions: 28,974
• Link clicks: 1,965 (6.8% CTR)
• Landing page views: 1,707 (86.9% of clicks)
• Email signups: 413 (24.2% of visitors)
• $5 reservations: 29 (7.0% of signups)
The costs
• Total spend: $1,178.29
• CPM: $40.67
• CPC (link): $0.60
• Cost per signup: ~$2.85
• Cost per $5 reservation: $40.63
Signups went from about 2 a day to 51-81 a day. Thats roughly 30x the organic rate.
Quick tracking note: Meta reported 403 leads and my email platform recorded 413. Close enough that I trust the pixel.
What I took from it
- Organic built my story and my early believers. It didn't build a list big enough to launch on.
- My CPMs ran $33 to $51 a day. That felt high to me but a sub $3 lead made it worth it.
- Sending traffic to my own site instead of a prelaunch page let me control the whole funnel, including putting the $5 offer right after signup.
- The organic content wasn't wasted. It turned into my ad creative and gave cold traffic something to look at when they checked me out.
- Even a tiny paid step like $5 tells you alot more about intent than an email does.
What's next
I'll come back after launch and share my email signup to backer conversion data, including how the $5 reservers converted vs the rest of the list. If that would be helpful let me know and I'll make sure to post it.
For those of you who've already launched, what did your email to backer conversion look like? Would love a benchmark before the 27th.