Should you set a release date for your Kickstarter?

Consider a mindset change, that’s the first thing you should think about before continuing with this post.
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I’ve now run five tabletop Kickstarters, three of which succeeded. The form of my crowdfunding history has gone like this: fail, success, fail, success, success, meaning that my most recent crowdfunding campaign, Langskip, didn’t need to be relaunched, whilst the first two did. This should hopefully suggest to you some sort of learning experience that I have gone through regarding Kickstarter campaigns.

So, what’s the mindset change that I mentioned? Consider this, when preparing your Kickstarter for launch, don’t set a launch date before your project and campaign page is ready, and even if they are ready, don’t set a launch date. I’m talking about a public post concerning the date in which your campaign is going to launch, and I’m also talking about your private inclination or an expected launch day. Instead, I want you to consider a few points with the example of you needing 100 followers to fund:

• Do I have 20x the followers (2000) on every social platform combined that I would need to fund my Kickstarter campaign?
  
• Do I have at least 5x the mailing list sign ups (500) that I would need to fund my Kickstarter campaign? 
  
• Do I know enough people personally that will back my project on day 1 that it could make up at least 40% of the minimum number of backers required (40)? (This can vary from project to project).
  
• Do I have enough reviewers where their combined audience is at the very least 50x the number of backers (5000) I would need to fund my Kickstarter campaign?
  
• Are there any major events coming up where I can increase exposure for the project first? 
  

As you can see, these points aren’t related to timescales at all. These points aren’t even related to your project, and the current state that it’s in. They are only related to the volume of your audience. 

Full disclosure, I am still on this learning curve. With Langskip, it was ready for almost three months before it launched on Kickstarter, however, I still had a launch date tethered to something other than the required audience I would need to get the campaign funded. I genuinely believe that it only got funded so quickly because I launched it at the UK Games Expo. Though, what I will say is that I am finally getting to the point where I can say to myself, regardless of when I finish my next game, the game launches when I have met those five points above.

And that’s really the thing with this post, it’s not about educating you about a specific method, it’s about an open discussion about this mindset that isn’t centered around the development of your project. We all know, or at least, once you’ve had your first failed Kickstarter, that you could have the best product in the world, the greatest idea of this generation, and no one would back it. It’s about building your audience, every day, and meeting those targets before you launch. 

What do you think? Do you think it’s a good idea to not publicly announce release dates for campaigns? Or, maybe you think that it’s the best way to market your game? Comment below as I am excited to get this discussion going, maybe a hybrid of the two could work wonders for both audience building, and captivating your own motivation. 

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