The Author Stack

The Author Stack

Articles

2025 Kickstarter postmortem

Six campaigns, $53K, and what the numbers really say

Russell Nohelty's avatar
Russell Nohelty
Oct 03, 2025
∙ Paid

Hi,

All year long I’ve been watching people say, “Kickstarter is down 25%.” Now that I’ve finished my sixth and (at least planned) final campaign of the year, I finally have enough data to see if they are right.

Instead of simply saying I’m “down”, which I am, I went through all my campaigns since 2020 (there were 41 of them), and put an “estimated raise” column for each of them. So, now I have the delta between what I thought I would raise and what I did raise for each campaign.

I think this is a more effective methodology since it shows whether my perceptions matched my reality.

Before we get to that, let’s talk about my Kickstarter totals for this year. Every year my mix of projects is different, so simply saying that last year I made $127,737 on Kickstarter and this year I made $53,396, while being technically correct, doesn’t make as much sense as the way I designed this portmortem.

Still, I need to at least mention the elephant in the room. Namely, that my projects made $74,341 l…

User's avatar

Continue reading this post for free, courtesy of Russell Nohelty.

Or purchase a paid subscription.
© 2026 Russell Nohelty · Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice
Start your SubstackGet the app
Substack is the home for great culture