My Kickstarter is a little over a week from completion, is 88% funded, and is quite likely to hit 100% during the final 48 hours. The trouble is, the Pathfinder conversion stretch goal – which will likely bring in considerably more backing if hit before the final 48 hours – is still $550 out. The odds I’ll hit that in time to bring Pathfinder hopefuls in are pretty slim. Worse, some of my current backers may have backed only out of the expectation that the Pathfinder stretch goal will be hit, and back out when things get close to the finish with that stretch goal still out of reach. This could lead to new pledges and cancellations dueling one another, a duel that the new pledges could ultimately lose out on, bringing the campaign to an ignominious conclusion just as it seemed on the threshold of victory.
On the other hand, 48 hours is a long time, so if the final surge quickly carries me over the $2,000 funding goal, I can start posting to Pathfinder subreddits to try and get us up to that $2,300 stretch goal, and if I’m really lucky, what would ordinarily be the final surge could carry me to the $2,300 stretch goal in the penultimate 24 hours, allowing me to advertise the campaign in its final day to Pathfinder as “this is definitely getting a conversion” rather than “please back so that it will maybe get a conversion.” It’s still hypothetically possible that tipping over the Pathfinder conversion stretch goal at the eleventh hour could lead to enough backers pouring in to count the campaign as an unqualified success (when the campaign started, I pegged that number at 250 – enough to show signs that my audience was growing, which it needs to do in order to make this gig stable), but it’s not very likely.
If the project does end up funding but not hitting the Pathfinder stretch goal, I could run a separate quickstarter specifically to try and fund that conversion. This would require me to make a new Kickstarter campaign, which would be a hassle, but it would also give me fairly solid evidence of how big the Pathfinder audience really is. One possible reason why this Kickstarter has gone poorly compared to the last is because the Pathfinder audience is holding off until the conversion is locked in, and that I’d be doing much better had I gone with a higher initial goal and baked the Pathfinder conversion into the default project. The Pathfinder conversion quickstarter would give me pretty good evidence as to how much of the campaign’s comparatively limited success is due to that particular factor.
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