Free · No email required
How many backers do you actually need?
Start with the number you actually want. Every figure on Kickstarter has been hit by somebody, and yours is reachable too — it is only ever a question of how many people have to say yes, and how long it takes to find them. Put your number in and see the route to it.
Put in what you want to raise and your average pledge to begin.
The basics
2 How big a list does that need? Turn backers into wait-list signups and VIPs Open
Your list does not have to deliver every backer. Fund fast on day one and Kickstarter starts surfacing you in Discover, the category rows and its newsletter — and roughly half your final orders come from the platform itself rather than from anyone you recruited. So size your list against the half you are responsible for.
Of the backers you bring, about 2% of a plain wait-list signup pledges on day one, against roughly 25% of a VIP who has put down a small deposit. Paying filters browsers from buyers, which is the whole argument for a VIP stage. Change either if you have your own numbers.
3 What do you actually keep? Kickstarter's cut and payment processing Open
Kickstarter takes 5% of what you raise. Payment processing takes roughly 3% plus a small fee on every pledge. None of this touches production, shipping or tax — it is just the cost of collecting the money.
Let me help you hit that number
This calculator gives you the shape of it. What it cannot tell you is the part that actually decides the outcome: which half of that list is worth building, what your VIP offer should be, what a realistic price is for your product, and how long the runway needs to be before you pick a launch date.
Campaigns raise these amounts every week, and the founders who do it started where you are now. The number is a measure of runway, not of whether you can do it.
In an hour I will go through your actual numbers and show you how it really works — why the figure on your Kickstarter page should be your day-one number rather than this target, and how the platform brings the rest once you have funded fast. That one distinction is where most campaigns are won or lost.
Talk it through — £60 strategy callQuestions
How many backers do I need to reach my Kickstarter goal?
Your goal divided by your average pledge. A £100,000 target at a £75 average pledge needs 1,334 backers. That number is far more useful than the money figure, because backers are people you have to go and find, and you can work backwards from it to the size of email list you need.
What is the difference between my target and my funding goal?
Your target is what production actually costs. Your funding goal is the number on the Kickstarter page, and it should be what your pre-launch list can clear in the first 24 to 48 hours. They are different questions with different answers, and setting the goal at the target is the most common reason campaigns stall in public.
How big does my email list need to be?
Work backwards from backers. Roughly 2% of a plain wait-list signup backs on day one, against about 25% of a VIP who has paid a small deposit. So 1,000 day-one backers means around 50,000 plain signups, or about 4,000 VIPs, or some mix of the two.
How much does Kickstarter take from my total?
Kickstarter takes 5% of funds raised, and payment processing takes roughly 3% plus a small per-pledge fee. So expect to keep around 91 to 92% of the headline number before you have paid for anything you promised.
My number looks impossible. What should I do?
That is the calculator working. Either the target is too high for the runway you have, the price is too low for the number of people you can realistically reach, or you need considerably more time to build the list. All three are cheaper to discover now than on launch day.
More free tools on the tools page, including the day one calculator for checking whether the list you already have will fund your goal.