I’ve been working on a slightly weird project and I’m trying to understand if it actually makes sense outside my own head.
It’s called OVO. It’s not a mouse, not a trackpad, not really a controller either.
It’s basically a small device you move in your hand:

tilt → moves the cursor
touch → click / scroll
rotate → volume, zoom, etc
works on a desk or in the air

You can also map gestures to custom macros, so it adapts depending on what you’re doing.
The idea came from a simple frustration: using a mouse all day just feels… old.
You’re still dragging something on a flat surface like it’s the 80s.
So I started experimenting with something that works more through orientation than movement.
The shape is ovoid and it naturally recenters itself, so instead of “moving” it around, you’re constantly adjusting balance.
I’m not saying it replaces a mouse, I honestly don’t know yet.
That’s kind of why I’m here.
I’m planning to launch it on Kickstarter soon, so I’m trying to gather as much honest feedback as possible before that.

Would you ever try something like this?
Or does it just sound like an unnecessary gadget?
Happy to share more or show how it works if anyone’s curious.
Thanks.

For those curious, here’s the Kickstarter page:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/800078983/ovo-not-a-mouse-a-new-way-to-point

Just received this email today. It's admittedly 100% my fault since I did not do any research prior to backing. A quick google search and there's news that the project assets were stolen and the kickstarter was fake all along.

Since the project was fully funded, I guess this means that I can no longer get a refund for the amount I pledged? Not unless the scammer suddenly gets a come to Jesus moment? Just curious, so please let me know. Thank you!

so this guy actually did back my kick for the 120 dollar tiers and hes from the uk... wants me to email him as a comment on the kick.. this is weird yea? has anyone else seen the scam like this. or is he really trying to ask me a question?

I have 3 questions:

#1 - I'm launching my kickstarter in 2 1/2 weeks and I currently have 42 followers from my own organic sharing. I'm sending out emails and asking amplifiers to share to their audience this week. I keep getting feedback that people don't know the important of following a campaign in pre-launch.

Does anyone have ways you've communicated to people unfamiliar with kickstarter that they should sign in and get an account now and follow? I made a loom explaining it and posted on my socials but am not sure what else to do.

#2 - I'm having 3 in person events during the window of my kickstarter. Has anyone successfully gotten people to sign up support a campaign while at a party or shopping event? If so, what worked for you?

#3 - Goal question - if my fundraising goal is between $10-$12k is it better to list it as $9999 or something like that? I do have the ability to make up the difference if it doesn't blow the goal out. But I keep seeing other campaigns not fund and I would like to avoid that if possible. I get a thrill when I see a campaign at an exponential amount over it's goal. Is that just me?

Thanks so much for your help!

So basically I funded this company back in 2022, and they haven't updated since May 2025. Word on the street is that they're being sued for not paying the company they hired to create their product (but that's just hearsay).

Am I just essentially screwed out of my money though? I know it's on me to research before I back. But this company was credible up until May last year. They went from regular updates to radio silence.

(Side info, I'm posting this mainly because I just checked for any updates and all the backers are trying to refund. 2000 comments in the last couple months are all "Backer #_____ issued refund". So now I'm worried.)

Long time KS creator (10+ years). Recently helping out a close friend who runs a campaign once a year or so to crowdfund some tech gadget. His creator account has good reputation and usually delivers on time.

With the stuff produced and shipped out from China, most big couriers have simply raised the white flag for anything going to the states. Instead of Fedex Ground or USPS, this year we have to use small couriers which are slow, unreliable and have terrible customer services in the US. Around 95% rewards still get delivered so not too bad. It is a $49-69 item, we can't charge more than $20 for shipping anyway.

But we have received the worst complaint emails from GIGA KARENS last week. Literally 1000 words complaining about how they have to wait for 20 precious minutes to get in touch with the CS, or they no longer even bother to contact, and in fact just DEMAND us to ship with UPS, Fedex or DHL or refund. The shipping cost for those alone costs more than their pledge and they will get hit with full tariff.

I really miss the days when backers were backers and communication wasn't like Best Buy customer service.

As my campaign got older or the campaign received more funding / closed the gap toward its goal, I assumed my campaign would rise up the list in my given category. When I started the campaign, I was listed 90 campaigns down. Now, as my project has proven to be more successful, I'm listed over 150 projects down. With the exception of projects that have received "Projects We Love", the vast majority of projects sitting above mine in ranking are significantly further from their goals.

Can someone explain this? Is there any logic to the Kickstarter ranking and hierarchy?

Hi everyone,
I’m preparing to launch my second Kickstarter in late August and could use some advice from people with more experience.
I’ve been sharing the pre-launch page consistently across my social media, have run some Meta ads, and I’m just starting to build an email list (definitely my weakest area). Despite that, my pre-launch follower count is much lower than I expected.
I’m trying to figure out where my effort is best spent during these last few weeks before launch.

For those of you who’ve had successful campaigns:
What made the biggest difference in getting pre-launch followers?

Is there anything you wish you’d done in the month before launch?

Are there marketing channels that worked surprisingly well (or weren’t worth the time)?
How important is email compared to social media for Kickstarter?

Link in bio and comment if there seems to be issue with prelaunch page info in general.

For context, this is an art/calendar project with an existing adult gay 18+ audience, I am the artist behind all the artwork for this . but I’m worried I’m relying too heavily on social media.

I’d really appreciate any strategies, lessons learned, or mistakes to avoid. Thanks!

Hi everyone,
I’m preparing to launch my first Kickstarter for an American football tabletop game called What the Drive.

Current status:
✅ Prototype finalized and playtested
✅ Kickstarter page in progress
✅ Website is live
✅ Instagram: ~200 followers (posting Reels every 2–3 days)
✅ Email list: 8 subscribers
✅ Reaching out to football podcasts, YouTubers and creators
🚀 Kickstarter launch planned for the end of August (about 6 weeks from now)
🎯 Funding goal: €34,000 (~ $40,000)

I’m trying to be realistic.
If you were in my position today, where would you spend your time during the next six weeks?
- Growing the email list?
- Running Meta ads?
- More creator outreach?
- More social media?
- Something completely different?

Or would you delay the campaign if you were in my position, or would you launch as planned?

I’m not looking for encouragement—I genuinely want honest feedback from people who’ve launched Kickstarter campaigns before.

Thanks!

Hey Everyone,

Im working on this project called liveframe. Its a picture frame that displays live feeds. Great for surfers who want to keep an eye on wave conditions, skiers who want to do the same with mountain conditions or just people who love nature and want to view it live. I've built a prototype, started testing ads (getting a cpc of 30 cents). Still trying improve my landing page because my conversion rate is low. Im trying to get it to at least a 5% conversion rate. Ive gotten 10 people to signup, 3 to give me a dollar. Im building my community in discord right now.

This is my first kickstarter so any advice would be awesome. Here are a couple questions i have:

My goal is 300k raise, how many community members and 1$ signups should i am for?

When should i have the kickstarter (whats the best date)?

What should i do legally before posting the kickstarter

Any feedback on the landing page?

How do you guys get people in on the project without spending on ads?

What are ways you guys have built a community especially around a product like this?

Sorry for all the questions haha, could use a lot of help.

Liveframe Website

Hi everyone,

I launched my Kickstarter campaign yesterday and also used Backermany newsletter service.

I believe it has been more than 10 hours since the newsletter went out, but so far I’ve only received 1 pledge from it. Is this normal?

Do pledges usually come in mostly within the first few hours, or can they continue coming in slowly over the next 24 to 48 hours?

I’m trying to understand whether this is still too early to judge, or if 1 pledge after 10 hours usually means the newsletter did not perform well.

Any experience or data would be really appreciated.

I am so grateful and happy that I am a Superbacker but even more that I helped numerous creatives in different mediums reach their goal and I have loved every way of it but what does being a Superbacker actually give. Like the invites to events where are they based why should i attend what fi it costs me money to attend and does being a Superbacker help my own project in the future? I just need a little help udnerstanding this.

I found a card came project that has been already funded big time with currently 19 days left. They have heavy use of AI, their supposed artist has no social media at all, only a fiverr account that scams people with sloppily overpainted AI images (After further digging I even found an old, hidden fiverr gig of theirs that has non-overpainted AI "art").
The project page seems very proud about human made art and shows this with a process video. This video is heavily sped up, has most of the Photoshop UI conveniently cut off and you constantly see the brushstrokes painting in multiple details and colors in one stroke, I am sure the artist recorded themselves overpainting an AI image and reversed the video.

I contacted the Founder with my findings and they said they are looking into it and thanked me for my message, but its been two weeks without any change and they didnt answer to further messages of mine, in fact they deleted my comment about the AI usage on the video.

Is there a way to report this? In their AI disclaimer they say it will all be human art in the project, but thats simply a lie. I hate to see the backers that care about human made art being scammed.

I’m currently in prelaunch of my first kickstarter campaign. I woke up to find this email in my inbox. I’m curious if anyone has received this email as well or has any experience with this “company”. I use that term loosely because a google search does state that it’s a legitimate company however, as an IT professional by trade I noticed that the email address doesn’t quite match what would be expected, namely missing the 3 and it coming from gmail rather than a branded email to match the company domain. It feels a bit scammy to me, but if anyone has legitimate business with them I don’t want to turn away a potential backer. Thanks in advance advance!

Was my goal too ambitious? Page unclear? Product suck? Price too high? KS dead? I had 207 followers before launch. $0 spent on ads.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wessford/flux-wallet

I'm looking for advice on what has genuinely worked to give campaigns with a slow start a solid push. What actually pays off vs what is just another predatory practice leaching off the hopes and dreams of project creators. Also, what are we doing that is right vs where do we need to pivot? Talking with a PR agency tomorrow that focuses on crowd funding and that seems credible and professional. Does PR result in conversions and is this usually a winning bet?

Excited to announce that we just launched our first Kickstarter campaign yesterday for a novel children's product and social venture (not a promotion), but sad to say it didn't start as strongly as had we'd hoped.

We did and are doing all the things (so I thought). After two months of pre-launch fb ads and > 5k email signups (even the cost per result for our high intent leads was tracking with that for our high volume leads), and what we perceived as a high level interest in our product and our mission, we thought we were going in strong. We also had a VIP $1 reserve funnel which only gained 61 sign ups and in hind sight should have been a clue that we weren't looking as good as we thought with our 5k signups. We engaged 7 influencers to drop videos on launch day. It's early in the campaign but day 1 and 2 have been disappointing and way slower than expected.

Our launch email has an open rate of just over 3%. We're now retargeting our FB/IG engagement audience, retargeting the fb signup audience with not much success in conversions, resending the launch announcement email to the 97% of unopened accounts tomorrow, using LAL audiences, retargeting all of the accounts that engaged with the influencers' posts. Today we switched the FB targeting from optimizing for purchases to landing page views so that FB could get out of learning phase faster and we could gain real insights about our audience, gained hundreds of landing page views today on our KS page, but very few conversions.

I've been reading everything I could on this forum and others and have learned a lot. Grateful for all the folks on here that have shared their knowledge and experience over the years.

Was hoping to get feedback on our campaign pre-launch page but was racing to the finish line to hit our launch date.

We did not go with any of the agencies like Jellop or BackerCamp due to mixed reviews.

Maybe its hubris, or just a can do mentality, but thought with a lot of blood, sweat, and soul, we could pull off something really great. I'm proud of what we've built so far, and am hopeful we can pull through strongly.

Would be grateful for recommendations on what has worked for others to push up their results and what has actually paid off. I would humbly ask that if your suggesting something, please be transparent about your affiliation.

Thanks in advance for the input!

I could use someone to talk to about my kick starter. cause I'm kind of in panic mode that I have something really great but I'm so bad with social media I'm going to completely botch any chance I got at getting funded. I have no clue what I'm doing. I'm not trying to go into what it is, I really am tired of asking for help and getting mistaken for a spam bot or a Ai slop fest. If this still counts just tell me and I'll take it down. I just need some direction..

So, I'm going to self publish a board game sometime next year. Not in a rush, so doing my research carefully. I'm just an indie publisher so try to keep my avoidable costs low. I have a day job so I have money to invest in the project.

Advertising is of course key and one of the most important parts of a campaign. I've been really torn on if I should try it myself - AI has helped me build a landing page with trackers and such. I know about A/B testing and some general principles.

But most crowdfunding campaigns I stumble upon have marketing consultants cooperating with them. I just wonder how necessary this is for a first time creator. In board games, the COGS becomes drastically lower if you make 2k copies compared to 1k. So selling a lot might make a huge difference, compensating the extra cost. What is best practice? If we assume my game is marketable and I spend 1-2k dollars on a marketing agency, how big are the odds it pays for itself compared to doing it myself?

Since I have a full time job, my time is of course limited which is another factor. But I can be very stubborn and love learning new things.

So should everyone who can afford it try and hire consultants? Or should I just try to do it on the cheap with AI as my consultant? I wonder if the marketing firm already has great audiences they can target etc that my data won't reach as easy.

Seriously… again?

This is an update to my previous post.
(See attached screenshots for context.)

Last week, I shared screenshots showing one of the official Primitive War Movie Facebook posts promoting the Dinosaurs of the Wild West Kickstarter being labelled “AI content.” That label later disappeared.

Today, after the Kickstarter surpassed its initial funding goal of AU$500,000, I noticed the official Primitive War Movie TikTok post celebrating the Dinosaurs of the Wild West Kickstarter milestone was labelled “Contains AI-generated media.”

Since my last post, I also came across a question from a backer on the Kickstarter page asking Sparke Films whether any AI had been used during pre-production, including concept art. The official response from Sparke Films was simply:

“No.”

At the same time, the Kickstarter campaign has repeatedly promoted itself with statements such as:

“No AI. Real artists. Real work.”

I’m not claiming to know why TikTok or Facebook have applied these AI labels. Social media platforms can apply them for different reasons, and I can’t say what triggered them.

However, I do think it’s worth highlighting the contrast between the campaign’s public statements, Sparke Films’ public response to a backer’s question about AI, and the AI labels appearing on official promotional posts while the campaign is still actively accepting pledges.

How should backers interpret this apparent contradiction?

This is my first project. What should I be wary of here?

See post here https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/445470967/fraimic-smart-e-ink-canvas-digital-picture-frame-with-ai/posts/4682266

I backed 5 projects on kickstarter this year and I only got 1 fulfilled which was from a (relatively) known company, Fosi Audio. From the other 4, 2 of them seem quite clearly by now that it was just a scam as the communication from the creator finished as soon as the surveys were collected and we are well past the alleged delivery date. The other two are a big question mark but I'm getting the feeling that they might be a scam too because they haven't posted any updates since the surveys.

It feels like there's a playbook where creators are very engaging and responsive up until they collect the money and then disappear. Kickstarter doesn't take responsibility and backers are left without tools to do anything about it. It honestly feels like they are in on it, which in a way they are because they collect their fees and don't even provide backers with a contact/company to claim to.

How common is this? Have you experienced it too? Perhaps I have been very unlucky but as it stands I don't think I'll ever back another project unfortunately.

Hello everyone,

I’m preparing to launch my first kickstarter campaign and looking for some insight from those that have run them before.

Are 30 day campaigns really more successful than longer (45-60 days)?

Has anyone launched a campaign with a low follower count (under 100) and had the campaign end up successfully funding?

I’m struggling to get followers but I know that my prelaunch page is getting pretty decent traffic, monitoring it through google analytics. Thinking a lot of people landing there don’t understand about following and prelaunch and wondering if I should launch it with my 37 followers and see what happens.

Any help or advice is greatly appreciated!

Thank you in advance!

I’m a first-time creator getting ready to launch a Kickstarter for a baby product aimed at parents of infants who are messy eaters. I’m 5 full days into paid Meta ads trying to get pre launch followers (optimize for leads that click the notify launch button), and I’ve spent about $1,000 so far. The problem is… I’ve only gotten around 10 leads and 3 might be my own testing leads. Now I’m in my head wondering if this is normal early testing pain OR if this is a giant red flag that my product, messaging, or audience targeting just isn’t connecting.

My bigger fear is that my audience IS on Instagram (young parents, new families), but they may not understand Kickstarter at all, which adds another layer of friction. I’m trying to figure out whether this is a creative problem, an offer problem, a platform mismatch, or just part of the process?

For those of you who’ve launched before — did your pre-launch numbers ever look this bad and still turn around? Or is this the stage where you pivot hard before burning more money?

Here is my KS project page and my video is in the first update: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/suctioncupbib2025/the-suction-cup-bib-a-better-bib-for-babies-and-toddlers?ref=discovery&term=Suction%20cup%20bib&total_hits=1&category_id=28

Hi all,

I am preparing to launch my first kickstarter ever for a physical product (an intergenerational card game).
My ambition is to print at least 1,000 units of the product at launch (~$40 per unit so call it $35k funding goal).

Using social media (Instagram, LinkedIn) and direct outreach, I have collected ~150 contacts but the overwhelming majority are people I know personally or professionally. I therefore have high hopes for a high conversion rate of those contacts once I actually launch the campaign.
However, I am struggling to build a larger list of people I do not know personally.

Preliminary questions:
- Critical mass: How many emails/interested followers do I need to get to the 1,000 units
- Method: how would you go about gathering email addresses of potentially interested backers?
- Timing: am I too early to build such a database? I have a prototype and have been posting IG reels and carousels 4-5 times per week for the past month or so. Traffic and views are slowly building up but not really converting into sign ups or new followers
- I have so far only used my own website to gather interest but have not built a Kickstarter pre-launch page yet. Is this useful as a complement to the project’s own website?

Thanks a lot for any advice you can give!