Setting your funding goal

Your funding goal has to satisfy two masters. It must be low enough to fund quickly, because a campaign sitting at 40 percent looks doomed and stops attracting pledges. And it must be high enough that if you fund at exactly the goal, you can actually manufacture and ship the game without losing money. Creators fail in both directions: goals so high they never fund, and goals so low that funding was the beginning of a financial disaster.

Build the goal from a real budget. Get manufacturing quotes at your minimum order quantity, usually 1,000 to 1,500 copies for offset printing. Add freight from the factory to your fulfillment warehouses, fulfillment fees per package, platform and payment fees of 8 to 10 percent, a reserve for failed payments and refunds of a few percent, and any remaining art or graphic design costs. Then add a contingency of at least 10 to 15 percent, because tariffs, freight rates, and paper prices move between your quote and your invoice. The number that covers all of that at minimum quantity is your true floor.

The temptation is to set the public goal below the true floor and count on overfunding. Some experienced creators do this deliberately, treating the difference as a calculated risk backed by savings. For a first campaign it is gambling with money you may not have. A safer trick is to reduce the true floor itself: simplify components, cut the deluxe version, or shorten the component list so the game you must deliver at goal is cheap to make, then let overfunding pay for the nicer version through stretch goals.

Remember that shipping collected later in a pledge manager should not be inside your funding goal, but shipping charged in the pledge must be, and the platform takes its percentage of shipping revenue too. Model the campaign in a spreadsheet at three outcomes, goal exactly, 2x goal, and 5x goal, and confirm you survive all three. More campaigns have been sunk by unexpected success at the wrong prices than by failure.