Publishing lessons

Over the past 4 years I have shipped more than 30,000 orders to 80 different countries and today I’ll be diving into the data, sharing my thoughts, and looking at the most common countries that support crowdfunding campaigns.

There are 5 columns, KS 1 – KS 4 represent all orders associated with each of my 4 crowdfunding campaigns and Direct contains all other orders that have been placed directly with me but can’t be attributed directly to a campaign.

The raw data can be found here.

Notes from my latest crowdfunding campaign (KS 4)

• 8 countries (Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Netherlands, Sweden, United Kingdom, and United States of America) make up 88.15% of all orders placed.
• 14 countries (the above plus Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Italy, New Zealand, and Spain) make up 93.08%.
• Most countries (46) individually account for less than 0.1% of all orders.
• By using a fulfilment centre in Australia, Canada, Germany, USA, and UK you can provide custom friendly local shipping to over 97% of customers.
• While some countries are harder to ship to than others (for example Russia), I choose to ship to those countries anyway. Even though there are so few orders (13 from Russia in 4 years) and I may lose money, I choose to put in a little extra effort and try to make every group of people happy rather than ignore them.
• The number of backers from a country can vary greatly between campaigns, for example my backers from USA have been 50.56%, 45.50%, 55.05%, and most recently 56.49%, changing by over 10% between projects.

General thoughts

While planning out a crowdfunding campaign it is important to focus on the most popular regions and make sure you have your numbers correct. These are the countries where if you make a mistake you are likely to lose a lot of money and may find yourself in a difficult situation.

However, it is still important to be as inclusive as possible and to spend time working out shipping costs for as many countries as possible. Fulfilment centres will be able to provide you with prices for all countries they ship to, and it doesn’t take long to scan 4 or 5 documents for an extra 50 entries and note down the best options. It may not feel worth it for a few orders, but if you include all the countries where I had 10 orders or less during my last campaign, that’s still 1% of all orders, an extra $15,000 in sales, and a lot of happy people.

I hope this information proves helpful and I’d love to know if anything stood out to you while browsing the data?