As lockdown began, Kickstarter kept a close eye on how the pandemic might affect our ecosystem. We were focused on two primary indicating metrics: the number of launched projects from creators, and the overall pledge volume from backers.

Initially, the effects were minor. We saw a slight dip in launched projects, while pledge volume stayed somewhat steady. As April and May rolled around, we began to hear concern from creators both online and writing in to us about whether funding was drying up, or if they should delay their projects. Though backer support remained consistent, by May we had seen a 40 percent drop in projects funding on the platform — and no signal for the decline to halt.

May through July 2020 proved especially tough for the company, as we underwent a difficult round of layoffs and scaled our product organization down from six feature teams to two. With significantly less resourcing, our strategy for resiliency and stability had to be significantly more focused than in previous years. As a staff product designer with a strategic focus, my role was to inform the strategic prioritization process with our leadership team, as well as partner with Ellie Clinton, our team’s product manager, to identify how our team would contribute toward the company-wide objective of increasing support for projects seeking on our platform — without compromising on our charter principles.

Evaluating different pathways to resilience

With a smaller, more focused product organization, we began to chart our course. Before landing on a path forward, we explored a broad spectrum of strategies that could bring financial stability to the platform. We discussed everything from experimenting with our business model, to improving our creator tooling.

Ultimately, we felt that the best thing we could do for our creators was show them that creative projects were still finding funding on our platform. Terry Van Duyn, a group product manager here at Kickstarter, recently shared a quote from Marty Cagan that seems particularly relevant:

Early on at eBay we found we needed a product principle that spoke to the relationship between buyers and sellers. Most of the revenue came from sellers, so we had a strong incentive to find ways to please sellers, but we soon realized that the real reason sellers loved us was because we provided them with buyers. This realization led to a critical principle that stated, "In cases where the needs of the buyers and the sellers conflict, we will prioritize the needs of the buyer, because that's actually the most important thing we can do for sellers."

-Marty Cagan, Inspired

Leveraging our backers to foster a healthy ecosystem for funding creative work

In order to understand how we might drive more backings on our platform, our first step was to audit our existing backer journey.

Creating a backer journey map