The Pre-Launch Timeline Indie Developers Actually Follow (90, 60, 30 Days Out)
- 2 days ago
- 9 min read
Most indie game Kickstarters don't fail because the game is bad. They fail because they didn't have a pre-launch timeline
Posting on social media, growing your community, and preparing for your launch. It all feels like a shot in the dark, but there are actions we can take to make it feel a little less like bashing your head on your keyboard. Planning a pre-launch builds the audience, infrastructure, and momentum your campaign needs before day one, and each phase has a different job.
There's no golden rule, but I think if you follow this guide and get the order right, you have a clear structure that becomes the payoff for twelve weeks of work to start building a following.
Let's begin.
Key takeaways
90 days out: build the foundation.
Define your positioning, set up your Kickstarter/pre-launch page, test messaging, and get early interest on social media through gameplay, images, story and viral trends.
60 days out: start consistent visibility.
Post dev updates, share gameplay clips, grow Discord/socials, and begin outreach to creators and communities.
30 days out: enter the pre-launch sprint.
Lock your page, finalise trailer and assets, push press/influencers, and actively drive followers and sign-ups.
Final push into launch: prepare momentum.
Schedule content, warm up your audience, and focus on hitting strong day-one funding (ideally ~30% early) to trigger an algorithmic boost and credibility.
Why the Sequence Matters More Than the Tactics
Before getting into the phases, you need to understand one thing: the first 24 to 48 hours of your Kickstarter campaign are the most critical window you have .
Campaigns that hit 30% to 40% of their funding goal in that window trigger Kickstarter's popular campaign feature, which helps visibility for the rest of the run. Campaigns that launch cold rely entirely on forcing your game on new audiences, screaming into the void, watching everything burn around you.
To get it right, you need to understand that 99.99999% of successful Kickstarters day-one performance is not luck; it's already been weeks, months or years of work before launch and when the time is right to announce your Kickstarter or Steam launch, it's all about taking your followers on a new journey, warming them up even more to become eager supporters.
One thing I see time after time from indie devs is the over-reliance of social media followers: social media following is not the same as committed backers. Take this game for example, a game with 8,000 Twitter followers can launch to just 16 backers because Twitter followers didn't commit to anything.
Kickstarter followers and email subscribers are different. They made an active choice either log into Kickstarter or create an account to track your project.
Your pre-launch work needs to prioritize those relationships over social metrics.
That's the bottom line for everything that follows. Each phase builds the conditions that the next one requires.
90 Days Out: Build the Foundation
This phase is unglamorous. You're not announcing anything big. You're not running ads. You're building the infrastructure that everything else depends on, and you're doing it while there's still time to get it right.
Set up your community presence. Choose one or two platforms based on where your target audience actually gathers, not where you feel most comfortable. Discord works for real-time discussion and building a tight-knit community. Reddit works for long-form conversation and genre-specific communities that already exist. Twitter and X work for quick updates and jumping on trends. TikTok and YouTube work for short-form gameplay clips.
The mistake here is trying to be everywhere. A solo developer or small team with limited bandwidth should pick one or two primary channels and build genuine engagement there. A few hundred people who are actually interested in your game are worth more than thousands of passive followers across five platforms. Post behind-the-scenes looks at development. Run AMAs. Encourage community members to share their own content. Provide value before you ask for anything.
Build your landing page or Kickstarter pre-launch page. This is the piece most developers delay, and it's the piece that everything else depends on. Paid ads need a destination. Social posts need a conversion point. Your email list needs a signup form. None of that works without a page.
Design it with the right specs from the start: capsule art at 1024 by 576 pixels, project title capped at 60 characters, subtitle at 135 characters maximum. Then show it to real humans from your community before you spend a dollar driving traffic to it. Fix confusing messaging, unclear calls to action, and broken links now. You don't want to discover those problems during launch week.
Validate your messaging. Watch what content gets engagement in your community. Which angles get comments? What questions do people ask? Use that feedback to refine your pitch before you invest in paid advertising. If your core community doesn't connect with your positioning, your ads won't either.
60 Days Out: Grow the Audience and Create Your Assets
The infrastructure is in place. Now you use it. This phase is about growing your pre-launch audience, creating the campaign assets you'll need at launch, and beginning systematic awareness building. The 30-day phase is execution. This phase is what makes execution possible.
Announce your Kickstarter intent and direct people to your pre-launch page. Every post, every update, every community interaction should have a clear call to action pointing toward your Kickstarter pre-launch page or email signup. 200 Kickstarter followers converts to approximately 30 to 40 backers at launch. Each follower is potential day-one momentum. Start accumulating them now.
Start building your email list. Email subscribers are your highest-converting pre-launch asset. They raised their hand. They want to hear from you. Aim for at least 1,000 engaged subscribers before launch. That number separates campaigns that have momentum from campaigns that start from zero. Every subscriber you add in this phase is a potential day-one backer you won't have to pay to reach again.
Set up your paid ad campaigns if your budget allows. Pre-launch Facebook ads have four goals : building your email list, creating brand awareness, driving traffic to your landing page, and generating social engagement.
Set up your Facebook Pixel for tracking. Define your target audience by interests, layering relevant categories like Kickstarter, your genre, and comparable titles. Prepare 3 to 5 video clips and 10 to 15 static images for your ad creatives. A/B test your hooks, angles, and lead conversion cost. Monitor cost per lead closely. If acquiring an email subscriber is costing too much, adjust your targeting or creative before you scale.
If your budget is limited or nonexistent, this step gets smaller, but it doesn't disappear. Organic community work and consistent content creation are your multiplier. The paid ads phase accelerates what you've already built. It doesn't replace building it.
Create multiple campaign trailers. This is the single highest-converting asset on your Kickstarter page and part of your big marketing beats on social and press coverage (if you plan on emailing journalists yourself), and it is not something you build in the final week. Here are some marketing beat examples for trailer assets:
Gameplay trailer (high energy, big moments, high action, epic soundtrack)
Announcement trailer (shorter in length, announcement 2 to 3 frames in, call to action at the end).
Story trailer (introduce the core story of your game. What's your character's motive, what's your characters back story?).
Main trailer (A mix of all the above, with a call to action at the end of your desired goal. i.e. Support now, back on Kickstarter now, wishlist now).
Only about 30% of Kickstarter videos are watched to completion, which means your first 10 seconds need to hook the viewer immediately. The full video should run 1 to 3 minutes. Lead with your game's strongest visual and your most compelling hook. Walk through what the game is, why it matters, and what backers are funding. While you're producing it, create supplementary clips for paid ads and social content. Short gameplay clips, developer commentary, and behind-the-scenes moments become the fuel for your paid campaigns in the next phase.
Refine your page with real feedback. Show your pre-launch page to your community. Test different hero images, different headline copy, and different ways of describing your game. If one version drives more email signups than another, that's data. Use it. The goal is to know your page works before you launch, not to discover it doesn't on day one.
Maintain a consistent content rhythm. This phase is where your pre-launch audience grows from a core group to a broader following. Post consistently. Engage with comments. Answer questions. Encourage your community to bring in others. Don't just announce things. Give people a reason to keep paying attention.
30 Days Out: Execution Mode
Everything should be ready to go. If you enter this phase without your landing page live, your video created, or your community engaged, you are building during your launch. That splits your attention at the worst possible moment and costs you conversion when it matters most.
Finalize your campaign page. Confirm your title, subtitle, reward tiers, and stretch goals are complete. Proofread everything. Launch-day edits signal to backers that you weren't prepared, and that erodes trust at exactly the wrong time.
Shift your paid ad targeting to your warmest audience. Increase spend and narrow your focus to people who have already visited your landing page, engaged with your content, or signed up for your email list. These are the people most likely to pledge on day one. Drive all traffic to your Kickstarter page or pre-launch page. Push your existing community to follow your Kickstarter page immediately.
Prepare your email launch sequence. Schedule your launch announcement to send at the moment your campaign goes live. Have follow-up emails ready for days 7 days and 24 hours before your launch. Your email list and follower list are your highest-converting channels. Don't launch without a sequence ready to activate.
Execute your pre-launch hype sequence. Release your launch teaser or main trailer. Announce your official launch date to your full community. Begin countdown content: behind-the-scenes looks, developer updates, community highlights. The goal is to reach launch day with the highest possible number of people who have already committed to following your campaign.
Send press outreach if it's part of your strategy.
Prepare a press kit with your key assets and talking points. Personalize each outreach based on what the recipient covers and why your game fits their audience. Generic mass emails get ignored.
Run one final push for Kickstarter followers and email subscribers. The days immediately before launch are your highest-intent window. People who follow your project now are the ones most likely to pledge within the first few hours. Don't slow down in the final stretch. Accelerate.
The "Announce and Wait" Mistake
The most common pre-launch failure is announcing a campaign date, posting once, and then going quiet until launch day. The problem is not the announcement. The problem is that no one is watching when you make it.
Without a pre-built community, a launch announcement reaches no one who is already invested in your game. When launch day arrives, the campaign starts cold. Cold traffic rarely funds. Your campaign needs warm traffic: people who already know who you are, what your game is, and why they want to play it.
Building that audience takes weeks, not hours.
The second version of this mistake is treating social follower counts as a proxy for launch readiness. A large following feels like momentum. It is not. Social followers are passive browsers who made no commitment. Kickstarter followers and email subscribers are different. They actively chose to track your project. Your pre-launch energy should go toward converting social followers into committed pre-saves and email subscribers, not celebrating follower milestones.
One more variation worth naming: developers with small budgets sometimes skip the pre-launch phase entirely and plan to run ads during the campaign instead. This breaks the sequence. Ads need a landing page. A landing page needs an email list. An email list needs time to build. You cannot skip to execution. Even with zero ad budget, the 90-day window should be spent building your community, capturing emails, and creating your campaign assets. The paid ads phase is a multiplier. The foundational work is what it multiplies.
Start the Clock Now
The developers who consistently hit their Kickstarter funding goals didn't start marketing at launch. They started twelve weeks out, followed a sequence, and entered launch day with a community that was already watching.
If your launch is 90 days away, the foundation phase starts today. If it's 60 days away, you should already have a landing page live and an email list growing. If it's 30 days away and you don't have a campaign video, a pre-launch page, and a community to activate, the most useful thing you can do right now is compress the first two phases as fast as possible and stop treating anything as optional.
The Free Kickstarter Marketing Guide from Full Charge extends this timeline with page design templates, budget-free marketing tactics, and the full playbook for turning your launch window into a funded project. Download it and build your pre-launch plan before your window gets any shorter.
