Launching your indie game on Kickstarter? Use our pre-launch checklist to prepare your campaign page, marketing, social media, ads and audience.

Kickstarter isn't just a funding tool. It's a market validation engine, a community builder, a creative freedom guarantee, and a launchpad for everything that follows. Here's what it actually gives you beyond the money.

Start paid ads 6–8 weeks before your Kickstarter launch date. Any later and you don't have enough runway to build the audience you need. Any earlier and you're spending budget on followers who'll lose interest before you go live.

A realistic paid ads budget for an indie game Kickstarter starts at £500–£1,000 for pre-launch and scales from there based on your funding goal, timeline, and how aggressively you want to grow.

Popular Upcoming was a popularity contest. The Personal Calendar is a relevance engine. That's a meaningful difference.

A campaign that funds 80% in its first two days generates press interest, activates Kickstarter's own algorithm to surface it in browse and search, and tells every backer who arrives later that this project is real and succeeding. A campaign sitting at 20% funded on day three sends the opposite signal — and that signal compounds.