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Transcript

Post-Mortem: From Parts Unknown #2

An in-depth look at the seventh Pesto Comics campaign.

Adriano Ariganello

May 07, 2025

Transcript

Welcome Back (00:00)
Thanks to ComixLaunch (00:26)
Project Updates
- From Parts Unknown #4 in Prelaunch (01:02)
Main Story
- Funding (01:30)
  - Funds Raised Comparison (Series) (01:34)
  - Funds Raised Comparison (All Pesto Comics) (01:56)
  - Total $ Per Campaign (02:39)
  - Funding Stats (03:00)
  - Popular Pledge Levels (04:20)
  - Average Pledged Per Backer (05:01)
  - Cost Split (05:54)
- Backers (06:52)
  - Backer Count Comparison (Series) (06:58)
  - Backer Count Comparison (All Pesto Comics) (07:33)
  - Backer Counts (08:10)
  - Followers (08:47)
  - Multi-Return Backers (09:10)
  - Physical vs Digital (09:57)
  - Backer Types (10:53)
  - Where are Physical Backers From? (11:28)
- Marketing (11:51)
  - Kickstarter Referrals (11:54)
  - Non-Kickstarter Referrals (13:10)
  - Backerkit Launch (13:50)
- Reflecting on the Campaign (14:31)
  - How Do You Feel Now That the Campaign is Over? (14:43)
  - What was the high point of this campaign for you? (15:29)
  - What was the low point of the campaign for you? (16:22)
  - How are you different now that the campaign is over? (17:10)
  - What surprised you the most about this campaign? (18:17)
  - What's the biggest concern now that the campaign is over? (19:01)
  - What worked really well during this campaign? (20:03)
  - How might you do even better next time? (20:38)
  - What did backers really seem to resonate with? (21:17)
  - What completely bombed? (21:29)
  - What will you never do again? (22:06)
- The End (22:59)

Welcome Back

[Note: Below is a transcript of the video attached. I’ve done a light edit, but it’s a lot more raw than my usual posts.]

We’re back and doing a post-mortem for From Parts Unknown #2. You’re may be aware that we just finished the campaign for Issue 3, but there's some interesting information we can glean by looking at Issue 2. It does mean that the reflection questions that come at the end may have a bit of extra context to them that we wouldn't have if we did this right away.

I’ve done my best to put myself in the mindset of where I was with Issue 2 when answering those questions.

Thanks to ComixLaunch

As always, I like to credit Tyler James and the ComixLaunch as I've taken this postmortem from that course and manipulated a bit to make it my own.

I recommend it, not just because of this postmortem, but because of a lot of things that I have learned, not just the course itself, but the community you get to be a part of.

You get access to a private Facebook group where you can learn from all sorts of creators at all different levels, who are always there to help and answer a question for you. If you're serious about launching comics on Kickstarter, I highly recommend checking out ComixLaunch.

Project Updates

From Parts Unknown #4 in Prelaunch

Before we get into it, I want to encourage you to check out the pre-launch page for From Parts Unknown #4.

This is a double-sized epic finale. It's jam packed, full of vampires, pro-wrestling, body-slams & gore!

This is what we've been building up to, so I can't wait for you to check it out

If you haven't backed the series before, we’ll have lots of bundles to help you get caught up.

Follow From Parts Unknown #4

If you've been following along since the beginning, we'll have something special for you too!

And now…

Main Story

Funding

Let's talk about funding From Parts Unknown #2.

Funds Raised Comparison (Series)

Typically when you're talking about comics in a comic shop, there's a steep drop off after issue one, and fortunately we did not see that here.

It actually stays pretty close, though we didn't have a dead zone with Issue 1 - we did with Issue 2. Fortunately, the last couple days did see a spike, and we actually did better with this campaign than we did with Issue 1.

Funds Raised Comparison (All Pesto Comics)

That said, Naked Kaiju Woman still breaks the chart entirely as it was by far the highest funded campaign for Pesto Comics to date. It squishes everything else down.

With that context, I did feel a little bit disappointed with how From Parts Unknown #2 went just because it was the first campaign after Naked Kaiju Woman.

It's obviously different markets and I should have had totally different expectations with this, but I was still hoping that we'd get a much bigger jump in support given how well Naked Kaiju Woman did.

If I'm being reasonable about it, this is about as well as I could have expected it to go.

Total $ Per Campaign

It’s easy to see when you look at the actual total funded numbers. Naked Kaiju Woman is on an entirely different level.

From Parts Unknown #2 just barely outperformed #1. I'm not complaining at all. It looks like a lot of that audience did carry through.

Plus we got some new backers, so all in all, I'm pretty happy with how this result had gone.

Funding Stats

I upped the funding goal this round. I was feeling extra confident after coming off of Naked Kaiju Woman that if I raised the goal, we should be able to surpass it in no time. This led to us not funding as quickly as we usually do, though we still got the “Project We Love” badge.

I was a little worried that we weren't going to get the push from the algorithm that I was really hoping for as you do when you fund really quickly. It's still an ongoing experiment on my end, and with context for how #3 went, I know how the other route worked out and it didn't seem to work much better. I’m not sure how best to approach #4.

I'm not sure if funding goals matter in any way as far as my budget goes versus the funding goal. They're unrelated entirely. Just making the goal is never enough to completely cover the cost of the comic itself.

It more or less just covers the print run, but the production costs are more or less on me at this point, so it's always really important to not just double, but triple and quadruple that goal that is set.

This clearly didn't happen here. We just barely passed our funding goal, and you don't get nearly as much excitement in doing that than you do when you fund within a couple hours, even if the goal itself is significantly lower. Food for thought with the next few campaigns.

Popular Pledge Levels

When we look at the popular pledge levels, there's nothing terribly surprising here. We could see very clearly that digital always does well.

The main cover is always number two, and what's a little different this time is we have the digital catch-up. It does mean that we had a few new backers who are interested in catching up with issues one and two.

That was great to see repeated with the highest funding pledge levels as the physical catch-up was a little more costly being two physical issues and two digital issues. That helped it become the highest funding level of all of the pledge levels in the campaign.

The main cover stays at number two, of course, the digital copy manages to be the third highest funding pledged here.

Average Pledged Per Backer

One interesting thing that happened because of those catch-up tiers, it actually upped the average pledged per backer with backers buying that physical tier. That, again, is a little more pricey because you're getting physical books delivered to your address.

The average rate per backer to the second most of any Pesto Comics campaign so far, and it's number one in comics. The only one that was more was Big Smoke Pulp, and that was a 550 page book which had an exclusive hardcover that was $40 and a bundle for both the paperback and the hardcover for $60.

That made the average backing rate a lot higher, where this one was just straight comics and the fact that we're just about $25 average per backer is huge.

Although the campaign didn't get nearly as many people as I was hoping to, we managed to fund pretty well because we had so many people going and getting those catch-up tiers.

Cost Split

When we were talking about goals and why it's so important to double, triple, and quadruple them, here is why I mentioned it covers the print costs and the shipping costs in most cases. Production is where most of the costs end up, so that means paying Daniel and paying JP for the art and the colours on this book.

That's where most of the work comes in. Fortunately, I letter it myself, so I'm able to save that cost, and I think I do a decent job.

In other words, comics are very expensive to make, but well worth it if it's something you're interested in.

Just keep in mind that goal is really for that small slice of the pie. I'm still trying to make up the rest with conventions and future campaigns.

Backers

Let's talk about how many backers we brought in on this campaign.

Backer Count Comparison (Series)

Looking at the series, you can see the story is a little different than it was with the funding, although those two lines were pretty consistently tight with one another. They were following the same trend. You can see it was a little different with issue two. We did have a bit of drop off in terms of how many people actually did follow from one campaign to the next.

It was thanks to those new backers that actually got the backup tiers that made it comparable to issue one and two. That said, we're not that far off. It's not that big of a drop off, so I'm pretty happy with the results though you’d always hope that you would grow as the campaign goes.

Backer Count Comparison (All Pesto Comics)

It's no surprise at all that Naked Kaiju Woman absolutely breaks this chart by flattening everything else with just how high the backer count was with well over 600 for Naked Kaiju Woman.

Unfortunately, From Parts Unknown #2 is the second-last in terms of total backer count, which was pretty disappointing and did lead to us pivoting a bit in terms of how this series would go forward.

That's partly why #4 is now a double-issue, instead of doing the full five issues like we had planned at the beginning of this campaign for number two.

It was during this campaign that we decided to merge the last two issues to try and really end on a high note.

Backer Counts

I've been talking about how many new backers we got with this campaign, and it's actually shockingly small amount. Although they did help with getting this campaign to a certain funded level, it doesn't mean that there was a lot of them.

This is the highest return rate versus new backers I've seen on any campaign I've done thus far. It basically means people who've read number one decided to come back in droves, which was good, but we didn't get so many new people in at an Issue 2.

Followers

We did see interest in this as we had a pretty decent follower count. It was actually just shy of the follower count we had for Issue 1. However, the conversion rate was higher, given the math of just having a handful of fewer followers.

That said, it's pretty consistent with the last two campaigns as both Naked Kaiju Woman and Big Smoke Pulp also had a 32% conversion rate.

Multi-Return Backers

When we're talking about returning backers, we can see how many people have come back for multiple campaigns. The last five who have backed since the very beginning and have backed every campaign are just holding on.

I'm still very grateful for you, of course. We do see that the numbers are growing of folks who are coming back and backing multiple Pesto Comics campaigns.

I know that genre hopping makes this a lot more difficult to have everybody jumping from book to book to book. We even did a short story anthology in the middle here.

Big Smoke Pulp was not “comics” at all and we still have backers that have joined us in nearly everything we've done. I'm very grateful that you guys have so much trust in what we're putting together and are so interested, so to the backers that keep returning time after time, I thank you so much and to those new backers, I hope to see you join this list very soon too.

Physical vs Digital

In terms of physical and digital, the trend didn't break at all.

Here we're still very consistently seeing that digital always outperforms the physical, but the caveat to that is if you order physical, you get a digital copy with it.

The fact that this flipped with Crazy Latte Thing Called Love, I think was attributed to the fact that we had five variant covers. A lot of people picked up all of the covers that were available. That helped tip the scales into physical, but nearly every other time physical is always overrun by the amount of digital copies that are sent out, which I'm never upset about because it is a lot easier to distribute these.

It allows you to download and read it at your leisure. Shipping things out can always get a little more expensive, and there's a little more work on my end, but at the same time, I do appreciate people who actually want the book in their hands.

It's always interesting to see this split, but with From Parts Unknown #2, nothing too off trend here.

It looks like we're following the typical trends.

Backer Types

This actually breaks down whether a backer was a physical backer getting something in the mail or if they were purely digital.

The numbers always do change with each campaign with Naked Kaiju Woman, we more physical than digital. Similar with Crazy Latte Thing Called Love and Stay Cool.

With From Parts Unknown #1, we had a lot of physical backers more than the digital, but for Issue 2, that number actually flipped entirely. A lot of people actually just opted to skip the shipping and just went straight to digital.

Where are Physical Backers From?

Of those physical backers, as always, the United States is the overwhelming favorite in terms of who are backing these campaigns. With 36 backers from the US, we have eight from Canada, four from Ireland.

I credit JP for a lot of the Irish support as he's always pushing the campaigns and it's definitely folks from his neck of the woods that are backing this.

Marketing

Let's talk about how we got the word out with marketing.

Kickstarter Referrals

One of the best and most important ways to find backers on Kickstarter is to have the Kickstarter algorithm find your project and push it. Fortunately, From Parts Unknown #2 was a “Project We Love”, so it did find itself in front of people more often than it would've if we didn't have that badge.

That said, what was most important was people who have backed the campaign of mine in the past. We see that with the “new project email” about a quarter of the backers total on this campaign came from that email.

The “Project We Love” badge was huge, because we did come up in “Discovery” for 7% of the total backing.

We also had people searching it, people who saved it, the followers getting an email. Those pre-launch followers came in clutch, we showed up on the discovery page once again on the homepage.

Not only did people get that email in pre-launch, but we started showing up in all these other places. Thanks to that, and because prelaunch ended up being so important, it's something we're thinking about for number four.

This came right off the heels of Naked Kaiju Woman. We didn't get much time to get the pre-launch collected and had maybe had we collected more followers at that point, this would've done just a little bit better.

Non-Kickstarter Referrals

In terms of backers, we could actually track coming externally. There are a few that we have no idea.

They punched in the URL and showed up. That's about 17% of the backers on the total campaign that just went straight with the URL in their browser, which is great. It means we're getting the word out enough that people actually are finding the link and finding their way to it without relying on a link being provided to them.

That means a lot, but we don't know exactly how they came about that link. Instagram actually had one backer that came in huge, so it looks like at least one ad paid off the little bit that I spent there.

And BackerKit launch still seems to be worth it, and we'll talk about that right now.

Backerkit Launch

I only sent three emails. One to get people to follow the pre-launch, one at launch, and then one with 36 hours left saying, “Hey, don't miss out” with those three. We had a 40% open rate, but only a 3% click rate, which actually 2% worse than we got with Naked Kaiju Woman that said 1% of the 40% that clicked.

We're worth 23% of the total funding for this campaign.

That ended up being absolutely huge. $500 worth of the 2200 that was put in to this campaign. So Backerkit Launch is still proving it's worth in being able to send those emails out to previous backers.

Reflecting on the Campaign

Now I'm gonna go back in time and we're gonna reflect on the campaign as though #3 never happened. Let's get into the questions.

How Do You Feel Now That the Campaign is Over?

I feel alright.

I was always feeling a little bit down given the heights that we hit with Naked Kaiju Woman that we were nowhere close From Parts Unknown #2. It was a little bit upsetting. So was the retention from issue one to issue two, although the funding totals were good.

The fact that we saw a handful of people drop off was a little bit upsetting. I don't know if they read the book and didn't like it and didn't carry on, or was I just too rapid in terms of releasing it? It's hard to say, but when we talk about #3 very soon, I have some thoughts about this.

At the time, I know I was still comparing it to the previous campaign which was probably not fair, but I wasn't as happy about this campaign as I should have been.

What was the high point of this campaign for you?

The high point of the campaign was seeing that we had so many people getting the physical catch-up tier, so we did get the word out. However, it was strange because it took a few days for the new backers to show up. We're talking about 3, 4, 5 days into the campaign, we had only returning backers. It was kind of a good thing, because it means that people that read Issue 1 liked it and wanted to continue on the story.

The fact that it wasn't getting out to anyone new, even with the “Project We Love” badge was very disconcerting. It does look like that ended up helping in the long run as people did find it on the Discovery page and we're finding the campaign later on, but it took a while for us to get there. Seeing that when we did find those people, they were more than happy to catch up and that they were willing to get caught up with these physical issues, it meant a lot.

What was the low point of the campaign for you?

The low point of the campaign was really when we were in the dead zone.

I was seeing that this was not going to be the same as what I've become accustomed to in terms of not really hitting the dead zone. It wasn't just Naked Kaiju Woman, but we didn't hit the dead zone with Big Smoke Pulp.

We didn't hit it with Crazy Latte Thing Called Love. So this was a relatively new feeling. I think even From Parts Unknown #1 didn't really have a dead zone, so being back to those days, knowing that there were gonna be days where you were gonna get zero followers or worse, you were gonna get a minus day where somebody maybe cancels a pledge, was really a low point.

But again, we came out of it and we did pretty well. In the end, we had that bathtub where day one was really good, and the end of the campaign was really good.

Overall, not terribly upset about it.

How are you different now that the campaign is over?

I have a lot of thoughts about doing series on Kickstarter, at least in the way that I did it.

This was a very serialized book, so if you read #1, you know that you don't get a complete story. It's very much act one, if not the inciting incident to the whole arc. You're not getting the full story.

The whole reason I wanted to do this rapid release was so that people didn't feel that serialization weighing on them, because with indie comics, you never know if the next one's coming. I wanted to make it super-duper clear that there is a plan. We've worked as far ahead as we possibly can to make sure that we get this book to you within six months.

Even though we did all that, it still didn't have the effect I hoped for. With that, it makes me reassess the approach with comics going forward. Not all a bad thing. I'm still relatively new to this even though this is my seventh campaign with From Parts Unknown #2.

I'm still learning and testing and seeing what works, what doesn't, the shifts in the market and all that business.

Not upset about it, but I did learn quite a bit about the difference of doing a series versus a one shot.

What surprised you the most about this campaign?

The beginning days, we had a good day one, but it was 100% returning backers. That was absolutely wild to me that we did not have one new backer as much as I was pushing it everywhere, as much as the pre-launch looked like we were getting a lot of followers there.

A lot did come from Naked Kaiju Woman. I extended my audience as much as I could there with over 600 plus new backers to Pesto Comics, so it's not surprising that a lot of those people returned. Although most returning backers were actually from, From Parts Unknown #1.

It was just shocking that not one new person did not show up until a few days in.

What's the biggest concern now that the campaign is over?

This is where we talk about From Parts Unknown #3 a little bit, but my concern at the time, and it was a concern realized, is that the trend would continue and we'd continue to see a little bit of a drop off in terms of followers as we go through Issue 3 and beyond.

The way I addressed this was by condensing the series, so that those folks that don't want to jump into a series midway or pay shipping multiple times, maybe they're waiting for the end and I figure let's get them to the end as quickly as possible.

Let's give everyone the full story as soon as we can, and if we get the bonus of a double-sized issue in the end, so be it. That's what led to this approach, but that was my biggest concern is that maybe I made a mistake going so heavily serialized with this book.

Naked Kaiju Woman is more sequalized. You could read Naked Kaiju Woman beginning to end and get a full and complete story.

From Parts Unknown is not that. It is Act One.

It's a little different in that approach and that's where my biggest concern came from. I was gonna have a hard time selling this one.

What worked really well during this campaign?

I think that's easy. It's BackerKit Launch.

That's actually the thing that worked best in this campaign. About 50% of the final funding of this campaign came from two sources:

The email from Kickstarter saying a new project has launched from someone you've backed before. That was 25%,
And then nearly 25% was from BackerKit launch.

So all previous backers, that's what worked well, is getting people back onboard, and although we didn't get as many people as we want, and we didn't get everyone who backed #1 to come for #2, it still did really well.

How might you do even better next time?

I think for this, it's having a clearer strategy in terms of a series. This was the first series I had done. I had multiple one shots prior to this, so this was all a big experiment and now I've understood that even if I want to tell a serialized story, I have to have a very clear plan to, one, to shorten it and two, to get people on board for the whole thing.

Maybe it's giving people the option for a subscription so that they're not paying shipping multiple times or maybe it's just being upfront about the serialized nature of it.

I'm not sure, but I do know that doing a series in this way seems to have some detriments to it.

What did backers really seem to resonate with?

It's a silly answer, but again, we had so many repeat backers that it seems like Issue 1 was the thing that got people in, which was kind of exciting in that way.

What completely bombed?

The enamel pin.

It did really well with Naked Kaiju Woman. The Enamel Pin sold out for that campaign. It was a part of the Make 100 initiative and I thought, it did so well there, let's do one for From Parts Unknown. (I have my own collection of pins, so I'm kind of into those now too.)

I wanted one for From Parts Unknown and it just didn't do as well as it could have. I did offer it again on #3. We sold even more there.

It looks like it's not going to be a loss with these pins. They're still relatively popular, but in no way was it as popular as it was with Naked Kaiju Woman.

What will you never do again?

I think the pivoting midstream was something I wasn't entirely proud of. I did have to explain to a few people that “yes, I kept saying it was a five issue series and now it's a four issue series”. Still, I think that's the right choice.

#4 will be the thing that saves the series overall. That will get new people on board because it's a complete series and that final issue will be an exciting, jam packed double-issue. It was written in a way that issues four and five were just an extended climax, so there wasn't too much of a cliffhanger going into four and five.

Those were very easily merged into one issue. It made a lot of sense to do it as a double-issue, but I don't think I would do this pivot midstream again. I would have that plan as clear as possible from the get-go, whether it's working with an editor or working with someone who would help me see that sooner.

I think that's how I would approach that in the future.

The End

Now we do know how From Parts Unknown #3 went, that funded successfully as well. It didn't quite hit the heights of #2, so that postmortem is gonna be pretty interesting.

Most important is that if you haven't followed, the campaign From Parts Unknown #4 yet, please do so.

Follow From Parts Unknown #4

I'm really doing the full court press for From Parts Unknown #4.

I'm on a bunch of podcasts and, I'll be pushing it a lot on socials. I'll be paying for advertising. Really going to try to get this campaign to end with a bang, get as many new people under the tent as we can, and hopefully convince those of you watching from the sidelines.

This Saturday, for those of you who are paid subscribers, we're getting into social media and how all that works. Plus I have a preview for a new project, a new endeavor that I'm working on for the near future.

If you're interested in that at all, check out the paid posts.

Subscribe to PAID with Early Access

I try to keep the cost literally as low as Substack will allow me to do.

It allows for a little bit of a barrier. It's only the most serious people, the ones who really need to know. It’s where I can really share future plans, things that aren't quite ready for prime-time, things that might pivot or change.

We can get into numbers and I'll tell you specifically how much I actually spent on things, how much I made, how much I spent on advertising, all that fun stuff.

We go in depth with each campaign. I have plans from now through September for paid posts. Lots more to come.

Next Wednesday, we're doing a different kind of postmortem. It won't be a video, but I'm gonna get into the fulfillment for three campaigns: Big Smoke Pulp, From Parts Unknown #2 and Naked Kaiju Woman.

Lastly, if you're curious about when we're gonna do the postmortem for From Parts Unknown #3, I'm keeping that all the way out in July with one goal in mind. Normally I would split the postmortem with the campaign and the fulfillment in two different posts. I'm not gonna do that any longer.

Now the postmortem will cover the fulfillment end of things, so it'll be a little bit longer of a video, but it'll be a wholesome view of how these campaigns go from not just the campaign part, but all the way through to the end in fulfillment. That talks about all the printing challenges and getting everything shipped and all.

My goal is with these postmortems to be as in-depth as humanly possible. For that reason, we'll talk about From Parts Unknown #3 all the way in July, and we'll do the postmortem for #4 in August.

I hope you’re enjoying these. Let me know what you think in the comments.

Until next time…