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Post-Mortem: Naked Kaiju Woman

An in-depth look at the sixth Pesto Comics campaign.
Adriano Ariganello's avatar
Adriano Ariganello
Feb 12, 2025
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Table of Contents

Welcome Back

I’ve been looking forward to doing this post-mortem since the first day that Naked Kaiju Woman was launched. You’ll understand why when we get into the first slide.

It was an unreal campaign. It's led to a whole bunch of new relationships and opportunities that haven’t been open to me before. I've been relatively successful on Kickstarter before, but this was a whole new level.

The most important thing will be to learn the right lessons from this whole exercise and, if I do, I can carry them forward to my other projects. Fortunately, there's a lot of room for reflection and learning, and I think there's going to be a lot for you, dear reader, to take for your campaigns if you’re curious for yourself.

Given that this is going to be a really long post, I won't get into all of the stuff that's going on, with one big exception...

Project Updates

From Parts Unknown #2 launches NEXT WEEK!

The relaunch page for From Parts Unknown #2 is live and collecting followers. We are just one week away from launch on February 19th, so it's really important to collect those followers and get a big launch.

As I mentioned last week, if you're not interested in actually reading a comic about pro wrestling vampires, I totally understand, but giving the campaign a follow does help it in the algorithm and get it out in front of people that might be interested.

It won't cost you anything but your time and a click. I truly appreciate it if you can do that.

Follow 'From Parts Unknown #2'

Now let's get into it.

Main Story

Post-Mortem Introduction

For those who haven't been here for a Kickstarter post-mortem, it’s a review of all of the data and numbers that I was able to collect in running the campaign for Naked Kaiju Woman.

We'll go through financials, backer counts, marketing and a small Q&A at the end to get the general sentiment of how it all went down. Spoilers: The vibes, and the numbers, were absolutely off the charts this time.

A reminder that I did not create the structure for the post-mortem myself. I’ve co-opted this concept from Comixlaunch by Tyler James, adding and removing pieces to make it my own. If you're really looking to get the most out of your Kickstarter campaigns, I always recommend checking out Comixlaunch for yourself. It's a great program with a great community behind it.

And with that, let's start talking some numbers.

Funding

Funds Raised ($CAD) Comparison

A common trend you're going to see with these charts is that the numbers that Naked Kaiju Woman brought in completely breaks the charts. It outperformed so much that it makes every other campaign look somewhat flat, even being the second shortest campaign of the bunch.

From the first day, Naked Kaiju Woman was already beating the total funding for three out of the five previous Pesto Comics campaigns.

On the second day, it surpassed the best performing Pesto Comics campaign: Big Smoke Pulp.

There is nowhere to go but up. What was even more astounding was that the trend continued day after day. It was such a high pace that the funding gap between $5000 and $10,000 was at a higher pace than my full campaigns for every other project.

It just became the snowball rolling in on itself.

Total $ Per Campaign

The trend is clear on the Total $ Per Campaign slide when you just compare the totals. Naked Kaiju Woman absolutely towers over all of them.

Crazy Latte Thing Called Love and Big Smoke Pulp were relatively comparable in what they brought in, with the latter just barely setting a new record. Naked Kaiju Woman, by contrast, has more revenue than all previous Pesto Comics campaigns combined.

Average Pledged

That said, Naked Kaiju Woman didn't dominate in every category.

Big Smoke Pulp still holds the highest per backer average of all, though Naked Kaiju Woman is no slouch being in second place.

For Big Smoke Pulp, the difference was backers pledging for the Kickstarter-Exclusive Hardcover that was printed on a per order basis. That exclusivity led to a higher “per backer” count.

With Naked Kaiju Woman also had an exclusive element in the #make100 enamel pins. They were extremely popular, selling out as an add-on, but with such a low price tag, they didn’t contribute to raising this average in the same way.

So what did? The Pesto Comics back list.

This was one of the most exciting parts of all of the new backers. Finding that many were interested in the whole catalog and not just Naked Kaiju Woman alone was a real treat.

Popular Pledge Levels

Even so, the main book for Naked Kaiju Woman was the true star of the show.

An interesting trend here as the most popular pledge levels and the highest funding pledge levels do a reverse of one another. The key thing is that these are all different forms of Naked Kaiju Woman.

Although a lot of people did go to the back list and did add a backlist titles as addons. The main feature was the various covers of Naked Kaiju Woman, the main cover or the digital copy.

Amongst late pledges, the most popular thing was the ‘all covered bundle’, which was even more surprising given that they didn't back during the campaign and were willing to pay that extra fee to get this bundle while it was still available.

Although I always have back issues available, they're always priced the best during the campaign where they're launched. If you're looking to get all of the variant covers of a specific title, your best bet is to catch it while it's live on Kickstarter.

Funding Stats

One of the most surreal things was that the average pledge per day remained high from beginning to end — with the exception of one negative day with a couple of cancellations. I could reliably look at my email every hour and see a new backer or two finding the campaign.

For the first time in any Pesto Comics campaign, I wasn’t eagerly checking and hoping and instead enjoying the experience.

Overall Budget Covered by Kickstarter Campaign

And if you look at the stats of how much was covered within each campaign, you could see exactly why. Naked Kaiju Woman actually covered its own costs from end to end.

It allows me to print a whole bunch of extra copies that I can include on future campaigns and bring to shows - hopefully bringing this whole endeavour into a small profit (which will help recover the losses on the previous campaigns.)

It has been trending upwards with each campaign funding more than the one before it, but this is the first that carried its own weight, without a doubt.

The new goal going forward is going to be not just to break even as we did here, but to surpass that marker so I can start funding more experimental and different work.

Cost Split

It's always a difficult balance to keep costs low while still paying the artists that I work with the appropriately, making sure that shipping is done in a way that you don't get damaged packages and to get a little bit of advertising in where I can.

Rafael and JP were worth every penny. The comments we received on the campaign weren't just about the concept, but about how awesome the art looks. That doesn't happen without getting top class talent working on your campaign, which I was lucky enough to do here.

There's still some opportunity for this pie to change, as printing and shipping are estimates based on previous campaigns. Arguably shipping can go up while printing can still come down.

I'll be working with the printer that I had on From Parts Unknown, and given that I'll be putting in a much larger order with Naked Kaiju Woman, I may be able to bring those costs down per issue.

Shipping, with all the turmoil South of the border and these books being shipped, and produced, in Canada has some potential to be chaotic. Fingers-crossed it’s all just bluster.

Backers

Backer Count Comparison

Not unlike the funding totals, the backer count for Naked Kaiju Woman also started at a huge number. It surpassed not only every Day One count, but the total final backer count for Unlimited Udo.

Within three days, Naked Kaiju Woman was just a couple backers behind Crazy Latte Thing Called Love. Though not every day was in the double digits, as you could see a little bit of a slow down in the ‘dead zone’ area — which feels like a misnomer with this campaign.

The count ramps up by the end as we had a really high follower count. Those followers got notified that the campaign was ending and many jumped onboard.

Backer Counts

What was most exciting of all was the amount of new backers to Pesto Comics.

With many backers grabbing the back list, it made sense that they would be new to us.

That said, the amount of returning backers was also the most that I had ever seen in a campaign.

Returning Backers from Previous Campaign

This is something new I'm tracking using the Kickstarter Advanced Analytics.

Crazy Latte Thing Called Love was hands down the most popular Pesto Comics campaign backer-wise before Naked Kaiju Woman, so it's unsurprising that they would be majority of the backers returning. Nearly 1/4 of them had.

Although the actual counts of backers might be lower for the other campaigns, the return rate is relatively consistent.

The one campaign that I'm most surprised about and pleased about it is the returning backers from Big Smoke Pulp. That was an entirely different campaign, being a book of short stories rather than comics. Seeing this group coming back to support comics means a ton.

Multi-Return

It’s said to become successful in any creative endeavor, you need to build 1000 true fans. Fortunately, the Kickstarter Advanced Analytics makes that pretty easy to track. Seeing how many backers continually return gives you a good sense whether you’re headed there or not. I’ve clearly got a ways to go, but it’s trending in the right direction.

With six more campaigns planned this year, this chart will double in size and hopefully the amount of backers that are carrying over from campaign to campaign stays relatively consistent.

To those five that have been here since Unlimited Udo, I know who you are. I always appreciate when your name pops up. To those of you who found Pesto Comics later, there's nothing wrong with that. I do appreciate you carrying on from campaign to campaign.

I believe this will also grow as Naked Kaiju Woman and From Parts Unknown are series, and one would suspect that backers would return to see those stories through. This was a small disadvantage in doing one-shots exclusively to start.

Digital Versus Physical

I'm a super-backer on Kickstarter, nearly reaching 1000 campaigns backed. An overwhelming majority, I would say 95% of what I've backed, is a digital copy.

As much as I love having physical copies of books and having beautiful trades that go on my shelf, I just don't have the space to keep all of it. Not to mention that shipping to Canada is extremely prohibitive depending on where the comic is coming from.

However, the one mantra I always repeat is “you are not your own customer”.

Having a large amount of physical items increases the revenue, but are just barely profitable. I try to pass on any savings I may receive. Right now, the goal is just to get the books to as many individuals as humanly possible.

Plus, I enjoy the process of fulfillment. (I'll share how all that goes in the follow up post on March 26th.)

Backer Types

Though the digital copies being sent out always outweigh the physical ones, that’s mostly thanks to bundles. Digital copies are part of the packages when a backer orders a physical copy, so it’s not always a clear metric.

A better view is looking at the tier type and whether it’s primarily a digital or a physical one. The trend was usually that digital backers still hold the majority over physical, but that changes with Big Smoke Pulp and continued with Naked Kaiju Woman.

Before those two campaigns, it was consistently 40% physical and 60% digital. Those numbers have completely flipped, so we’ll be sending out a lot more packages this time out.

Where Are Physical Backers From

There is one clear outlier with backers from the United States. That's on trend with every Pesto Comics campaign.

Fortunately, we have really good shipping services here in Canada, specifically with getting things over the border to the United States. I'm actually able to ship to the US for less than anywhere else, including on my side of the border in Canada.

It did make all the tariff talk and the removal of exemptions for small packages a little bit terrifying. 301 backers would suddenly be hit with a nominal fee. Fortunately, that seems to have subsided, for now at least.

When we look at the rest, Canada and the UK stay in their usual order. Australia has really bumped up their numbers, plus a couple from New Zealand.

New to the list is Singapore. Although I've shipped to Ireland, Italy, Netherlands and Germany before, there's a whole host of new countries all over Europe that will be getting their copies of Naked Kaiju Woman.

Fulfillment will be a lot of fun!

(One more time: come back March 26th for that story!)

Backer Profiles

I've been touting how this whole campaign was “built for Kickstarter”, but what does that mean exactly?

I’m referring to the Power Backers on Kickstarter. Usually they are good for about 50% of the total backer counts, but in this case they've got an overwhelming 76%. Given how many were brand new to Pesto Comics, it believe I’ve hit the right note.

First Time Backers are always really exciting knowing that I've pulled someone from outside of the Kickstarter ecosystem and got them interested. The same could be argued for Passive, Casual and Core backers, who are more selective with what they put their money towards. These are the “hard earned” groups that really give you a sense of advertising, word-of-mouth and a well-built campaign are working.

Backer Platform

Kickstarter stays completely on trend, as the desktop website is still by far the most popular way for people to back campaigns.

That said, just under half are using some kind of mobile device. When I build my story pages for campaigns, I keep this in mind. It seems to be paying off. There are a lot of strange behaviours, like how rewards are displayed on mobile, so making everything easy to read and follow on mobile is a must.

Marketing

Followers

Followers are always an interesting challenge. They are the ones firmly on the fence. There’s little risk in backing early as payment doesn't happen until the campaign ends, so when they follow without backing I take it to mean I haven’t done quite enough to win them over.

I find most of my advertising effort seem to pay off in just collecting followers. The problem with these followers is I don't know who they are. They're simply a number, and in the case of Naked Kaiju Woman, it was a very large number.

There were just about 48 less followers than my previous five campaigns combined. That's a lot of folks that showed some interest but just didn't hit that pledge button for whatever reason.

That said, the conversion rate stayed more or less the same. It's usually between 25% and 30%. Given that the absolute number was so much bigger than usual, it led to a huge surge in the last 48 hours as those followers receive notifications on their app or in their e-mail that the campaign is ending and now it's time to heed the call.

Kickstarter Referrals

This slide might be the most important one in this postmortem. The Kickstarter referral system is what built this campaign into the monster that it was. Naked Kaiju Woman was fortunate enough to get the Project We Love badge within a couple hours of launching.

Through that, it ended up on the homepage and in discovery. I was seeing it in project update emails from other creators that I've backed more often than I have any of my previous campaigns.

I've broken it up into three categories, though you can see there's a subset of each one in the tables on the right hand side. It's effectively discovery, emails & pushes, and recommended pages.

Between those mechanisms, this campaign was a roaring success.

Non Kickstarter Referrals

That's not to discount referrals from outside of the Kickstarter ecosystem. The direct URL category doesn't really give you a sense of exactly where people are getting your campaign. All you know is that they've punched the URL into their browser and went directly to your campaign.

My guess is folks like Naked Kaiju Woman colorist JP Jordan and other kind people who added it to their newsletters or posted on social media about it bumped this number up. In a lot of those cases they were just providing a direct link, so I can assume that a portion of the 66 backers here were referred by them.

These referrals can all be considered “word-of-mouth” referrals.

The main lesson I’m taking from this: Although Bluesky is growing, there's less and less value in pushing things on social media specifically. You'll find a lot more success working within the Kickstarter system than you will anywhere else.

Backerkit Launch Results

I don't count emails as social media. Backerkit Launch is super handy in being able to collect all of your previous backers and pester them vai email. I try not to overdo it as I find there's diminishing returns and you also get a few unsubscribes if you get unruly with sending multiple emails out.

I stick to one at prelaunch, one at launch, and one just before the campaign ends - in between the ones sent by Kickstarter to the unknown followers.

None of these numbers are going to impress anyone who hasn't sent an email campaign before. Click creates and open rates are typically very low with any email advertising. This was a mild improvement from my last campaign.

The negative number in the percentage of total funded is a little misleading as the much higher backer count made those percentages harder to come by.

Reflecting on the Campaign

How do you feel now that the campaign is over?

Unsurprisingly, I feel absolutely great. I still can't believe how well this campaign did. Even better than that, it really does feel like folks were more interested in the concept itself and not just the naked ladies. At least, that's what they were telling me directly, virtually or otherwise.

I'm really excited to get these books in everyone's hands, and in my own.. Fulfillment is going to be a real challenge, but I think it'll be a ton of fun too.

What was the best part or high point?

Those first 48 hours were mind blowing. I did think the campaign would do well before I launched.

I kept mentioning that this was built for Kickstarter and I thought it might have a chance to be my best one by Pesto Comics yet.

Truthfully, I always think that.

 In my wildest dreams, I thought at best it would do a third or two thirds better than my last campaign, and the fact that it has done five times that is absolutely surreal.

Even more surprising is there was not that much that I had to put into it for folks to find it. That's not discounting how much everyone else was pushing the campaign on my behalf. Though it as humbling seeing folks that really though it was a cool concept and wanted to get behind it.

What was the worst part or the low point?

There was one day with a couple of higher pledge cancellations. Specifically, the highest pledge level that was $170 Canadian. Even with the backers that were getting single issues or digital copies throughout the day, it led to a negative day. The only one of the whole campaign.

Even then, I wasn't sweating it. That usually happens with every campaign. It’s rare to see zero cancellations. It's just part of the game, but this was one of very few low points in this amazing campaign. It was more than recovered the following day, so it was very hard to get too upset about it.

How are you different now that this campaign is over?

If you've been following the Substack over the past few months, you know how I've been contemplating what the strategy going forward is going to be. I've taken on a lot of the risk myself and with how flat growth in the campaigns had been, I was getting a little worried that I may have plateaued.

This campaign completely shattered that.

It gives me a renewed confidence that I'm doing the right thing and gives me even more motivation to really put my foot on the gas like I had planned all along.

We have so many new campaigns and new projects that are just waiting to be released at this point and I can't wait to get them out there. It reminds me that setbacks are just that. It doesn't mean you have to stop entirely, it just means you learn from them and go forward.

What surprised you the most about this campaign?

It's how the campaign was pretty much running itself. Normally I have a bunch of things on social media really pushing, “hey, we need one more backer”, “we need two more backers”, or I have a bunch of stretch goals planned. I've tried pocket rewards, I've tried everything to try and get the campaign going faster and higher.

This needed none of that. It was a self-sufficient campaign that seemed to promote itself. People were finding it all over the place on Kickstarter itself and it shows in the ‘new backer’ count. The fact that there's people from countries all over the world that are seeing this, folks that I would never advertise to shows the power of the platform.

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

The easy answer would be fulfillment. It's more than I've ever done before, but given that this is now my sixth campaign, I'm not worried about it at all. I have systems in place, I know exactly what I need to do and how, so I'm really not worried about getting this all together. I'm actually excited about it more than anything.

The true concern I have is the exact same one I had after Crazy Latte Thing Called Love. I'm really good at looking at gift horse in the mouth. I'm worried about how am I gonna repeat this in the future.

The easy answer would be to just do a sequel, but the way I've structured the year ahead in a way that it’s going to be a few months before the next issue of Naked Kaiju Woman is available.

The good news is it's set up to come out this year, so it's not going to be too long of a wait, but in an ideal world, I'd have the next issue up next.

If I'm being honest though, I'm just stretching for negatives at this point. I'm just happy with how it's all gone.

What worked really well?

There's nothing like having a title that's super clear to sell a book like Naked Kaiju Woman. It says it all. I got more compliments for that than I did for the content of the book.

Just a reminder to keep it simple.

Can you do it again?

Absolutely. As much as I love titles like Crazy Latte Thing Called Love or an insider reference like From Parts Unknown, I think speaking plainly and telling people what they're getting might be the new way I go about titling my books, or at least, the campaign behind those books.

What did backers really seem to resonate with?

I took the #make100 initiative as a challenge to do something different than I have before. When I went to San Diego Comic Con last year, I actually collected a bunch of pins unintentionally. A lot of places were giving them out, including the DC, IDW and Dark Horse booths so I had a bunch of pins floating around. I needed a place to put them as I didn't think I'd enjoy them as much as I do.

Now I have a little collection going and I thought maybe it's time for me to add to them with some Pesto Comics pins.

They technically sold out since they're supposed to be limited to 100 backers, but was a little bit of a hack as you could get the pin either via the “grab bag” tier or by adding it to your package as an add-on, also limited to 100 - so we sold over 100 total.

They were so popular, I'll definitely be doing them from now on.

What completely bombed?

Not to sound like a jerk about it but…nothing.

Everything went so well with this campaign that I can't point to one single thing that underperformed or didn't do as expected. It went extremely, extremely well.

What will you never do again?

I won't say that I'll never do it again, but one thing I'm definitely going to prioritize a lot less is social media. The return on investment seems to reduce with every campaign that I put out there. Especially nowadays where it feels like I'm just talking to the same handful of people over and over.

I'd rather take that energy and put it into tools like the Substack or just getting campaigns out into the world.

Lessons Learned

I mentioned earlier how over the past few months I've been letting it slip that I was feeling a less confident about this whole foray into comics. I know that you have to stick to your guns and really just keep pushing forward regardless of the ups and downs, but when you're in the midst of a down, it's really hard to keep that smile on your face.

I'm not naïve. I know a lot of this was timing and luck. Part of it was being on trend. It's not as though everyone suddenly is going to buy everything I put out and I'll be able to quit my day job, but knowing that I can garner the support when I need it to keep these projects going means the world.

The main lesson I learned is to be where luck can find you.

I was fortunate that it did this time and truthfully, I say luck, but I mean you. Thank you for your support. Thank you for reading or listening to the newsletters, sharing the social posts and backing the books when you can. It all means a lot and it keeps me going week after week.

I have so much more planned and I can't wait to share it all with you.

If there’s anything I didn’t cover that you’re hoping I would, let me know in the comments.

Leave a comment

Until next week…

Release Info & Updates

Coming Up on Substack

February 19

Round 2: From Parts Unknown

Step back in the ring with Bruno and Pietro.

February 26

Fun with Fulfillment: Big Smoke Pulp Vol. 1

Part II of the Big Smoke Pulp Vol. 1 Post-Mortem.

March 5

Schedule Congestion

Having so much to release and not enough weeks to do it.

Upcoming Appearances

Pesto Comics Release Calendar

Lots to come in 2025 and a lot in various states of fulfillment.

By clicking the link or clicking here, you will find a spreadsheet keeping you up to date with all of our releases in one handy spot!

Instant Ink Comic Book Podcast

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