This isn't a formal After Action Report with assessments, but my first Kickstarter is done. It exceeded every possible expectation I, and my team, had. I'd figured that I had a shot, with a late Kickstarter surge, of hitting my $5000 funding goal. If I got 110 backers, I figured I'd be safe.

Final tally? $15,942. 350 backers. 33 days. Lots of work by myself, Ethan McKinney and Jon Barson. Jerome Mrozak's yeoman work getting the first version of the AVID Assistant done is what allowed this to be as successful as it was - and Charles Oines' trailer got us a LOT of eyeballs.

I'd ran out stretch goals in three phases.

Phase I: Pay for the work that had already been done. This was the initial funding goal.
Phase Ia and Ib: Add features I'd wanted in Phase I, but hadn't been able to fund out of pocket.
Phase Ic: Make the browser based app into native apps for Android and iOS.

Phase II was adding plotting support for Squadron Strike.
Phase IIa was making the platform apps less expensive ($0.99). Phase IIb is making it free. I figure that I made more off of those two stretch goals than I'd've made off of Google Play / iTunes sales for several years of having them up.

Phase III will be be game automation for Attack Vector: Tactical, and it will slide back to a future Kickstarter. Attack Vector: Tactical has some difficult-to-implement tricks, which is why, when we hit $15,000 with 5ish hours to go, I didn't uncork those stretch goals. Besides, I suspect we'll have a better idea scoping out what's needed for AV:T after we finish Phase II.

This is far from my only software development project. You'll hear more about others down the road.

And thank you to everyone who contributed, pledged, shared links around and talked up the project. Right now, however, I'm going to sequester myself for the better part of a day and unwind.