Kickstarter Pre-Launch Follower Tracker

Track your Kickstarter pre-launch "Notify Me" follower count and project details automatically. Schedule it daily to monitor your campaign's pre-launch growth over time.

Why this actor?

Every Kickstarter creator running ads to their pre-launch page needs to track daily follower growth — but Kickstarter's own dashboard gives you limited visibility. This actor solves that by:

• Scraping the live follower count from any Kickstarter pre-launch page
• Extracting full project details: name, creator, category, description, location
• Working with both pre-launch AND live campaigns (also captures backer count when available)
• Outputting structured data you can pipe into Notion, Google Sheets, or any analytics tool

Use cases

• Daily follower growth tracking — Schedule this actor to run once per day and build a time series of your "Notify Me" count
• Competitor monitoring — Track how fast competing campaigns are growing their pre-launch audience
• Ad performance correlation — Compare daily follower growth against your Meta/TikTok ad spend
• Launch readiness assessment — Know exactly when you've hit your target follower count

How to use

1. Enter your Kickstarter project URL — e.g. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/your-name/your-project
2. Run the actor — it will launch a browser, load the page, and extract all available data
3. Get structured results — download as JSON, CSV, or Excel from the dataset

Scheduling for daily tracking

To track follower growth over time:

1. Go to Schedules in your Apify Console
2. Create a new schedule (e.g., daily at 9:00 AM UTC)
3. Link it to this actor with your project URL as input
4. Use a named dataset so all runs append to the same dataset
5. Connect the dataset to Google Sheets or Notion via webhook/integration

Output format

Each run produces a single record with these fields:

Field	Description
url	The Kickstarter project URL
projectName	Project title
creatorName	Creator's name
category	Primary category (e.g., Technology, Design)
subcategory	Subcategory if available
description	Project blurb / short description
followerCount	"Notify Me" count (null if < 10, as Kickstarter hides it)
location	Creator's listed location
backerCount	Number of backers (live/completed projects)
scrapedAt	ISO 8601 timestamp of the scrape

Example output (pre-launch)

{
    "url": "https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/creator/awesome-product",
    "projectName": "Awesome Product - The Future of Coffee Storage",
    "creatorName": "Awesome Creator",
    "category": "Technology",
    "subcategory": "Gadgets",
    "description": "A revolutionary modular storage system for coffee pods and beans.",
    "followerCount": 847,
    "location": "San Francisco, CA",
    "backerCount": null,
    "scrapedAt": "2026-03-04T10:30:00.000Z"
}

Input configuration

Parameter	Type	Required	Default	Description
url	string	Yes	—	Kickstarter project URL
waitForSelectorTimeout	integer	No	30000	Page load timeout in ms
proxyConfiguration	object	No	—	Proxy settings (residential recommended)

Tips

• Kickstarter hides follower count below 10 — the actor will return null for followerCount until the project crosses 10 followers
• Use residential proxies for the most stable results if you're running this frequently
• Use Apify integrations or webhooks to automatically log each day's count into Notion, Google Sheets, or your own API
• The actor works with projects in any state — pre-launch, live, successfully funded, or canceled

Cost

Pricing is $0.05 per request.

Technical details

• Built with Crawlee + Playwright (headless Chrome)
• Multi-strategy extraction: embedded JSON data → DOM scraping → text pattern matching
• Handles Kickstarter's client-side rendering (React/Next.js)
• Automatic retries on failure (3 attempts)