Kickstarter Campaign Canceled & Why?

Last week I canceled our Kickstarter Campaign after only 6 days.  Here's what I posted:

Hi, Everyone:

I'm canceling this Kickstarter campaign effective August 29, 2014.  My goal was to use this campaign to find a community comprised of game developers & gamers that would collaborate with me on building an automated games platform to target game lovers, small businesses, and hardcore gamers.  This platform would have served as an innovative, strategic & disruptive marketing channel for game developers too.  I wanted to learn about crowdfunding, and I did. 

After receiving more that $6,000 in pledges on Day 3, I reviewed our Kickstarter analytics, and the type of financial contributions received to date. We were not getting the $1, $10, & $25 pledges to build a community foundation.  The numbers of our page & video views were significantly less than I would have expected for the kind of social media campaign we ran, and the purported impressions delivered.  It became clear to me that the community I wanted to discover was not finding us.

Behind the scenes, I was contacted by lots of interesting people, who loved the campaign and wanted to work with us to figure out how to build something successful.  They convinced me that I could build a bigger, more significant platform by separating out some of the creative elements outlined here.

Thank you contributors for your support.  I greatly appreciate it, and will keep you in the loop of our progress.  I will also honor the equivalency of your rewards in whatever shape are platform becomes.  I want to acknowledge the hundreds of people – mostly strangers -- who sent me emails giving praise, offering suggestions & crowdfunding insight.  Thank you. 

Since then, I've been reflecting on what happened, and I do not believe the answers are that easy to come by.  Numbers are reality, and we did not get the page views to build a community.  Initially, I thought the concept was rejected, but once again, if you look at the page views versus the pledges, we overdelivered.  It could have been a timing issue.  It could have been that our social media messaging did not resonate.  What was fascinating was that we only got 2-or-3 pledges from Kickstarter, and only one from Twitter...where we spent money & did a promoted Tweet campaign.  Some people have reached out to me, and suggested that crowdfunding is no longer a novelty, and there are too many people asking for money.  Could be.  I enjoyed the Kickstarter experience/journey, and will be back with something to learn more.