You're right in that it's more varied, as my own KS didn't hit its stride until the second week when we got featured in KS's weekly newsletter of "here's three projects we like."
And there's countless other projects that have hit their goal towards the end, but they aren't ones that have a lot of steam behind them. They're trundling along and just barely pulling through. The people behind the project and the people backing it might have a lot of enthusiasm for it, but there's no hype. And trust me when I say that seeing a project only barely squeaking by is painful. Even if you're hyped and trying to spread the word, not seeing much progress in the funding value hurts.
Point is, you want to find all of those people early, even if you flatten out afterwards and still only just make your goal. Kickstarter isn't when to start your advertising campaign, it's the grand finale. Find a base, get them excited, start the hype train, advertise like crazy and say, "we're doing a kickstarter, sign up for our newsletter so you can find out when it goes live, probably in a month."
Ostensibly you've already done that kind of work with Release Raptor, taunting us with the EA release for two months now: your base is hyped and ready and waiting to throw money at you. You've been doing the press work already, getting people who don't follow the forums interested and following the forums (slash blog posts, slash Steam page).
Doing a Kickstarter is the same thing, you need to tell people "this thing, which I'm sure you want, is coming, go here for updates" so that you can build FOMO: Fear of Missing Out. The Kickstarter campaign is the "limited time only, get it now" culmination of all that work, the ultimate "the thing you've all been waiting for, get it now or never!"
