Inspiring words, I’ll be taking your advice on board!

To set that goal, we figured out the minimum viable product we would be ok launching, and I think it’s an important step any Kickstarter, new or otherwise, needs to take. Because we reached $25K we can do everything we really wanted to do, but were prepared to manufacture a more scaled down version with $10K funding. Shoot for the moon but you need your backup plan.

I agree with this. Part of the problem for my campaign, at least, is making the mistake of trying to create the game in its ‘ideal format’. That is, with the component types, cards, spit and polish that you want it to be. I suspect that for many projects that’s just not feasible (who wouldn’t want to upcycle cardboard components for plastic or metal ones?). This is especially true for a first-time campaign, I’ve learned.

Lowering the campaign goal is definitely an essential first step for the next campaign. Simply getting manufacturing and shipping quotes, working out storage and transit costs etc. and then adding contingency on top isn’t really a viable option for reducing costs. Actually trimming back on the scope of production is.

To that end, it makes sense to scale the campaign goal way back, and as you say – looking (where feasible) to contribute non-campaign funds to the actual budget of the project. These are all important lessons in successfully crowdfunding, it seems.

Our key marketing was word of mouth to get to half of our stated goal. The additional marketing that most aided us was MyMiniFactory, Facebook and Board Game Geek, all paid (MMF gets a cut of our KS). The reviews and such, and working with Fen the blogger, helped a little but I think we reach our $10K goal without any of that. They probably helped push us to the 12-13 range, then Kickstarter basically matched our effort.

An important detail I left out of the article was the funding goal. We intentionally set it low enough at $10K to make success more likely. Had we only raised $10K, however, that wouldn’t have funded the entire manufacturing process and we were prepared to spend some from our own pockets.

Our family & friends came through with 5K and that was 50% of our goal, which I think created enough momentum for Kickstarters to jump on board. I don’t think it works if our goal is $25K (the amount we eventually raised) and your friends and family are only getting you 20% of the way there instead of 50%. So one final tip is to set your goal low enough to give you a good chance to succeed. If you have to, get your friends & family to commit so you have a good idea of where you might get on Day 1, set your goal somewhere around double that, then marketing is just gravy that brings in more Kickstarters.

TL:DR; Kickstarter is fickle, and marketing, visibility and reach is more important than you might think.

Our first efforts on Kickstarter have resulted in what looks to be a failure to meet the campaign goal. Some of this is undoubtedly down to the nuances of being new to the production of commercial boardgames, but a lot of it is down to visibility. I have spoken to many people (of both successful and unsuccessful Kickstarter campaigns) who have provided an overwhelmingly aligned opinion – going onto Kickstarter without a prebaked audience is almost guaranteed to result in a failure.

That’s not to say this is the case with everyone. Those with the ‘killer product’ are just as much likely to have runaway success as those that are just ‘in the right place at the right time’ (another form of ‘secret sauce’ that eludes many of us).

Marketing is expensive. I ran a multi-week Facebook campaign that yielded a decent ROI on money spent vs. new backers. If all of my backers came from that avenue, I calculated that I would’ve spent about 30% of my budget on marketing to assist in reaching my goal. That’s a decent chunk of your operating profit right there.

My naivete in launching a campaign without much market reach was a mistake. I felt that we had a strong campaign pitch and pretty good graphic design / assets. We were a couple of days late with a playthrough video, but based on the analytics from Kickstarter, only about 46% were willing to watch a 2 minute promo video right to the end. I’m not sure how this compares with other campaigns.

I was happy with the conversion rate of visitors vs. converted backers – this tells me that the campaign does have enough meat on the bones to be viable. But again, the numbers do show that there weren’t enough people from non-KS origins hitting the page. The often given values of ‘50% from Kickstarter’ are pretty accurate, in my opinion, so that effectively validates the proposition that you need to generate 50% of the campaign’s funding from other sources.

These are hard, but valuable lessons to learn by being burned on the first try.
Part of the problem is that if you’re an independent developer, there is no capital to start producing great prototypes for sending out to reviewers and other such mechanisms that seem to be part and parcel of many successful Kickstarters. That’s not to say you can’t start basic and ‘work with what you’ve got’, but in reality – the best campaigns, and those that seem to succeed, seem to have all of these pieces in concert.

This won’t be the first and last time I’ll try. It’s hard to watch something you’ve laboured over for years get lost in the dust of bigger and better things going on, but this industry seems less about being ‘the next big thing’ and more about being visible, even at a low level. Building an audience and cultivating awareness about-a-thing is just as , if not more important than the quality of the actual campaign that promotes it.

Hopefully I can look back on this post one day and see that the application of these lessons allowed me to navigate the murky waters of Kickstarter successfully, so that we can at least have the first title under the belt.