Thanks so much to everyone who backed the Essence of Eternity, it was a success that exceeded all of our expectations with over 300% of our goal!
We’ll take a deeper look at our backer list, but this is our third successful Kickstarter now, and I think we’ve learned a few things:
- Know why you’re making your game: The selling point of Essence of Eternity is great, great art. It’s also compact, inexpensive and scales from 2 players up to 6.
- Keep your goal achievable, ideally in the first day. We would have been up against it trying to fund this game for just $4000 but we made our goal and had enough momentum for a strong finish, unlocking the stretch goals of upgraded the cardstock, added foil to the 6 unicorn blood cards, and added The Herald of Gaia to the Forest Realm Monster Deck. Though the common wisdom is to start on a Tuesday, we started on a Wednesday. Didn’t matter.
- Bring the crowd: We used 3 main forms of marketing:
- 60% — Facebook ads, a mix of created ads (we used a carousel) and boosting posts. At one point I calculated $0.54 per click which is not bad, and about $0.77 per follow. I’m not sure how it ended up.
- 30% — The Board Game Revolution Facebook group and newsletter, which produced noticeable surges in traffic and followers.
- 10% — We got 3 different reviewers, one of which offered us an Instagram package and video that we went with.
- Once you’ve brought your own crowd, Kickstarter will tend to match your crowd.
Finally, keep the momentum going. We (Matt) gave frequent and outstanding updates. Don’t be afraid to ping friends and family to help. We ran our campaign for only 21 days, avoiding some of the mid-campaign doldrums.
We now begin working on getting this card game into everyone’s hands. After sending the files to the manufacturer, the game is then shipped to our warehouse fulfillment partner and from there it will ship out to backers.
Anyways, I’ll have more on this but we’re excited to bring Essence of Eternity to our backers, and then to retail from there.