Well, in our first post, I mentioned that the next post would talk a little about our experiences with Kickstarter. As you may have noticed, there have been several small posts since then, none of which have mentioned Kickstarter. That is how we plan to maintain this blog. We are going to try to have regular, longer blog posts with some level of consistency, but in between those larger posts, we are interested in sharing other thoughts and bits of wisdom that we have accumulated along our journey. We hope that you will find them interesting and of value.
Now, on to Kickstarter. A few years back, Sandeep and I had this idea for what we felt would be a really cool little product. Rock Paper Scissors Lizard Spock Dice. We are both fans of The Big Bang Theory television show and this idea just seemed to materialize out of thin air while I was driving to work one morning. It was simple enough and seemed like it could have some solid mass appeal given the popularity of the show, so we thought we would try to bring it to fruition. Around this time, we had been discussing at length a variety of other projects we had in the works and the possibility of running a Kickstarter campaign for one of them. Given the apparent simplicity of the RPSLS Dice, we quickly decided it would be our best candidate for a campaign. Thus began the long path of trying to figure out how to actually run a Kickstarter campaign. Along the way we learned a lot of things. In order to keep this from rambling too much, I've broken the experience up into several lessons we learned and I'll talk about each one as we go.
LESSON 1: Do your homework.
Before we started our RPSLS Dice campaign we had several months of research. We found a dice manufacturer, obtained samples of their dice, worked out costs, determined shipping costs, planned what overfunding options we thought would work well, and so on and and so forth. For quite some time it seemed like each time we answered a question we learned about two more questions that needed answering. Keep at it until you feel you have all your ducks in a row. Then keep at it a bit longer.
Anyhow, back to our story. Eventually, we thought we had everything figured out. We knew how much the dice would cost to produce, package, and ship. We knew what colors and other options we wanted. We had final art done. We knew our plan for our campaign (or so we thought). You get the picture. Then we put our campaign together. That leads us to our second lesson.
LESSON 2: Plan your campaign.
We had planned all sorts of things for our campaign: overfunding goals, funding options, target funding goal, and everything else. Once we had our plan put into place we started our campaign. Then we remembered all the things we had forgotten. Updates, Updates, Updates... It is very important to keep your backers engaged throughout your campaign. Fortunately, writing and posting updates is a relatively easy thing to do, but still it would have been better to have a more solid plan for them in place before we began. This is especially true if you have a shorter campaign.
LESSON 3: Make sure you build in wiggle room.
As we ran our campaign there were various other things that continued to come up. One thing that became very clear very quickly was this: DO NOT PLAN FOR BEST CASE SCENARIO! If you do that you will end up either not making any money at all or even losing money on your campaign. Regardless of your homework you will likely find cases that cost more to ship, produce, or package. If you have built your whole business model on best case scenario, this will land you in trouble. This applies to time tables for delivery, cost, and pretty much any other aspect of your project you can think of. Remember, no matter how much homework you've done, it likely isn't enough. Make sure you have enough wiggle room to handle the curve balls that come your way.
LESSON 4: Expect the unexpected.
In the middle of our project we had one such curve ball. It was really more of a wrecking ball that we had to deal with. The company that we had vetted and were planning on using to produce our dice, was being used by another campaign to produce a custom die for their project, and the dice manufacturer dropped the ball in a very serious way. Not only were the dice delivered very late, but they did not look anything like the quality one would hope for or expect. In the case of this other project, it was a disappointment. But considering that our entire project was dice; for us it would have been devastating.
Given this development, we went into scramble mode and quickly found another production company and had to start the whole process of vetting them and evaluating samples and whatnot in the middle of our campaign. Fortunately, for us this worked out, but there was some very stressful time where the very fate of our project seemed in question. As mentioned before, expect curve balls and unexpected obstacles. Especially if this is your first foray into games publishing.
That's all we have time and space for in this post. We will continue our overview with some more lessons we learned in our Kickstarter campaign in the next post. Hope this post has been useful to you and you will be back to read Part 2.
- Dave & Sandeep.
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