Our Experience with Kickstarter or That's What You Call Diving Into the Deep End of the Pool. PART 2

In PART 1 of this post we talked about the lessons we learned as we prepped for our Kickstarter campaign. Here in PART 2 we will continue with some lessons we learned on the rest of the journey.

LESSON 5: Remember it is your project, trust your instincts.

Kickstarter is a very interesting beast. It is amazing how much personal investment and ownership your backers gain when they back your project. This is both good and bad. It is good because, when a backer feels personally invested, they often want your project to succeed and are more likely to share it with others. It is bad because everyone has their own opinions and when it comes to design decisions and options that may be part of your project you will never be able to please everyone. 

In our project, two of the overfunding goals were to bump up the size of the dice. First, from 16mm to 18mm, the second was from 18mm to 25mm. We really liked the 25mm dice and thought that was an awesome goal. The first goal to make the dice 18mm was received very well, but when we announced the goal to make the dice 25mm you would have thought that we were announcing that we were going to kill a baby seal for each set we sold. It was crazy how up-in-arms some of the backers were. Eventually we ended up producing both sizes of the dice and (almost) everyone was happy. The thing we learned through the whole process was that you need to trust your own instincts. It is your project, trust in your vision and do what is best for the project. All of the backers cannot be pleased and it is okay if some backers gripe and complain.

LESSON 6: Limit funding options.

One pitfall we found ourselves in was just offering too many funding options. It is very tempting to offer a lot of different funding options in the belief that it may entice more people to back your project, but this mistake can lead to a lot more work. The more standardized your funding options, the easier it is to fulfill your orders. In our project, the overfunding goals and funding options we provided made fulfillment rather difficult. We basically had to hand compile every order. Do yourself a big favor and do what you can to limit the order permutations so that packaging up the orders isn't so time intensive.

LESSON 7: Get ready to work.

Kickstarter campaigns are much more work than you think they are going to be. Actually, even putting it that bluntly is an incredible understatement. Managing production and fulfillment of several hundred to several thousand orders is no small undertaking. Ordering and managing shipping supplies, compiling orders, managing the mailing lists, the task list goes on and on... Remember to take this time, effort, and cost into account when planning your campaign. 

Another thing that we found very time consuming was international shipping. With our project every international order had to have a customs form and had to be processed individually at the post office. Since then we have been investigating what other options may exist, but we have not had a chance to try any of them yet. If you know more about easy ways of handling international shipping, please share what you know in the comments below.

LESSON 8: Get the word out.

Have a battle plan to get word out on your campaign. It is easy to look at Kickstarter, especially tabletop games on Kickstarter, and think, "Fantastic! I'll put my super-awesome game up there and make a mountain of money.". The fact of the matter is that there are just too many competing campaigns to rely on people stumbling upon your campaign and caring enough to give it the time of day. You have to get the word out. You have to tweet, post on Facebook, blog, comment in forums, email your friends, and do anything and everything else you can think of to get the word out. If you don't, very few people will see your campaign and if people aren't seeing your campaign, they can't back your project.

Conclusion

Given everything we learned and went through with our first Kickstarter campaign, my biggest suggestion is, jump in, but know a little bit about what you are getting in to. I am sure we will be running more Kickstarter campaigns in the future and I think Kickstarter is a fantastic way for a small company to mitigate some of the risk involved in self-publishing a game, but it is not all roses and sunshine. For all of you that are planning Kickstarter campaigns we wish you luck and hope many of you will check out our campaigns in the future.

- Dave & Sandeep.

Thought of the Day: More is Better, Right?

...Right? 

Depends on question actually. When the question is about the number of products you should have, the answer to the question is nuanced at best. 

The fact of the matter is that a majority of small businesses fail or simply close down within the first three years. There are many reasons for this, like not having enough cash, being in an over-crowded business space, lack of experience in the field, lack of experience in business matters like finance and taxes, spending unwisely on advertising, etc.

Another reason companies fail, and one relevant to the question in this post, is that they carry too much or too little inventory. Too much inventory and your capital can get tied up preventing you from seizing an opportunity that comes by. Too little, and your customers are starved and start looking for other places that they can get what they want.

The problem obviously gets magnified and further complicated when you have more products. No wonder there is an entire segment of businesses that do nothing but manage inventory for other companies.

So, when in comes to the number of products you should have, consider the implications that each new product has on your entire product line before jumping in.

Good Luck!

Thought of the Day: The one little word that makes all the difference...

When it comes to game design there is one little word that makes all the difference and it isn't "please". That word has its place too, but in game design the word that makes the most difference is "playtest". Playtest! Playtest! Playtest! The importance of playtesting when developing a game cannot be understated. Playtest with your friends, playtest with strangers, playtest and try out weird strategies, playtest and try and break your game, run blind playtests, playtest your manual, and when you think you finally have a polished little gem of a game, playtest it some more.

There is only one way to take your wonderful vision of fun and make it a reality and that is to put it through the wringer. Each playtest will allow you to chip off a corner here, polish a rough spot there, clarify some ambiguity, and simplify a complication. There have been many times we have talked about an idea, thought it was super awesome, thrown together a prototype and played the game to find out just how far from done our idea was. I have to strain my mind to think of a time when a playtest didn't yield at least some minor polish or change to a design. This is even true of designs that have been under development for a very long time.

So pull out that prototype and play it! Be ready to take notes. Be ready to hear criticism. Be ready to flip your design upside down, turn it inside out, and put it back together again. If you do you may be on your way to greatness. If you don't beware, because when you release your game into the wild, it is going to have to stand on its own two feet. Don't send it when it is just learning to walk. Wait until you know it can run!

Our Experience with Kickstarter or That's What You Call Diving Into the Deep End of the Pool. PART I

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.