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[Chaotic Kitten]

I just finished a post for our dev blog on the things I now know about running a Kickstarter campaign. I thought the Tig Forum would be a good place to collect other peoples experiences as well, since so may of us have run Kickstarters!

Post your own tips and stories from Crowd funding! 


http://robotloveskitty.tumblr.com/post/40318117461/tips-from-our-successful-kickstarter-on-a-0-budget  -warning- It's long, I kept coming up with stuff.

[Strigop Studios]

Hey, I read through your article, it was fantastic! I sent you a private message but I don't know if it sent successfully because it is not in my outbox (still a bit new to this site). If you didn't get it let me know and I will just post it here. Thanks!

[waylonflinn]

Cool article man.

You can't do everything and it's difficult to know what to focus on. Hearing about which activities were the most effective from a successful project is golden.

Thanks.

[Muz]

Not starting a kickstarter any time soon, but bookmarked it just in case

[Chaotic Kitten]

I'm glad it's helpful! If you were left with any unanswered questions, let me know!

[seandanger]

What a great article, thanks so much for writing it all up.  It's also great to see some "behind the scenes" shots of the Kickstarter administration pages.  I'm getting close to launching my KS campaign so I am ravenous at this point for more knowledge.  I hope you can oblige some more (somewhat long) questions.  Thank you so much in any case.

• "For the Goal $$$, time is money, but no one wants to know that."

I've been worried about that too.  Easily 75% of my business costs are pesky things like "living under a roof" and "eating".  Do you advocate dropping that portion of funds from your project goal amount completely?  I'm considering a campaign for $15K, which, after reward fulfillment and fees should leave me with around $10.  I would then spend $4K of that on licenses and test devices, $1K on art, some on misc legal and accounting fees, and then the remainder would go toward paying back some of the money I've had to borrow in the past 6 months while working on my game.  Do you think it would be better to ask for $5K (net) instead and just hope that it over-funds?

• Stretch Goals

I came around late during your KS campaign -- did you have the stretch goals posted on the project page from the start, or did you add them incrementally as they were reached?  I think it's simply good business / game development planning, but did anyone find your campaign to be audacious for setting a goal for $5K but also posting a stretch goal of $90K?

• Friends and Family

What percentage of your pledges came from friends and family?  I have this (perhaps irrational) fear that after launching my campaign and telling all my friends, I'll get "charity pledges" from family or friends who really don't have interest in the game but want to help me and my company out.  I'm not strong arming anyone so I wouldn't feel bad about it in most cases, but I do worry about "Uncle Steve" taking one of the limited $1K reward tier pledges without being actually interested in the reward.

• Linking Facebook:

One thing that has been really confusing for me is that I have a Facebook "Page" for my company, which is linked to my personal FB account.  I can't seem to find a way to link Kickstarter to a page instead of a personal account, and FB no longer allows you to set up new accounts for a business, instead they direct you to create a page instead.  I noticed your KS is linked to Calvin Nemo's FB account.  Is that a personal account or a separate account for your "developer identity" or what have you?  For now I plan on linking my personal FB account and putting any friend requests received into a separate FB "group" so they don't get my inane status updates meant for my local friends or family -- but I'd really prefer if they could just like my company's page instead.

• Backer History as a Project Creator

Similar to the previous point, I've had a personal Kickstarter account for over a year and have backed several projects, and I wonder how important that is to potential backers -- I'm sure it can't hurt to have proof that you contribute to the KS community in addition to creating projects.  I'm wondering if I should change the user name on my personal account to my company and then start my project there, or if I should just create a new business-related KS account and start it from there.  What are your thoughts on that?
[/list] (not sure why this end list bbcode won't parse)

Whew that's a lot of questions.  Thank you again for the article and extra thanks if you can find time to respond to these points. 

I'm excited for Legend of Dungeon, good luck devving and with Greenlight!  I was one of the staunch defenders of the game's title in the reddit post

[Chaotic Kitten]

I'll post in red as an easy identity while reading.
and I sliced up your questions a little to shorten the post a bit, here goes!

What a great article, thanks so much for writing it all up.  It's also great to see some "behind the scenes" shots of the Kickstarter administration pages.  I'm getting close to launching my KS campaign so I am ravenous at this point for more knowledge.  I hope you can oblige some more (somewhat long) questions.  Thank you so much in any case.
I'm glad it was useful to you! I'll do my best to answer, but please keep in mind I'm just a fellow Dev, and by no means an authority on Kickstarter

• "For the Goal $$$, time is money, but no one wants to know that."

 Do you advocate dropping that portion of funds from your project goal amount completely?

It's impossible for me to know whats right for your situation, but that being said... That's basically what we did, and the stretch goal levels were all for living costs while developing/extra costs of that goal.

I'm considering a campaign for $15K....... Do you think it would be better to ask for $5K (net) instead and just hope that it over-funds?
I don't know the scope of your game so it's hard to tell. Ask yourself: If your game only makes $5K, is it a game worth making? Are the incentives to over fund delicious enough?  You could also go for $7K, $10K etc.  The lower the goal the easier it is to get funded quickly(or at all), but don't make it so low that it's not worth it.

• Stretch Goals

did you have the stretch goals posted on the project page from the start, or did you add them incrementally as they were reached? 
We had all the stretch goals from day 1, and we tried to explain that the $5K goal was only the beginning.

I think it's simply good business / game development planning, but did anyone find your campaign to be audacious for setting a goal for $5K but also posting a stretch goal of $90K? 

People in general seemed to really like the fact that we had all these plans for the game. Early in the Kickstarter there was no online stretch goal, People kept requesting it, and we originally added it to the Overworld(because that would be AWESOME!) but it somehow made people confused, thinking networking alone was $100K. We had to change our stretch goals around to make it clearer

• Friends and Family

What percentage of your pledges came from friends and family?  I have this (perhaps irrational) fear that after launching my campaign and telling all my friends, I'll get "charity pledges" from family or friends who really don't have interest in the game but want to help me and my company out.

I was worried about this as well, so when I spread the word to my friends and family, I demanded that they share the link if they truly wanted to support me.  It worked very well! Only a few of our friends backed us, but they were interested in the game, so it was good

• Linking Facebook:

One thing that has been really confusing for me is that I have a Facebook "Page" for my company, which is linked to my personal FB account.  I can't seem to find a way to link Kickstarter to a page instead of a personal account, and FB no longer allows you to set up new accounts for a business, instead they direct you to create a page instead.  I noticed your KS is linked to Calvin Nemo's FB account.  Is that a personal account or a separate account for your "developer identity" or what have you?  For now I plan on linking my personal FB account and putting any friend requests received into a separate FB "group" so they don't get my inane status updates meant for my local friends or family -- but I'd really prefer if they could just like my company's page instead.
That is his personal account, and I think that Kickstarter wants it to be that way. I do agree with you though, it would be nice to have the company page there. If you are doing your Kickstarter campaign like we were, you wont have anything to talk about other than Kickstarter anyhow

• Backer History as a Project Creator

I'm wondering if I should change the user name on my personal account to my company and then start my project there, or if I should just create a new business-related KS account and start it from there.  What are your thoughts on that?
[/list] (not sure why this end list bbcode won't parse)
I think that the fact that you've backed projects is a very good thing to show, and you should use that account. Changing it to a company name is up to you, I don't know that it would change anything much.


Whew that's a lot of questions.  Thank you again for the article and extra thanks if you can find time to respond to these points. 

I'm excited for Legend of Dungeon, good luck devving and with Greenlight!  I was one of the staunch defenders of the game's title in the reddit post
<3 Thanks

If you have any other questions, feel free to PM me! and also, at any point you have a good piece of advice from your experience with Kickstarter, post a link to it here!

[seandanger]

Thanks so much for all the great responses, I know those were a lot of questions.  I'll absolutely be very public about my approach and results with kickstarter, and I'll be sure to update back here after I have some knowledge to share

[Chaotic Kitten]

I just wanted to bump this with a little update of a couple other things people have been asking about.

Contacting the press:

Find a good system for handling e-mail addresses, so that you can know who has responded, or covered you, etc. that way you can know who to send what when you send out your next press release.


Group efforts for publicity:
Gather a bunch of other game oriented kicksterers running at the same time and do something interesting with them (something like google hangout would be a good place). this will pool the entire groups backers and if you get a lot of participants, it might be able to get you an extra round of press!


I hope it helps! Feel free to share you lessons learned here too!

[Uncade]

Hey, Legend of Dungeon looks fantastic! I had been following you on screenshot saturday, and ended up backing you as an early bird. I wanted to give a couple of tips that I think have helped out my project going on right now, Another Castle:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/uncadedave/another-castle

1 - I think a good early bird reward tier is really important, it's a very good incentive for people to back early, and it can encourage people to donate more than the minimum.

2 - Try to get some press lined up for the launch of the Kickstarter. I was able to announce the Wii U version for Another Castle simultaneously with my Kickstarter launch, and that helped out a ton getting my project off to a solid start. I'm not sure if it's a good idea to get press before launch, at least for a small indie project. I know the Mak guys mentioned that they had trouble generating press as they had a bunch of articles written about their project a month before launch.

[petertos]

Hi, I've read parts of your article (it is long) and I must say I'm impressed with it, this is the typical information one would hide from the world to have success on your own 

There's one thing I'd like to ask you: I'm a social media nerd, this means I don't use Facebook, I quit Twitter a month ago and never have used reddit, tumblr or stumble upon. I have had a deviantART account for four years now and I've managed to get 4,000 lousy visits to my profile.  Should I improve my social media skills to succeed? Should I hire a social media manager? Is it critical to have those skills?

Yesterday I read on Yahoo that Facebook is losing its sex appeal, it's not fun anymore, there's too much advertising, youngsters are not using it.

[SterlingDee]

How are you planning on getting the word out about your campaign if you're not using social media? Calling people up? I guess if you have a great email database you might be able to get away with it or if you're lucky enough to get some press.

[petertos]

LOL. The problem is - what I said before is not a joke, it is my actual situation on social media.

I think currently we are mythifying social media, with all these stuff on community managers from here to there, the top jobs are always community managers. But what about Zuckerberg (Mark)? He's got some friends like the rest of us (in my opinion). This means, having a lot of friends can make you have three more visits at the beginning, but not many more at the end.

I'm also starting to think about viral success (social media powered): Is it too fast? Once you have it, it's gone and no one remembers anything about it in a couple months. Is it what we want?

If we could only remember Tom from Myspace, that guy had a lot of friends, he was the first friend of every Myspace user. LOL.

[SterlingDee]

I'm also starting to think about viral success (social media powered): Is it too fast? Once you have it, it's gone and no one remembers anything about it in a couple months. Is it what we want?

If we could only remember Tom from Myspace, that guy had a lot of friends, he was the first friend of every Myspace user. LOL.

Most campaigns are not viral successes, so you don't need to worry about that. Ok, so no one remembers it in a couple months. Isn't that still better than no one ever knowing about it in the first place? What exactly are you saying is the alternative?

Tom is still around. He is no longer The First Friend, but he definitely has a profile on the "New Myspace"

[G1ynn3]

Great post, thanks for sharing your knowledge and experience, there's some really interesting insights here

[Chaotic Kitten]

Thanks for noticing my game uncade, and for adding in your own two sense! Both your tips are very good points, and I completely agree.
Also, your kickstarter looks great! I hope you reach some of those stretch goals!!

LOL. The problem is - what I said before is not a joke, it is my actual situation on social media.

I think currently we are mythifying social media, ..... This means, having a lot of friends can make you have three more visits at the beginning, but not many more at the end.

I'm also starting to think about viral success (social media powered): Is it too fast? Once you have it, it's gone and no one remembers anything about it in a couple months. Is it what we want?

 

The absolute biggest response we have gotten to our game was from a single youtube video, but that video might not have happened if other people weren't talking about it.  Maybe facebook isn't as popular as it once was, and maybe going viral leaves you forgotten months later... But I think those things are still a big part of your best shot at getting known at all.  And as far as having friends giving you only a small boost. I think you are wrong, if they tell friends who tell friends, it has the potential to be a never ending thing. Twitter, facebook, and reddit help me stay in touch with the small community we have, and will help it to grow.

Obscurity will leave you with nothing, no matter how great your game is, so I say get out there and build you community in any way you can, even if you dislike it :/

 I don't know your financial situation, so I can't really tell you to hire someone or not.  I just wing it and try to be friendly.

[petertos]

Forgive me if I have looked rude in my comments...

I was just taking the conversation to the extreme, to talk about something. It is not that I completely hate social media (I wouldnt be talking in this forum), but I doubt a bit on its power.

My most successful flash game, Smileys Invasion 2, spreaded like powder in the first two days of life, I didn't do anything special nor put it on my networks, it was just a good game. I haven't repeated such success with other games I have made. There are a couple of models here: people who like social media (example: Lady Gaga and her Twitter); people who hate social media or come from a time where it didn't exist: Steven Spielberg. Steven dodges social media and avoids Youtube, in my opinion, and he's doing well. 

[Uncade]

Thanks for noticing my game uncade, and for adding in your own two sense! Both your tips are very good points, and I completely agree.
Also, your kickstarter looks great! I hope you reach some of those stretch goals!

Thanks! I'm pretty confident I'll get the minimum, but I'm hoping I'll be able to get a couple of the stretch goals. Anything could happen as the campaign comes to a finish.

Also, if you don't mind my asking, how did you end up getting on the Humble Store? Their service is pretty awesome and I'd love to distribute through them. Anyways, Legend of Dungeon is awesome! Keep up the great work!