Blind Faith will not make a kickstarter work, if its the 2nd time round

So imagine, here's me, a couple of weeks before releasing a medium to large sized kickstarter project, my "boss" is asking for the rulebook, usually the last thing that's finished in a campaign before print, so if he's asking me to finish the rulebook, then the KS pages must all be complete? right? 

Nope, So I go to interview a prominent Youtuber in the games industry, and I have to use a half assed project page to go through. I see it.. I'm shocked, I make the excuse its a work in progress, 90% of what the Youtuber says, I already said to 'my boss', some things we both missed, forest for the trees.

I tell the creator, "This was embarrassing, this was worse than 1.0 KS page" He's upset, I think he pouted, promised to do better.. and then proceeded to do worse, deleted the all-in, took out images of things that were not quite done, but didn't put them back before launch with better ones.. just didn't put them back, all the videos he promised, gone.. 

Its not wonder when we launched it was dismal, it was a shockingly dismal launch, we turned it around, but at what cost.

How not to do a kickstarter.. post mortem

If its your first kickstarter, I think some audience will forgive you your janky page, missing bits, things that don't make a lot of sense. Not everyone, they don't all look to see how many KS's you've done, how many projects you've created, they just compare to what they know.. that's human nature.

But when they see a shiny project created with a project manager, a graphic artist, a marketing agent, a copy editor and several consultants. They compare to a page done by 3 dads part time. Its not going to be the same.

But a 2nd project? C'mon, the whole point of your first campaign it to study what worked, what didn't and fix it, get better, prepared better, and be ready to go to market. 

Why? Because first impressions are lasting impressions, and most KS projects have a larger number of first to your product customers than usual. You have to have your A-Game to this, each and every project.

What we did to solve some of this 

We turned it around, we convinced the owner this was not good enough, we delayed a month, rebuilt all the graphics, added all the animated gifs, did some videos, a lot of work, sleepless nights. We put in 40 hours a week on top of our families and jobs for 4 weeks, and it was 'passable' (not according to dice tower, but who cares what they say)

In the end we hit 200% funding (my lowest funded project % to date) but it was dismal, for all that work and effort, we should have done twice as much work and got twice as much money for our time.

I understand, Kickstarter are not about profit, but I'd like at least more than $5 an hour at some point.

So here's what you MUST do for a successful kickstarter, Especially if its your second project

Build some kind of Audience, at least ten times as many people as you need to fund. If you need $40 from 500 people to raise $20,000 for a minimum production cost run. You need 5000 people to be aware of your product launch.

Facebook advertising brought in less than 0.5% of views, we spent $5,0000 on 40 different adverts, with a range of 0.3% to 1.1% and barely raised $5-10k (not profit, just raised). We could have done better, but I doubt it would have been worth it for a niche product.

Don't rely on that as a number, having them out there, only helped stop all the comments from backers asking "why don't we advertise more" placating them that we were 'doing all we could'

Due to the time frame, we did not do enough pre-launch listings.

Pre Prepare everything, months in advance and get a LOT of feedback. (don't listed to all of it, but aggregate the main ones)

This was certainly our biggest downfall, the lack of preparation. Sure, I can say I was asked to help with only the rulebook 6 months in advance, and I started play testing against myself for months and months (developing mini solo rules as I was doing it). But the Campaign? I was asked a week before we launched to help and the entire thing needed a complete overhaul.

Pre-Prepare to Succeed and also to fail. What's your backup plan if you go down the gurgler, and what's your cut off date. Mine was 100% in the first 48 hours. We didn't hit it, so I argued against going ahead. I presented the facts for both going ahead and barely struggling to fund, vs, relaunch at getting 150%.

But I also prepared for 500% ( was shot down several times to try for that, and in hindsight I hope the "boss" sees that this was a mistake as at time of writing we are at 415%) I set out profitable stretch goals, sorted out plausible stretch goal costs, so when we were panicking to put in new Stretch Goals, we had some that would not burn us later. 

This isn't a normal marketing campaign in a normal company, this is public, under scrutiny, don't try to fake anything, you'll get found out and it'll burn you.

Several campaigns came out in 2020 and 2021 done by people from other countries, not used to the western way of doing things, and they were burned to the ground under witch hunts of 'bad practices'.

Possibly this is from several years of snake oil merchants in the past, trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the consumer, and the rise of the same in the 80s, the modern consumer is armed with several 'lists' of red flags that can pull a KS down into the pits of failure.. even if its a legit product, doing everything right, if they don't prepare their campaign for the 'key points's and have transparency up front, the KS mob will come and burn them down. its scary, I've been in the middle of several campaigns, as a creator, thinking its a legit campaign, and its starts to go down, and go down fast as the trolls pile in for a witch burning..  

Post Campaign Prep is just as important, what's going to happen when, and show this list to your backers. Even if you don't show it, have it, because you need to know when each part of the list goes ahead. When you need to get artists to finish, when you need copy finished, when the printers need the files to prepare the product. If you skip any of those, your project will be late (But aren't they all?).

Backers have gotten used to the lateness, and some companies have lost confidence as a result, so now, gain confidence by beating your own timelines, deliver early and get talked about as being one of the 'better prepared' companies.

If we'd have done all this, in my opinion, we'd have hit a million easily. The product we have is far superior to most in the same genre, just needs a lot more careful preparation in how its presented to the public.

King of Average says "Make Games not Campaigns", yet I'd change one word 'not' to 'then'/ the campaign is as important, but should be a 50/50 split. You're not selling a game over years to spread out your campaign skills & budget, you're doing it all as a one shot. and it should be done right.