Key Insights and Takeaways from My Kickstarter Journey | Develop:Brighton 2024

Oh, these these lights are like shining bright. Honestly, I can barely see all of you. But thank you so much for coming. Um, I'm going to share any insights that I have and I hope that this session will be of value to you. I try to make it the most informative that I can and we'll have uh essentially I go through the slide deck which is like maybe up to 30 minutes and then you can ask me some questions after that. So we have 15 minutes for Q&A after that. Um just as a quick introduction I'm Elena. I founded a company called Yaldi Games. I'm really passionate about bringing real life knowledge into games. So, we're actually making a foraging life simulator that has real plants and real mushrooms and real recipes. And I hope that um it will enable people to learn about nature um while also potentially inspiring them to do some real life

activities once in a while. Um essentially, I'm here because we did a Kickstarter campaign and that was last year in September. Um, so that was a 30-day campaign, a 4hour game out and about, uh, and it raised 137,000 from 3,159 backers. And I'm going to tell you all of the work that went into preparing this campaign and all of the different stages that I went through during the campaign before and after. And essentially, I will round out with um the key takeaways. Um, first off, I think it's really important to broaden our horizon. like on Kickstarter because I think it's been very heavily used as a funding tool. But what is currently happening is that crowdfunding is more of a marketing tactic actually. It gives your game another marketing beat to just raise awareness to bring your community together to bring more people onto your channels like Discord. And I thought it

was really important to say that right up front. This talk is not just for you if you need, you know, funding through Kickstarter. It really is all about, you know, how can you use Kickstarter as a tool or crowdfunding in general to increase your marketing, to increase your awareness, and to bring your community together um in this well beautiful phase of like the 30 days of the campaign. And I think the best example that I can show and point to is Chibig. So that's a Spanish game studio and they actually they created multiple games. I think the one of the first ones actually is like summer of mara but Mika and the Witches Mountain and Koa and the Pirates like these were all games that were already you know funded through different means but they still did the campaign because they wanted to cover maybe some extra porting costs or just see if they can if they can you know get actually more money in through the Kickstarter um before launch. So, I think it's just great examples of how this studio in particular has completely

used Kickstarter and crowdfunding as one of their mo main marketing strategies and for several titles in a row. Um, so just to point to like a few of the benefits of crowdfunding right at the start, it increases your visibility and awareness. It grows your community and increases your engagement. So over the course of our campaign, we had so much happening on our Discord and people coming together and I think that's really valuable. It also generates a lot of wish lists and that is of course during the campaign but also after the campaign because the Kickstarter page will stay up there for a very long time, well forever basically. And people will always be able to go back to it or discover it independently from your website or your Steam page or anything like that. So, it's just essentially another like piece of, you know, online real estate that is out there for then people to discover you through. Um, so starting with the the essential

platforms and the platforms that we're looking at, of course, there's Kickstarter, there's Indiegogo, and there's Patreon. I think it's all important to to cover all of them. So, Kickstarter, you know, large user base. It has the all or nothing model which means if you don't raise your goal, you're not gonna get any of it. Um, with Indiegogo, that's different. So, it's a smaller user base, but very niche, so very committed in some cases. Uh, but and you can essentially keep all the money that you've raised even you haven't achieved your goals. I think that's a really important um differentiator between the two of them. And Patreon is really something that is coming up more and more with indie devs these days is that if you are building your Patreon community, you can have backers subscribe to your well to your company or or game uh on a monthly basis and get payments like two pound or five pound or something from them. And uh and that is also a really good way to actually crowdfund and like finance your

game. It doesn't have the same marketing benefits though. So I think often actually the perfect strategy could be to start a Patreon as soon as possible and then actually use the community that you've built through that um and then do a kickstart on top of it. So that's very very often what we're seeing right now with indie games. Of course, all of these platforms take 10 to 12% of the revenue. So that's always something that you have to, you know, give away uh in order to to use them. Um, so a Kickstarter campaign is essentially split up in these three stages. So we got pre-launch, we got the actual launch, and then we have post-launch. So pre-launch is definitely the busiest phase. So you have to prepare a lot of things to make sure that you are ready to have a successful launch. The first and most important thing that I can recommend to anyone is to have a community. Kickstarter is not your magical means of funding or you know creating a community. It really is a way

to amplify your community and boost it and and just really utilize it in a better way, you know. And um so I think it's really important to establish your community and have an online presence and that means you have to set up your website. You have to have your landing pages that you can use in any advertising that you put out there. So people are immediately guided to your landing page which explains everything about your product and then you have to have these u well the websites with your mailing list forms so that people can actually then sign up to the mailing list and um yeah most most and foremost you really just need to make sure that you are popping up when someone Googles you you know that that is I think for indie I'm not quite sure you know at what stages you are at but um I think I'm talking to I'm mentoring a few indids and it's, you know, getting up a website and just making sure that you're communicating what you're doing. It's just a really important step that often gets uh done too late. So for a Kickstarter, it's really important to have done that and to have like this,

you know, home that people can or well find you at. So in our example, um we were very active on Tik Tok from the very beginning of the development and I posted videos around three day like three days a week, you know. Um, I essentially posted a video of the what we were working on and the game just showing some some interesting things or some bugs or some models that we're working on. And that's how we accumulated the 51,000 followers on Tik Tok. And then on Facebook and Instagram because I wasn't really quite focused on it. It was a lot, you know, less. It's like 3,000 followers on email. And that is one, you know, mistake that I made is I didn't actually focus enough on email. Um, and we only really had the email sign up open on our website for for the first well two years and until the Kickstarter and and that generated like 1,800 like signups and emails over that course of time, but I never really pushed it out there. And that's definitely one of the lessons that I would include in this is email marketing

still unfortunately the way to go these days. Um, and yeah, we had this, you know, we had this website that has a section about the team and a section about the product, but then also create a specific landing page that was tailored for Kickstarter and that was linked in well any ads or anything that we did um to raise awareness before the Kickstarter. Um, one of the first things that you'll do then on Kickstarter essentially is to set up a preview page. And it is really a tiny like a tiny piece of information, but it is really powerful and really important. So your goal here is to commi communicate your project really well in whatever you know that kind of very limited space that you have. So you have to choose a compelling image that communicates as much of the gameplay as possible and then a title and an elevator pitch, you know, essentially in the title already. And then you have your short description of the project. And so this is the page that will go

live immediately once you press like that, you know, live button. And that means you can start collecting followers on on Kickstarter and they're going to not be massively important, right? But it's it's really it's still really good to do that because you can essentially gouge interest. Um, so one of our mistakes actually that we did is our key art doesn't actually tell enough about the game play of the game. So I asked some people, okay, what could this um what do you think this image stands for? And some people might even have told me that it could be a narrative like or like a visual novel. And that's of course not what we're actually doing. It's a live simulator. And so I looked at uh key arts for example from Paleo Pines. It's not like they didn't do a Kickstarter, but this is their key art. And you can clearly see you got the dinosaurs, you got the the gardening in the background, you got the nature and exploration in the house and the characters. So, you get more of an idea

of what this game is like just based on one looking at the image. And so, I think that was just a bit of a mistake on the preview page that we did because we didn't have the assets. And it's just something that I can advise in general is to make um the key art as much telling about the gameplay as possible. Um so the preview page followers, the goal is of course to get as many followers as possible. Um but those followers are very hardcore Kickstarter users and fans. So they are really hard to get. So, a lot of developers, they may might not get only get like a few hundred followers. You know, those really big games, the big games that are crossing like over 1 million on Kickstarter, they actually have between seven and well 19,000 followers. So, if you are getting close to that that 3,000 4,000 follower mark, then you know, okay, that's going to convert really

well. So we had around um 1,200 followers when we launched and the data actually is interesting because approximately 10 to 15% will convert on day one but overall on average only 20% will convert throughout the entire campaign. So the followers that you get here that's not a that's not like a direct sale either unfortunately. It's it really is just 20%, you know, 20 to 25% that will convert through the entire campaign. Um, so that is just a bit of math that you'll have to do. It's like, okay, you know, how much would we roughly get of the followers that we have right now? And um, you know, is that a good good enough number? Once once you are ready to set up your Kickstarter page, there are a lot of really important things to um look out for because one of the biggest mistakes that I'm seeing and when I'm, you know, asked for feedback is essentially it's just way too much text

and it's not enough game. You know, it's not enough images, it's not enough moving images. And that is just often really the issue with some some Kickstarter pages. It's about making people feel and see your project and using as few words as possible to do so. I think that that would be the goal. Um 80% of your visitors will watch the trailer. Uh so having a great trailer is of the utmost importance. It's like the one like the one Kickstarter rule is like have a trailer. Absolutely. Um, one thing that I was advised to do which was really great is to have a a GIF of your core loop at the very beginning essentially of the page and then you can round that up with a short paragraph on what is this game about? Um, because that essentially means that well 80% of users will at least see that because I can tell you that a lot of the people they're not ever going to scroll down to the very bottom. Kickstarter pages are

very long in general because there's lot of information to actually put on there, but people don't actually get all that information. They're not actually scrolling to it. So, um it's important to communicate things right at the very top and make it as clear as possible and use as many images as you can and of course make them good. Make it make it a good video, made it a good trailer. Um and that really helps. Um, and yeah, really just ever always avoid having long paragraphs. If you have five sentences in a row without any, you know, art in between that, you know, you should start thinking about, I'm going to put something pretty in here because otherwise it's just going to be too much text, like a wall of text. Um, the the typical breakdown of Kickstarter pages is that you have features. First and foremost, you go first and foremost, you essentially start with this is the this is the core loop. Um, then you go into features and mechanics in more depth. Then you can talk about the world, the narrative, the characters. Then you talk

about your individual production timeline. You can talk about the languages that you localize in. Um, there's often something like a reward table that actually shows your reward tiers linked to the rewards that they contain so that people can get an overview. And then at the very end there's actually the team. So that is like a um like a a thing that's actually like set up by Kickstarter itself and and you can talk about who you are and you know why you're making this game and just talk about all of your passions. So we put like a team picture in there and just tell them you know this is why we're doing it and we're excited to have them on on the journey. So the lesson with Kickstarter pages really is all about use lots of art. And because the page is essentially completely blank, you will have to create all of your custom headings and all of the, you know, sprinkle in between the beautiful maybe concept art that will just need to be created. So, you definitely need someone on your team with those visual

skills to just create a large amount of these images in um in anticipation of of the Kickstarter so that you can then put them on the page. So, one of the our examples was that we started with just like having the base features and the typical verbs, you know, just really getting to the point. What is this game about? Also using emojis just makes text less and well heavy to look at. So I mean for our audience at least you know really just make sure that you look at your audience but our audience uh loves emojis so we just use them here and then we had um links you know to for them to follow us and find us on different social media spa sp pages. And yeah, that's that's just an example of getting to the point and some important things that you could have on your page there. Um, the next thing that you have to consider with Kickstarter is your backer tiers. So those are actually the tiers that backers will then choose between um when

they want to pledge. A lot of them like your vast majority, I would say maybe like 70 to 80% they will just go for the first tier that you have. So that's like the standard edition 25 quid or something. They will just they will just choose that. Uh but of course your your strategy should be to upsell as many po people as possible. So one way to do that is to create you know a sense of urgency with the early bird tiers. Um, so that that allows you to mark a certain tier or create a certain tier as an early bird and you can essentially set the price for that. You can create the art for it. So you could say, okay, say5 and then makes it clear that that's that's a discount and you can choose the quantity or the time that it's restricted to. So we did like a 48 hour um period. So essentially after the first two days that's when all the early birds stopped but a lot of other games

they've done maybe something like you know only 200 are available and then you know once it's gone it's gone. So you can really um just create those yourself but it's it's really important to have some of them. So we had them for the basic the second basic tier. So one step upwards. So we had the £25 here and then we had the £35 here. And so we created an early bird version for that because that would be more interesting then for people to buy that than the previous tier because it was just a five pound increase and it feels like you're you know you're getting more than you're actually paying for. Um and then we also did that for the legendary tier which was like a more expensive one. So instead of I think like 80 pounds it was reduced to I think like maybe 65ish. So essentially it was just cheaper and therefore we were able to upsell people on that because yeah that's really the the other thing is to foster the feeling

of having made a smart decision in with people and so therefore if you are designing your rewards well then people will always compare they will always think okay which one should I get which one is smartest for me which one has the most things but you know maybe for the least amount and So um that was in this case for example we added a completely like another outfit and cards and and that just made also just visually the image feel much fuller and so people were really like feeling like they would get more out of the the digital deluxe version and that's how we achieved an average price like a backer price of um43. So that's actually that's just a way of trying to get your backers like to upsell them and get them to spend more of course on rewards that they're excited about. Um which leads us to the rewards and add-ons. So Kickstarter

essentially has two different ways to structure rewards. So the rewards are things that you um are able to then tag in all of your tiers uh to allow you to create that tier tier structure. So, you know, tier one has these and these rewards, but then there's also add-ons. And add-ons can be added to any order independently. So, every add-on that you do is essentially priced separately and can be added to whatever tier you have. And um in general, what you want to do with rewards and add-ons is to find lowcost rewards that are still really motivating your audience. So knowing your audience, knowing what they care about and you know thinking about ways to fit in that, that's the most important part. Um, one of the most important things to point out is you should stay digital maybe as long as you can because you could always add physical copies or physical rewards on top of the campaign if it's really going

well. I think that's what Mika and the Witches Mountain did. They had digital rewards and then they saw, oh, this is this is lifting off. We got a lot of traction here. we got like already like maybe 300,000 and that's when they created the statue of Mika and um essentially put that in as a reward during the campaign and that's also when they then see saw like another upbeat because they already had the traction. It's just it's much easier because physical rewards will essentially just really dilute um whatever you have in revenue coming back from the Kickstarter. Um, and another real like important thing with rewards is just to not have too many. I know that there's a lot of Kickstarters with very long list of rewards and we were also one of those Kickstarters. We had a lot of rewards and there's actually um a few of them that I just would not recommend doing think I have a slide on this later but um that's some lessons learned right like about not overdoing it with rewards either. So, this is an example of a

reward versus an add-on, which in some cases are just the same thing. So, you could have a digital copy and it's part of your specific tier. So, your tier will get you these things and those are the rewards. But then the add-ons means that you can add anything as an add-on and people can, you know, during checkout actually choose to like actually add this on top of their order. And add-ons are very important because um they give you that flexibility. They give you players like people, backers, the flexibility to add things that maybe might not be part of their backer tier because they didn't want to commit that much money, but they did want to have this very specific thing and that's what they'll buy afterwards. And later on, I'll I'll show you the pledge manager. And that is essentially a way to then upsell again even after your campaign through add-ons. So, it's really important to just think about can you make um most of your rewards, at least the digital ones, very specific ones,

can you make these add-ons and just give people the opportunity to just if they like it, just just put it on top of what they're buying already. So, these are some mistakes that we made. So, um we had a lot of rewards and like some of them we just like should have just like cancelled. like it's, you know, the the early access PC one here that actually confused a lot of players because they asked us, do we get early access when I have the Switch version? So, there's a lot of these questions coming back and and then clearly that's not the case. You cannot have two keys and it's not like we could give them the early access key on on PC while, you know, the game is still in development because then we can't take that key back. And that was really a tricky question to answer. So really, I would have like taken that out now. And um I also wouldn't have put an exclusive Discord channel in there, even though all of the other games studios did it. That's why we did it. But I wouldn't do it again because honestly,

one of our um main things with our community is to have open discussion with our players and actually ask them about their opinions. And I wouldn't want to I didn't want to like limit that to the only exclusive Discord channel. And so it's it's a bit now like a bit of a situation like okay what can we offer these exclusive Discord channel people but also not exclude the rest of the community which is probably going to be a bit more like early play testing um but keeping it so that the rest of the community is just equally involved and not separated and I think that's important. Also we had a few tiers that were just way too expensive. you know, a few life simulators, they have these very expensive tiers, but I think only the real like major successors will actually sell anything on these higher tiers. I think the highest tier that we sold was around the 600 pound mark, which was like a memorial bench, and only two people bought that. One of them was my mom. So, yeah. Um so essentially

I think you know really don't bother with these like at all because if one person would do it and then you you know you have to create that for them just don't keep with like smaller things smaller rewards um and always just always get in the mindset of oh I'll have to you know I have to deliver this at some point someone will have to put the time in that and it is always going to take longer than you think it will so just always um plan a bit smaller in that regard. Okay, this looks like a lot of text, but um stretch goals is one of the other things, many things that you have to think about when you are preparing your pre-launch. Um so here it's important that you create achievable goals that your audience wants. So, I made sure that I highlight, you know, achievable end ones because sometimes I think we're all, you know, too into our games and we think everything about the games is perfect, but actually there's

only maybe a specific thing maybe that our audience cares about the most. And if we can figure that out and really focus on that and integrate these things into our stretch goals, then well, it's much easier for us to achie like to create stretch goals that the community cares about as well as those that we can achieve and that will be good for our game. So essentially, um, I'm going to show you a few tricks that we did because our stretch goals were a bit of a mess, I'd say. So essentially we had a set of stretch goals that we wanted to launch with. But we did hide them. So that was the good news. That's why I'm advertising here for keeping uh some things hidden. Um because that really helped us because essentially we just we noticed when we launched okay momentum was going to go in a certain direction and our first stretch goal would have been too far removed to actually keep momentum going. So, we actually changed the amount and the stretch goal itself and we were able to do that because it was hidden. So, I'm going to show you

some images. Um, but yeah, essentially the good the good thing about stretch goals is if you can find small goals that essentially you have already committed to in your base game design. That is that is the most valuable thing to put onto your stretch goal list at least in the early stages. put things on there that you were already thinking about doing and and and then only at the later stages put on the things that are completely new and that will require you to just make make new commitments and invest new resources and um and having that mix between the smaller and the larger goals that will really help because in the early stages of a campaign it's all about first achieving the the goal itself which is you Why this is through Kickstarter of course because it's all or nothing that creates a very interesting like psychology

because a lot of beckers if they see that your game hasn't reached you know the goal in like I would say maybe like 5 days or a week into the campaign they're actually less likely to invest in it because they first wanted to like to see it succeed and then invest in it when it's a safe bet and that that is something that from a psychological perspective you have to fight against in the very early stages of the very first days of your Kickstarter. Your main goal will be how can we get funded as quickly as possible. How can we achieve the goal so that people that so that well first of foremost we can say funded in maybe 48 hours or something which is like a tag that you can then put on your advertising which is great. Um, it will boost the algorithm on Kickstarter to guide more people towards your page as well, but also just to get rid of that doubt of backers so that they make sure when they see your page and they're interested that they also commit. And um so having a bit of these um smaller and larger stretch goal really helps you

because that means once you have achieved your goal, if you then have a stretch goal that's just you know 5,000 pounds away, you can very quickly on top of the announcement, oh we achieved our goal, you can then put out, oh, we achieved our first stretch goal. And that really helps you just funnel more momentum into the campaign and it ultimately will help you um ideally actually get more revenue out of it. And um because ultimate so every campaign starts with like a big rise in the beginning and then it flattens out slightly towards the middle part. It gets slow and then it's going to spike up again at the very end because that's when um all of the reminding emails go out. That's all of the when Kickstarter tells people this, you know, this campaign is ending soon, they put like a timer on it. So there is a lot of momentum at the very beginning and at the very end and you just need to make sure that you you align your stretch goals with that ideally to boost the momentum on this journey. So this is for

example um how we hid our stretch goals. So you are not able to actually know what comes after the music player. And that means um at least for us at the very beginning we were able to make make a choice depending okay what um what should we put in there and I think that was just um that was for us really important because as I said um we made the mistake in the very um beginning that uh after achieving that goal of I think we set it to 36,000 we set the next stretch goal after that in the original plan to 60,000 And that would have taken ages and we wouldn't have been able to actually give an update and like channel the momentum and boost it. So essentially because we hit it, we were able to then say, okay, you know what, you know, this stretch goal just doesn't work for us. And also because we were doing a survey during the Kickstarter and we were actually asking people, what is the feature that you

care about the most? And we figured out, okay, it's it is clearly foraging. they don't really care about the cooking or the romance or the town upgrades as much as they care about forging. And that really helped me also decide on the stretch goal. So a lesson from that actually was for me ideally do a survey beforehand so that you design your stretch goals perfectly and you don't have to hide them to then be flexible. But if you want some flexibility, you can think about hiding them. And um and then of course you know this the second image here shows just some some differences between smaller stretch goals you know like the 4,000 between the the being funded and that first stretch goal but then you know the difference between photo mode and a music player being 10,000 and then I think towards the middle of the campaign you can essentially put in larger stretch goals and make sure that well because things slow down anyway you know then you're you're not that stressed out to constantly have to update things cuz that was another of um my mistakes is

that we had a probably too many small stretch goals which meant that um I was constantly having to chase and track and do updates uh because um that is that is not something that uh that Kickstarter announces to you at all. So you have to look out for that yourself. Um some companies some people do pre- campaigns so we weren't one of those. Um, but I talked to uh Michael from Tavern Talk. So, they did a Kickstarter right after ours and it did really well. and they actually had done a pre- campaign. So that was like €7,000 euros I think that they invested working with, you know, future friends um as a marketing agency and essentially just putting ads into Facebook and then channeling people um into the preview page to get their followers and you know or as well grow their email list because that's still really important marketing channel. And so this pre- campaign essentially consists of telling people, okay, this is going to launch soon, follow us, and

sign up to the newsletter so that you're the first person to hear about it. And and that will ultimately help you with your campaign when you get there. So, it's optional, but yeah, if you have the resources, it's it's recommended. Um, of course, what you also need to do in the pre-launch phase is to actually look at who are you going to be working with. Is it of course it is possible to just be you know on your own for yourself but there are marketing agencies out there and we actually worked with um two of them and you can see my feedback on those. So essentially um Backer Kit has been a great experience for us. So they're actually they're very committed to creating a a really good experience when it comes to doing Kickstarter support and doing marketing for it. But they also built their own platform and they have a lot of other added services. And I thought that was really valuable. Like they had

the marketing manager where you can import your email list and they already had set up all of the different um uh emails that would be sent out at certain stages. So you just it was even pre-written in a way. So you could of course go in and write your own thing, but you would just need to press send and you would know all of the beats, which is really valuable because I I didn't know like, okay, when would you actually when do you send out these emails? This is like 3 days before the campaign, at the campaign, of course, all of it. But then there's even more. So that was really valuable. And then they have a pledge manager which comes um which essentially comes into action right after the campaign will be hugely valuable. Um, and they even have a pre-order store, which means even after the campaign, you could get keep getting revenue and guide people to your pre-order store and people essentially immediately can buy it there and you get that money in the bank. So, they have a lot of really really cool services. Also, very great support, quick to respond. They they start running ads immediately, which is really important

because I didn't realize that Backer Camp actually didn't do that. So when I was um working with Backer Camp, they only started running the ads when the campaign was already 75% funded, which which meant that we were just slowed down at that stage. And so that was a bit of a a hit, I guess, uh because we didn't we did we weren't able to make the funded in two days. It was like slightly above 48 hours actually. Um but I think the most important difference between the two is that for both of them, you set up a contract and you agree on a return on ad spend minimum. So, a lot of times this is like 2.5 or something. So, you're saying as long as your ads are above 2.5 in terms of what they return um on what you spend on it, then that's okay, keep going. Um so, Becker Kid actually they got back to us immediately once that dropped and they asked us, should we pause the ads or should we, you know, reduce spending and we said, yeah, just reduce spending. We still want to keep ads going. I think the lowest that it got to in the medium

stage was 1.8. 8 and it was still being profitable which means that even if they are spending the money on it um at least they are also covering their costs as long as the return on ad spend was 1.8 eight roughly. Um so we kept them going but Becker camp on the other side even though the the agreements at 2.5 to three like actually we never heard back from them and even though like we saw on the the back end that the ads weren't um you know at some point weren't performing up to those standards. I thought I think just in general I would re I would always recommend going with Becca kit. There are some others. there's something like gelop and I heard that Kickstarter is now setting up their own marketing agent and service see like that's smart of course you know why why give the money to other people if you could just do it yourself um so there's lots of people to choose from the important thing with these agencies were they actually spend the marketing money so you didn't have to have it as long as the return on aspend was good that means

that you are generating money from their money and then you are paying them back once you are paid from the Kickstarter so that means Even if you don't have money, you can run a Kickstarter campaign if you're working with these agencies and you have a good return on ad spend. So once you actually did all of these things, you are technically ready to launch. Um, and in this case, it's all about yeah, pressing a button. I guess it's really it's a bit, you know, unnerving, but yeah, once you press the button, essentially everything turns into a a 30-day marathon or well sprint probably more like cuz it's uh it's it's quite intense. So, because you essentially you have to post on every social channel every day. You have to engage like crazy like whatever you can. So, in these 30 days, that is like your main job. um at least one person needs to just really do it because you not only do you need to, you know, try and post every day and like try to generate

a viral hit if you can. Uh you also need to constantly track your funding and um and do, you know, the the updates if you have reached the stretch goal because Kickstarter doesn't know your stretch goals. I mean, your stretch goals are essentially an image on the Kickstarter page. So, they're not going to tell you if you reached anything. So, you know, sometimes in the very morning at like 7 a.m. I just like woke up and I'm like, "Okay, I have to write an update because it's like it's almost there." We always reach that next stretch goal. Um, so yeah, like that will be part of that experience. Um, and it also means though that if you if you have bigger goals and you you know you do that, then you might have less of that time pressure. But yeah, you have to look into these things and post updates and answer lots of comments. So people will like ask lots of questions. Kickstarter has its own comment section so you can answer them there. It's perfect. Um, you post updates whenever you have reached the goal and whenever you have reached the next stretch goal to essentially get people, rally people and get them

excited about the next stretch goal. And in our case actually often reveal the next stretch goal or the one after. Um, and what you can expect and what no one told me is that you get lots of spam messages in your impulse from all kinds of service providers for Kickstarter. Like even they even commented on um some of our ads on Facebook saying like, "Oh, we can help you run this campaign." Um, and it's yeah, it's just, you know, you'll you'll get used to it, I guess. But um, that was just something that I didn't know. H and of course what you should have as a as a preparation from all your you know pre-launch uh stuff is having the Discord prepare because I know it's it is a stressful 30-day kind of um well event. So it's it's you know it's going to take some of your energy but it's also really fun to have people talk on your Discord. It was beautiful time to you know for people to they post their gifts when we reached like a stretch goal and everyone was like really excited like partying on the

discord and that was like I think the most active our discord channel was which again shows how much Kickstarter can just really rally your community bring the pe people together and yeah that's really something I can like recommend is just that will give you the energy that you need to get through that month um and yeah something that we also did that was um during the campaign and I think that's one of the positives actually of Becker camp. So they did that and now I'm passing on that knowledge so that you can do it even if you wouldn't work with them is that uh you essentially send backers a link um to a survey and you ask to fill it out and because they're your backers and they're really excited in the very moment you essentially get you get their attention you know they actually get them to fill out that survey. So, out of the 3,000 Beckers that we had, we got like 1,200 survey like answers, but I think Becker Camp actually didn't send the survey to everyone. So, it's only a few. I think maybe a certain percentage, but it was great. That data was

fantastic. We really asked people, "What feature are you most excited about?" And that helped me like from a design standpoint, like a lot because, you know, we're excited. We're devs. We're all excited about the different features that our games have, but what is the feature that your customer cares about the most? That's really valuable information and ultimately it still helps us now to this day to have this survey. So I can recommend you know if you want to gather any kind of data asking about you know that and maybe platforms or where are you located um because that really helped us you know figure out okay we actually got a lot of backers from the US and then after that it's Australia it's like okay nice and uh and that really helps us now because it's like okay uh we clearly need to create more um American content you know because we have um because our game is about foraging it's about you know where where are plans located and in our case this information of where are our people uh backers located is really helpful for

us because we can then create more plans that are relevant to them and that has informed our road map in the future. So it's just really useful data. And so after you have gotten through that the timeline, so the 30 or 60 days, whatever you committed to, um you will get your payment. It will take two weeks uh to get to you. It will also mean that um Kickstarter and Stripe will automatically deduct uh all of their money essentially from what you're getting. Um it will be linked to your essentially just transferred into your bank account. And after that point, the marketing agencies that you worked with, they will sell you send send you the invoices for the cost that they incurred and then also a separate invoice for the cost that um well their own charge. And um I didn't mention that in the saying, but it was on the slide before is they charge 15% on the um essentially the the revenue that they generated through their ads, which is really I think

really like generous in that regard because we didn't have to pay them much. It's like maybe£35,000 or something. It's like because that was the re 15% of only the thing that they re like generated through their ads. So, if you're doing well with community and you have other ways of doing marketing on your own and getting people to do Kickstarter and Kickstarter itself will be a great, you know, way to also funnel people to your page. Kickstarter will put you up uh on their lists. Maybe they give you the project we love tag. um or you know the trending and that's how you get a lot of people and and you don't have to pay the marketing agencies on the people that you bring to your page or that Kickstarter brings to your page. Uh probably is going to change if Kickstarter is the marketing agency as well. So it's going to be interesting. Um but yeah so essentially after after the campaign it goes over to the fulfillment and in this case actually

where the backer kit pledge manager came in and that's usually that was just great for us. So essentially what you do is you import all of your backer data from Kickstarter which essentially is the data of here's the Becca number, here's the name, here's um here's the tier that they got essentially the tier that they ordered and maybe potential add-ons. All of that you can import into the pledge manager and then you prepare inside the pledge manager a survey because that's the Becker survey and that's information that you absolutely need to collect. It's for example, yeah, what platform do you want that your key for? And um well, which specific region for that platform is that? For example, with the Switch, you need to ask, you know, is it Europe, is it North America, is it Asia? Because um you need to get that information to actually then uh get request the keys from Nintendo. So that backup service is just really important. It also helps you to cover anything else. Like for example, if you had a reward that lets people um upload or like create their own design, you can

essentially uh put that in here as well. So yeah. Um, and the greatest thing actually about the pledge manager was that all of the add-ons that you had in your campaign, you were able to then monetize again because in the pledge manager um, people were able to add things on top of what they already bought. So if they committed, if they backed your like your game like on day one or something and then they get the reminder about the survey like you know two months later and now they have more disclo maybe more disposable income again. Actually, we saw a lot of people invest and and get more add-ons. So, a lot of people bought the kitchen skin that we offered and a lot of people got the foraging cards that we offered and that generated revenue after the campaign had already ended. And that was all thanks to the pledge manager. And um and of course what you then have to do is updates like I think maybe in the beginning you can you could do it maybe

every week or maybe every second week but then you know you you go on to a monthly rhythm. Some games actually that I I backed I mean they only do maybe every 3 months like an update. Um, but it's really important and you can get lots of like engagement there, comments and ask people something like we we put out a survey recently about getting to know more about the lifestyles of Cozy Gamers. We put them in here because this is like your well your own personal email list. This goes out to every Becker and it's really valuable as a as a marketing resource. And then ultimately what you do is distribute. If you have digital downloads like wallpapers and postcards like we had, it's super easy to just very quickly upload them um through the pledge manager, you can immediately distribute them to everyone that had them tagged in their backer tier and then it's it sends them out. It's perfect for other items. You know, you actually first need to finish the game and then and then do that a bit more,

you know, a bit more manually. Um but there is a lot of things that we also don't know yet. I can't quite talk about it. Um but yeah, to to kind of finish things off, I think the most important key takeaways for me was um that Kickstarter was really valuable just above, you know, the funding as well. It's about um the the marketing, it's about community, so the engagement, it's about the validation of the market, product market fit in that regard. and and also just hugely helps us you know now in in publisher talks. So that was really valuable and then um you know you do have to prepare for it and build the community beforehand. That is is a key takeaway. you know, if if we had done maybe a better job at also getting more people into the emails and the email newsletters, maybe we could have had a better outcome even then because um it's just a much better marketing tool and it converts much better than Tik Tok. The

best uh audience actually in terms of conversion were like Twitter, Twitter and X. Um, and then you know, Tik Tok is very much like a uh lower conversion rate kind of audience, very more casual. But I think email is always best. If I'd known that, yeah, you know, it would have boosted it further. And yeah, honestly, like doing that backer survey during the campaign, learning more about what your audience wants, what features they're most excited about, that data will help you long term with design, with scope, you know, with being able to make decisions of like, oh no, we don't need that. we can cut that because people didn't even like like no no no one cared about it so why would do we do it. Um so yeah I think that was that was uh that was it and I'm excited to yeah answer any questions that you have about maybe specific projects or specific ideas or anything really. Oh yeah.