Mastering Crowdfunding Campaigns

[Music] welcome to the novic gaming podcast where it is our mission to explore the business and future of video games we bring together the industry's brightest Builders investors and thinkers to keep a pulse on current events dissect emerging Trends and games share Lessons Learned and have a great time this podcast is also part of novic growing ecosystem which ranges from free and premium research to Consulting and AD advisory services for more information visit [Music] www.nic.edu and Esports tournament organizers grids data infrastructure and Distribution Solutions help game rights holders unlock new revenue streams while empowering their communities and professional players no matter what you are building grid can unlock your game's

data potential through its off-the-shelf grid SDK or fully customizable Solutions Plus if you're a developer or entrepreneur with a live data powered project idea make sure to apply for grid open access to start building with supported official game data today learn more and sign up at grid. or check out the link in the show notes and with that let's jump into the episode hello everyone and welcome to the novic gaming podcast I'm your host Alex te and this of course is the interview and insights segment so who can be an investor is a question a lot of companies have asked themselves why can't someone support a company or a cause because they aren't an inedited investor and Why can't your average Joe participate platforms like Robin Hood for stocks Masterworks for art have democratized the participation in assets that have usually been reserved for well those who can afford it um or have relationships to understand regulations and platforms and for games are media crowdfunding

platforms like Kickstarter and patreon have been where companies or even individuals have colled the masses to join their mission and and dream and to create something new even if not in exchange for an equity State Kickstarter specifically began is in 2009 with the goal of helping bring creative projects to life and as of February 2023 Kickstarter has received $7 billion in USD in pledges for the Menagerie of Music film theater games journalism and food related projects Oculus Rift some people know began as a 2012 Kickstarter project Cards Against Humanity also originated on Kickstarter Kickstarter has been an extremely popular place for our relatives of video games board games in 2021 board games raised 272 million In Crowd financing with video games coming in substantially lower at 24 million and so today we're going to be talking about Kickstarter specifically but also about crowd financing including Equity campaigns and as more generalized finan solutions to do so I am joined by

two folks from frost giant who we have probably seen achieve amazing success on their Kickstarter campaign that ran a few months ago 2.4 million on the kickstarter platform from 28k backers an average of $85 per person which is pretty impressive that is more than the price of a AAA box so great job guys um and they've also been doing a crowd financing um crowd Equity financing campaign on start engine so by my first guest is uh Carol la Forge Frost Giants Director of Business operations who also shares background at Blizzard Entertainment welcome to the Pod Cara thank you thanks for having us um and the second is my friend Tim Morton who I've had the pleasure of Hosting on air from the very first episode I ever recorded and he probably needs no introduction for our audience but he is the CEO and production director at Frost giant welcome back to the Pod 10 thanks for having us on all right well I am super excited to chat today not only

because the campaign itself was very impressive but also because I simply don't know a lot about how to successfully execute a successful Kickstarter campaign and am generally less seasoned on crowd equity in general um so today we're going to begin with talking about Kickstarter as a platform why run a Kickstarter campaign in the first place pros and cons how the campaign was executed and some lessons that you guys can profer if you were to do it all again and although we will spend the majority of our timeline Kickstarter we're also chat throughs ideas and ideation around crowd financing versus crowd Equity but before we dive in of course intros um Tim you've been on here of course but tell us a little bit more about you and more specifically give me like a quick update on where Frost giant is at in the production cycle and what's next for stormgate uh let's see yeah I've been in the industry for a long time um started out a lifetime ago as an engineer and got into to being a producer um and uh

was most recently at blizzard prior to frost giant had an opportunity to uh get some Equity funding from traditional sources from from Venture Capital to start the company and uh brought a core group of developers who had worked on real-time strategy games at blizzard uh to frost giant to build a new team and build a new pc realtime strategy game Cara was someone who I had had the chance to work with at blizzard and who was brave enough to to join this effort uh and yeah Frost Giant's been going since 2020 uh we had some rounds of closed Alpha we're in our final round of closed beta now on stormgate which is our first product um and and we are looking

forward to launching the game into Early Access in Q3 of this year that's terrific um really exciting uh there's been such a good Buzz around around the beta um I know a lot of folks that have bought the deluxe pack um so we're all we're all really excited to see what comes next and I guess you talked a little bit about how you met Cara but Cara tell us a little bit more about you um what uh what got you to joining Tim on this crazy adventure so I had had a whole career in uh Securities fraud litigation 20 years and but I had two sons who were DieHard Gamers who became Starcraft pros and later Starcraft casters and uh they convinced me to leave my career and join them in gaming um the younger one and I uh ran a small streaming company in the very very early days of live streaming called day9 TV um did a lot of Red Bull Work launched

games uh launched Heart of the Swarm uh with blizzard just had a ton of fun and eventually I was recruited over by blizzard to work on the Starcraft and Heroes of the Storm Team and Then followed my boss Amy morheim over to Esports spent a couple years doing Esports and now I'm lucky enough to work here at Frost giant which is super exciting for me my passion is really startups so um very very happy to be here that's a very cool story um it's it's very uncommon for the uh to have a recruitment role reversal usually it's the parents that are recruiting their children to go into medicine um versus the other way around but um sounds like you can win the uh coolest mom of the Year award um I don't think my kids would say that but thank you well that's awesome guys and thanks

for some contacts there um I want to jump into our first topic which is kind of talking about you know what is Kickstarter um and so you know maybe Kara since I know that you led a lot of the efforts on the kickstarter campaign particularly in your own words can you tell me about Kickstarter um and was it your first time to the platform um or had you engaged with it before you came to frost giant we had only engaged in it as as patrons ourselves for projects that we'd admired this was brand new for all of us steep learning curve um and I want to stress it was team effort we had a couple people here really leaned in far more than I did our finance guy our head of publishing sarilyn Smith um our PR guy Gerald lauia the these are the folks who really really leaned in and crafted this thing um you know we went into it it was really almost a fortuitous

accident we are from a long blizzard tradition where we like to offer um Collector's Editions founders packs about six months out from from any kind of launch and we from the day we found it the studio we thought oh this this is you know a cool thing that we're going to do blizzard used to make these phenomenal statues and signed Collector's Editions they were beautiful kind of thing you'd put on your shelf and but we learned um that on Steam you're you're really prohibited by valve's policies from selling these kinds of things if you're intending to go into Early Access they have a policy against doing that I think the concern there is there is that you know there's a lot of Indie startups on Steam somebody may take the consumer's money and not deliver the game they want to prevent that they're like no really early access is the moment at which you should begin to show

your product and and and take take in funds for things like like a Founders pack so but they did have a carve out in their policy for kickstarters and we thought okay well let let's take a look at that this is something we know our community wants it's something we'd love to deliver to them um and so we we we basically started to read everything we could get our hands on think about how we would do this um we were lucky enough to have a couple of people from the community side to step forward and help us um at the right moments we are very tight with our community we talk a lot to our community we have Summits for several hundred influencers about every six months we tell them exactly what's going on and what we're intending to do and what our road maps are like we've been doing that

since the day the studio was founded um we have another 1,700 content creators that signed up on our website um we had a summit with them said we're not really sure who you guys are but thank you so much for being interested in us um this is this is what we're working on this is what we're thinking about and as part of all that we we rais this Kickstarter um we we are very well funded we've been very fortunate we have an amazing group of VCS behind us um and we didn't want to look like we were taking from our community like we were looking for charity from our community um so we spent some time seeking permission from our content creators in our community are you okay with this do you understand the context do you understand why we would do this this is really a mechanism to get something we think you want in your hands and we would really like more of you to be in

our beta play tests got it we had launched our Alpha that had been very successful but it was quite small um and as you know for a multiplayer game putting a ton of players into a play test this your server costs can really shoot up so there was this question the back of our heads how many people can we get in cost effectively and um giving people a steam key that would give them beta access as a part of a Founders pack was one way to do that so the community turned out to be pretty positive about the whole thing um and so we reached out to the kickstarter folks um stood up a coming soon page which was their recommendation um and started to think about how we would Market this thing email campaigns you know um what would the founders packs look like what tiers would there be how do we price it studied everybody else's camp

yeah that's actually where I want to go um and sounds like you're diving into some of the de the the details and the meat of the actual Kickstarter campaign um but just for grounding for the audience um Kickstarter is not a crowd Equity financing platform um basically what you do is from my research is that there are 13 categories on Kickstarter um and 36 subcategories broadly they are art Comics dance design fashion film and video food games music photography publishing technology and theater um film and video music and games are responsible for over half the money raised and the video and tabletop industry alone counts for $2 of every $10 spent on the platform and there are some general guidelines for project creators which the frost giant team I'm sure you guys all know but creators can fund projects only a project must fit into one of the 13 categories creators must abide by the site's prohibited uses so turns out charity and awareness campaigns are not allowed on Kickstarter

and you cannot offer incentives like equity revenue sharing or investment opportunities um and so I think that that's something that at least when I initially was doing some research was confused between the difference between a crowd financing campaign and a crowd Equity campaign um and so I think I would love to hear a little bit more about the actual Kickstarter design because some of those things also required you to navigate through a bunch of different um a bunch of different rules yes and and I think you've done a great job of summarizing it essentially the kickstarter is focused on product delivery and and beta access for us um it was it was all about getting more people into the game and getting these cool founders packs to them the the crowd Equity campaign on start engine was more about investing in Frost giant as a company and investing in the realtime strategy genre which is what we

were making a bet on got it and so what we're going to do is we're going to path towards the details of the kickstarter campaign so I want to hear about you know how did you decide to price things how did you decide how much Capital you wanted to raise but maybe since you mentioned it we'll dive a little bit into the crowd Equity campaign because I know that you guys are running that on start engine as well um and Tim I know that you're leading up that effort so tell me a little bit about your start engine campaign and why did you decide to do an additional crowd Equity financing on top of your crowd financing through Kickstarter yeah each campaign um served a different purpose and car kind of highlighted already that for the kickstarter it was about delivering Collector's Editions and enabling players uh to get into the Beta who were really passionate about wanting to do that uh by contrast then the crowd Equity Campa aign with start engine is

about providing some additional ability for us around marketing as we bring stormgate to Market um and so you know really the capital that we raised from traditional Venture Capital was very much about developing the aim um and you know paying for the developers and the outside companies that we work with to create stormgate um and at the point that we raised that uh original Venture Capital we didn't know would we work with um big Publishers to bring the game to Market would we work with regional Partners like you know just what what the strategy was around publishing and marketing in the game and as we got into it um we concluded that the best way for us to bring stormgate to Market um in a way that we really felt like it was going to be authentic to

what we believ was important um was for us to self-publish it and uh we are working with some Regional Partners outside of um North America outside of Europe so specifically in Asia um and you know I think that's really to enable us to service those players in the best way possible but to be true to the way that we want to release the game and not have pressure from Publishers um to do things in a particular time or in a particular way self-publishing was the route that that we decided to go on so that start engine cred Equity campaign is enabling us to do that um it's providing Capital to drive that marketing I see okay so that is um basically you're doing something very similar where you'd go to event venture deor or you'd go to venture capitalist

and say hey I need 5 million specifically for this so your crowd Equity campaign is specifically for the publishing capabilities for stormgate in the west got it all right um so I have I guess I got a couple questions around here is the first is how did you decide how much Equity to give away and how did you figure out what the right number was there are a couple of different kinds of crowd equity offerings um that you can uh pursue um there is a rank a which has a a higher upper limit but also has kind of a a longer lead time because there's a bunch more uh diligence necessary with the SEC to prepare for a rank a um companies like uh skybound who did Walking Deads um have done regas uh then the tier that Frost giant

decided to pursue is a regg CF um which has a $5 million limit on the round um and there's no uh you know sort of unlike Kickstarter where you have to fill out the goal that you set for reg CF we can take up to 5 million um and whoever wants to invest can invest along the way um that size round um is perfect in terms of that's you know anywhere from a million up is great for us in terms of marketing Capital um so that variability is fine um we don't need more than that uh and it's also as I mentioned a little uh more straight forward shorter lean time um to file for a reg CF yeah that makes sense um I was actually on a panel

on Monday at UCLA on game financing Alternatives and we talked a little bit about reggae um and how it's sort of it's so onerous that it's not really an option um and you know when we're laying out the landscape of what where games can secure seed financing from Project based financing Equity financing Etc um there's uh you know the in reggae there's some options there but it's so difficult because of all the regulations um and so if you did this you reg CF is what you said right yeah okay got it um did you have to spend any time in that process actually educating your retail investors about regulations maybe some of the low liquidity and the highrisk of failure for a startup or did you kind of more proceed in a manner where you assume that everybody was kind of educated about what they're getting into yeah no I you know disclosure is a super important part of any offering um and I guess I'll even preface this by saying that our existing investor base um was

very supportive of us doing this reg CF um and I I'm of course grateful to them for for being supportive because we are um taking a bunch of new investors onto the cap table basically so it it does um you know have have some impact on them but uh yeah as far as the offering itself um there are a variety of platforms um so just as you know Kickstarter or Indiegogo um are platforms for uh crowd funding that's not crowd Equity um for crowd Equity funding there are platforms like we funder um start engine Republic uh a number of others so you know we did did some diligence on which platform to work with but in our case we chose start engine um the team at start engine helps us put together the disclosures and the filing

for the SEC and in a way it's like a mini IPO I mean there are regular financial reporting requirements there are audit requirements um so it it's kind of it's a useful exercise in terms of um kind of being buttoned up in in your financials and in your plan and I I also think it's a healthy thing to have transparency um you know just anything that it is a completely closed system is prone to uh you know have flaws that don't get discovered until much later um the transparency that comes with an SEC filing was a good exercise for us um yeah so a lot of thought and effort went into the disclosures and making sure that investors are aware of the risks yeah it sounds fairly intensive and it sounds like you guys are in a good spot in the case that you have to do any kind of uh um auditing or maybe

you guys have an IPO sometime some way down the line um you'll be you'll be prepared for for the kind of work that that requires um so I had a kind of a maybe an interesting question here and I can't take credit for this question but I'm just curious um are there any rules about who can participate in the campaign um so let's just say uh you know you said the upper bound is 5 million um and I want to raise 5 million on x um dilution or how however much of the company you chose to of uh Frost D you chose to give away um to make this example um I guess maybe where I'm going with this is like what if I I'm a founder of the company want to buy back some of my Equity can I participate in my own crowd Equity financing campaign so I can own more of the company or are there rules around who can actually participate There Are Rules around participation um

and it's interesting I think neither myself nor my co-founder um explored what it would take for us to participate um but definitely you know one of the things that start engine uh asked upfront was whether we intended to participate um and so like clearly there are some uh additional checks around inside trading basically like that um our employees are able to participate um and so oh interesting yeah that's that's kind of a cool uh opportunity for them to um participate if they want to there are also regulations around immediate family members of the founders participating so yeah I think um just like public markets there are checks um that the SEC uh enforces just to make sure that

everything is being done properly yeah I would presume so because I would also presume that question extends to your current investors um again I don't know what the relationship between the price and the equity is potentially your priced round are cheaper so they wouldn't want to buy up this Equity right but we don't know yeah it's worth noting that they're different stock classes too um so yeah the rights that you get um in an offering like this are generally different than the preferred stock that um the the early Venture investors would get yeah of course um and uh but I think it's a great really interesting um Dynamic for uh employees as well um as well as I was considering potentially the the founders um but that's pretty interesting and I'm glad that we learned a little bit about the start engine campaign as well as sort of the rules and Dynamics around reggae um CF I think is what you called it um CF

okay uh and nice and uh that that's actually really helpful so I'd love to go back to the kickstarter Campaign which is the I guess the quad Equity campaign is still open right it is that's right I think for another six weeks or so okay so if anybody's listening you go check that out on start engine um and if you're interested in investing in a frost giant you can give it your uh your user experience um but going back to the kickstarter Campaign which has concluded right um it sounds like Cara from what you were saying that this was more about getting um a kind of like a collector's edition type thing into the hands of players and for onboarding people into the Beta um I guess I wanted to hear kind of like a macro story where like someone walks into the office one day and they're like let's do a Kickstarter campaign how did you guys actually Greenlight this thing or was it we have a beta what's the best

way to Market it um which came first huge debate at trly as there is about everything we do when we're marketing the game what's what's the best way forward how do we do this is this the right path to take lots of smart people here raising lots of smart points really we thought once we talk to our community and the community said we get it um we'll back you we'll help explain what's going on um we felt like it was going to be okay to move forward there were definitely concerns around Logistics where practically everybody on the team is adep uh we're a very small group doing publishing we wear a lot of hats um but as I mentioned before we had two Community people who stepped forward to help one was a videographer who reached out to us and said your videos are okay but I think I could I could help you make the better and we said come over to the offices he

was local here come over to the offices talk to us he turned out to be so talented we hired him fulltime and made him a member of the team he's responsible for a lot of the animations you see on on the kickstarter homepage and a lot of the explanatory video which we think were were among the more compelling pieces that we put up it's it's hard to explain what we were building because we were building so many things our our vision is pretty ambitious we have many modes that we're putting forward 1v1 3v3 Co-op uh an editor that we want to give to our community so they can make user generated content there were there there was a lot to explain and some of the wisdom is that on Kickstarter don't be text intensive you want to use visual images so uh Chris Culp was able to step in and kind of take over and organize a lot of that do a lot of the heavy

lifting then we had another guy who is in our beta play test his name is Brendan he's from a company called open Al Studios he specializes in taking board games um to Kickstarter and running their campaigns and he stepped forward and said I you know this is what I do I'd love to give you some advice if you'd like to listen so he was super helpful in kind of getting us to focus on the right things and and pulling this together okay so tldr make that it's coming soon page to indicate that you're doing one and then recruit people before you execute it to help you do it it took a village to get this Kickstarter page up we we worked in a pretty short window um which is often the case here because we're a small marketing team we scramble um but uh we were lucky enough that it all came together lot a lot of um debate internally like how do we pra these tear like this many tiers that many tiers I

think once we arrived at a at a package combination and put it up we were amazed to find how many people were willing to buy at a $60 tier instead of the sort of the bare minimum tier to get into beta which we thought was the real hook which would have been $40 um so that that took us a back we thought well who are these incredibly generous people who want to us at at $60 and then you know we were told the wisdom was you make some of these these higher tear and these lower tear to encourage participation and you know people people were buying in to our astonishment at the $5,000 Hall of Legends level so you know there were many of us on the publishing team on Google searching names going who are these people you know why why are they so kind to us why are they so generous um actually got to meet some of them the other day we had a zoom call for all of them as a part of you know

their rewards where we were like turn on your cameras so we could see your faces thank you who are you that's incredible yeah it was super cool it was super cool for us a good scenario um we love a good case of um we call that menu pricing where you sandwich the things between the different tiers and so nobody buys the most expensive bottle of wine but everybody buys the second most expensive bottle of wine um pricing um so that's really cool um and it sounds like you had a lot of help from the community to build this um but Tim I know that you mentioned that unlike crowd Equity right where you set the target kind of um for a Kickstarter if you don't hit your goal you don't get to um no funds are collected and I know that you guys exceeded the target well over the original goal by some crazy amount like 20 2,280 to be precise um but I would love to hear from you what Target did you set

originally and why we set uh a 100K goal for our Kickstarter um largely because it wasn't about um the money so much as it was about delivering value to players um so yeah we we weren't as concerned with hitting a a particular threshold but um yeah I I think they're pros and cons either way um we were just really really fortunate to have a community that's um passionate and generous and supported 100,000 was also the price at which we thought we could make a statue this the statues I don't ever dealt with this before they require these molds and the molds we were getting bids for 20 to $30,000 for the mold to make the statue so we we had done some napkin math and decided okay

we could safely Venture into a collector's edition statue if we raised at least $100,000 that yeah that well I used to work um with Tim in finance of blizzard and so I'm very surprised to the Statue costs um which were very important to the dev team and yet very uh um let's just say the margins on statues um not the best uh but very important for morale so that's really funny that the statue is your Anchor Point uh but it's also kind of just sounds like what I would do is if I weren't going to collect any funds I would just set the target as low as possible um and this way I would collect something so uh is there a floor for how low you can set the price of how much you can collect on Kickstarter good question I I'm sure there is I actually don't know a fan what that is you didn't even have to bother with it because you guys are going to be so successful that it didn't even matter um uh you know one interesting thing is in

fact it's still going on this um crowdfunding campaign Kickstarter limits you to a 60-day window to make your offering but it turns out that Indiegogo a competitor will allow you to import the kickstarter campaign onto their platform and continue it so at the very tail end of our campaign we we had a number of people who had fomo who wrote to us and said oh my goodness I missed I missed the the window I I'm not going to get a statue I'm not going to get into beta is there any way for me to buy in late and so as kind of a community service we investigated and said okay well you know for these tailin people we can open up on this second platform um and so we did that we imported the campaign in Indiegogo Indiegogo helped to set it up

amazingly there has been a longtail effect to our having done that another another 2,000 people have arrived after the kickstarter campaign closed to Buy Buy Reward at some tier so I think the very highest tiers are being offered but I think most of these people wanted to wanted to get into beta and we wanted to let them so of course yeah and actually it was one of my questions was why did you choose Kickstarter specifically over another crowdfunding platform such as Indiegogo or patreon um and do you think maybe the initial results would have been the same if you had hosted it on a different platform yeah I think you know each platform has its own um audience and therefore its own reach um Kickstarter from our investigation seemed to have the strongest reach um and even though it wasn't as popular for video games any War um there still were examples of

video game campaigns that were were doing while I'm Kickstarter so um for what it's worth to to Cara's point I think Kickstarter does now have some new late pledge functionality that didn't exist uh when we ran ours but um yeah it was um useful for us to be able to continue to accept late pledges through Indiegogo so your initial campaign on Kickstarter um I was going to also ask about the L was capped at 60 days right that's right yeah okay got it and then you basically because of surging demand you ported over to Indiegogo and now the campaign is still going yeah we we haven't really promoted it um again it was just kind of um ferous to let people who wanted to get into the Beta or wanted to get collector's edition um to be able to do that but um yeah it's done surprising numbers uh given that we really don't talk much about it yeah um that that's I

mean I didn't even realize that you guys were doing a second one which I guess brings me to the question of you know you talked about having all this community participation you brought in people that um were just big fans of stormgate as well as your internal marketing team as well as someone like yourself Karen obviously Tim your time um but can you tell me a little bit about the Beats over the actual 60 days it sounds like you actually did like a pre a pre a pre preview um coming soon and then you open it up for 60 days you know what was the how did you promote the campaign's existence where did you promote it how frequently did you promote it yeah I I should let Cara talk a bit about um the relationship with content creators streamers um that I I think produced a lot of the awareness um around the kickstarter campaign because Cara had a really big role in coordinating that but we also did some traditional PR um we were at uh the game

awards and we were super fortunate to have seeu get up on stage and uh and talk about storm Gates and so the end of that trailer um presents that we're on Kickstarter and that that was kind of the the biggest beat in terms of marketing it but there was a very conscious effort on our part to make sure that that the word got out but I I honestly think the content creator uh role was the most important of that so I don't know Caren do you want to talk a bit about that yeah I think you know I I I think it's the whole ball of wax I think the marketing efforts were important it's important that we thought of this in the context of a a whole series of events um so we could continue to to remind people that that we were doing this the the content Creator thing is is interesting as part of the really the studio values

was to be very transparent with the RTS Community to try to reach out talk to the RTS Community um we're hyper aware that that these days people on Twitch and YouTube they really are like the Salesforce for gaming um they are your business partners you do need to work with them you need to understand them as brands in their own right um and look for win-wins um so we have been working very hard since the day the studio was founded on those relationships and to understand what their worlds look like what their business models look like what works for them what doesn't work for them um so by the time we arrived at the kickstarter we had talked to them a lot they' given us a lot of advice about the game they were I would say there were probably 70 80 of them that were involved even in

the early days in designing the game so certain sense of wow that's a cool full circle moment for them oh yeah yeah yeah yeah they've been and they've been awesome awesome to us um we did offer an affiliate fee program because we thought well we're we're raising funds and if they're working hard we should give them something we should give them some opportunity many of them actually elected not to pick up the affiliate fees because they don't like the hashtag ad that the FTC requires they put on their videos they would prefer to maintain trust with their communities and be clean and present it you know good or bad um so there's a you know there there there's a complexity there that that we were working with but yeah the these guys were very good about helping the the um user base understand who we were we were building why we were on Kickstarter why they were helping um

super helpful and then beyond that you know Sarah Lyn and Gerald uh and Howard put a lot of time into email campaigns um around this week had built a house list um just by putting up a form on our website if you love RTS if you're interested in what we're doing you know sign up here we'll keep you updated with a newsletter um so they were able to use that list which by the time the kickstarter happened had hundreds of thousands of names on it as a as a seaing mechanism to drum up some interest um in the kickstarter and then Kickstarter itself has its own internal email system people sign up to that coming soon page um you build a second list and then it kind of helps you automate the communications around that but that's a that's a lot of work those guys they had a goal I think of

two times a week to communicate with the folks that had signed up and they more or less stuck to that throughout um so that's a lot of that's a lot of communication yeah it sounds like you guys had like a four quadrant approach you had like at the highest bracket it's just like famous actor on a stage at a game show award award show all the way down to like constant email lists and then you also kind of had like your content and streamer influencers in the middle um as well as own um company owned Communications um that I that sarin and their team were running yeah and and PR as well but you're right and I think it is important to understand going into any of these campaigns this is true for uh the kickstarter that we did it's also true for the start engine campaign that's active now it requires act at work the platform brings a certain audience with

it but at the end of the day it's on you running the campaign to really make sure that the word gets out and make sure that people feel like there's a reason for them to participate and so um it's not a light lift and we were fortunate to have enough um folks internally to be able to field it um but there are a bunch of agencies out there for uh people who don't have that and and we got approached by a lot of them um and and many of them have their own lists that they mail to I think probably the biggest factor for us like we we did have some dedicated staff that we could put towards these campaigns and we also had our own mailing list so we felt like we could um get reach internally but uh a lot of folks to go with agencies yeah that makes sense one of my questions was how how big is Frost giant right now yeah it's depends on how you count it I

guess but we're we're over 50 on the internal team there are a bunch of additional contractors around the world and then there's some uh third party companies that we work with on cinematics and various other pieces of art so um yeah it's a it's a good siiz effort to get stormgate done for sure yeah but it sounds like you still had to Rally a lot of your community to get the kickstarter done as well so it's you know again like you were saying before it takes a village um I wanted to talk also about um you know we talked a little bit about the marketing beats and the campaign itself and how you guys structured that how you got the word out but obviously people are paying money on Kickstarter and they're getting the deluxe Founders pack right I would obviously want to be really happy with what I bought so how did you guys design um and decide what to give away in the in the founders pack and how did you guys come to that decision as well yeah this one is really um product decision in a lot of

ways you know it's forcing us to think about what types of content bundles will appeal to players when we launch the game um and so it was useful to get our heads in that space um you know motivated first by this Kickstarter uh we have a finance and monetization person named Howard Zing who put a lot of effort into to putting together proposals Gathering feedback from all the internal stakeholders um we we got some external feedback from trusted uh you know folks in the RTS community that we we keep in touch with and yeah eventually settled on on the tears that Cara outlined but it even just architecting that was a lot of thinking and a l iterating to get there yeah I imagine that they might be there could be a lot of friction and also a lot of um just different opinions

about what's right to give um because again at least the way that I would think about it is it's like okay well what if I need this for later or is this going to be worth to the value or is it going to disappoint the community um and it sounds like you guys in addition to the deluxe Founders pack you had that but you also had the beta access so there was like kind of something there for the people that wanted to play Early versus the people that wanted stuff um which is which is kind of cool um and Carrie you mentioned earlier in the episode that you did spend some time looking at other Kickstarter campaigns so for example obsidian has run some very successful ones in the past did any of your ideas that we've talked about were those influenced by prior research um of other Kickstarter campaigns oh I wish Howard were here to answer this yes it was Howard was constantly bringing examples um to the table of of what other people were doing and I will tell you you know funnily

enough I was sitting next at dinner next to some obsidian folks the other day and they were talking about Kickstarter campaigns and I was saying that we had not yet done the physical shipping portion of our Kickstarter so we were we're you know we've got that coming up to to to see if we can execute on well and they said to me well you know you are going to be working on that for years years for years you got work they changed their emails they said years later people will come and to you and say well where is my keychain because I bought in at this level and you're going to need to dig out the records and fulfill on that and I thought oh interesting that had not occurred to me that had not occurred to me so yeah I think most of the recent examples of PC games on Kickstarter there there were fewer in more recent times so we kind of had a a

lack of benchmarking so we looked also at a lot of board games their look and feel the emotional appeal um and then I guess now that I think about it I we forgot to mention at the very end of the campaign what what you learn is that almost everybody buys in the first like 36 hours um so you have a surge when you laun when you move from your coming soon page to your actual launch campaign and then it it falls off and it stays quite even and quite low for a long time and then as you reach the end of the 60 days it kicks up again organically people think oh I it's over already and I didn't get a chance to buy so suddenly you see your you know your your rewards buyers up your backers coming in at that last kick up kickstart came to the publishing team and said we actually have an internal team of

experts who do digital media buys and if you can um provide some funding we can provide the expertise to pull together campaigns to help Drive um some extra awareness now we had not set aside anything for any kind of digital media we had purely appealed to our community um so our results were very organic but they did come in at the end I think do remember what we spent Tim was it 20,000 or something like that can't remember um yeah yeah and overnight they produced 30 40 50 pieces of artwork and started shooting out these campaigns and it did give us a little bump at the end so I raised that in case there are others out there who are interested in doing a Kickstarter campaign paid paid media was not our approach it sort of didn't really dovetail with the way we manage our money currently and how we spend um

but could be potentially useful for somebody else doing another campaign interesting yeah well that curve is very funny that reminds me of if I'm closing my eyes and looking at the OverWatch business uh that's exactly what all the OverWatch curves look like too um it's like beginning of Halloween big swoop in the middle end of Halloween um and that's kind of this the the pattern which is uh you know the I guess I wouldn't have suspected that because I guess that was one of my questions was when did you hit certain targets of the total 2.4 million that you raised and it sounds like you made it all fairly early but then you still had that digital media buys at the end to help kick up to help you get um a little bit extra yeah the midle was still kind of steadily trickling um so it still added up in the end but yeah I think uh it was probably half within the first 36 hours um and yeah that other big surge at the end was important too and and Cara raised

something that I think uh is easy to overlook or forget about um in campaigns with physical Goods but you know there is a cost of goods component to this too so it's not like the 2.4 raised is all just um funds available like that uh good portion of that has to go to making statues and boxes and everything else that goes into the physical collector's edition yeah makes sense you're also going to have a working capital problem as well uh so uh one of my uh good friends she's a CEO of a board game company and she's like I didn't sign up to be a CEO to work on working capital but here I am in the board game business working on barding Capital um so um I I guess uh it will I guess it might stay around for a long time as the obsidian guys mentioned and it will be kind of the bane of your accounting team team and your finan team existence for only if only temporarily

um but I want to spend uh the next the last 10 minutes of the conversation kind of talking about you know if you guys were to do it again um and talking about some of the lessons learned the best practices the audience can take away from the actual stor stormgate campaign it sounds like for you guys everything went very positively um people really enjoyed the content you had your community on board um but were you nervous in the beginning maybe and maybe this is to a question of risks um in disappointing the community and uh what would you maybe do differently if you did disappoint anybody in your community this time around yeah I think it it's a constant concern for us um really feeling blessed to have um this fantastic audience of RTS players and and being worried about are we making the right decisions are we um going to live up to the expectations I think that's something we think about every day with all aspects of the game

um I think Cara's role in helping to facilitate communication with um content creators because those guys are so plugged in to the audience um really helped us a lot so I think that was one of the things that went right um you know always along the way we're trying to pay close attention um and trying to be out there um you know reading what's being said in comments and uh on on Reddit and even in the steam forums um you know parsing that and figuring out because oddly enough there are always some critical people on the internet I don't know it's a strange thing but uh you know there there are also positive comments there so figuring out what's true north um and all of that is a very subjective uh difficult determination to make um but

yeah I think paying attention um and sincerely trying to listen is important um and then we didn't talk about stretch goals but the there are all these stretch goals that create incentives um for people to hit the next funding Milestone effectively um so and I think we were a little um you know we had come up with very ideas and we had a little bit of adaptability um on that stuff so some amount of adaptability is important I know car any any thoughts on your side it's interesting you say adaptable you know it's a there's a very experienced group of people here um working on these projects they're very resilient um they're very nice people they have very good values I think all that helps helps us at times of stress but be assured we are always in a mad scramble always in a mad scramble to meet the next marketing

beat to to do the right thing to to fulfill our promises um and things do go wrong in spite of the fact of we did a lot of planning for example for we didn't understand that a certain number of people who signed up on Kickstarter could sign up using their Apple ID which essentially Shields their email from you when they ah more yes and they were numerous it was like 20% of all people who signed up for a reward from us we had no email for them we couldn't fulfill the Rewards or reach out or communicate because they had this toggle turned on in their Apple ID yes so that precipitated a tsunami of support emails which we had not prepared for so it was all Hands-On deck I mean there were six or seven of us answering emails Around

the Clock you know over a very long weekend um again we're very lucky in our community our community grew up with real-time strategy games with Warcraft 3 with Starcraft 2 they're older they're um they're smart um they're snarky they're very funny um they're very proactive so they wrote to us and you know we're scrambling to make good for everybody but I have to tell you these were like the nicest support tickets on the planet like you're sleeping I see you on Twitter you look exhausted you know um make sure everybody's eating well we love what you're doing I mean super nice support tickets but that was that was a mad scramble so if we ever had to do this again or if anyone else out there is watching this and is contemplating doing a Kickstarter Beware of the Apple ID issue oh well this just goes on with the friend of Apple being the everyday villain in the games industry they're just blowing things up left and right

for everyone no one is safe not even a PC PC game bu doing a Kickstarter um well that's a really interesting story as well um I well first it sounds like they at least um you know they were older and they were not reading at you like redditors uh and but how did you guys end up resolving it um they had to reach out to us we posted repeatedly on the site okay um we we have like a Blog that we post a newsletter we push out to them so we kept saying we have this issue please come to us we post it on our Discord um as many ways as we could signal um that we were here and ready to fix that um we would but of course you know everything has an upside the fact that all of us were killing ourselves to answer all these support tickets it was hundreds and hundreds of touch points emotional touch points for the community um so most of the community wrote back and went oh my God I kept leave their answering emails at 3:00 in the morning

in California that's awesome you know you guys are working hard we you know we see you so um yeah it's all part of that relationship honoring that relationship yeah well it sounds like you built a ton of trust with your community and they were also more patient with you because of that um I guess two final questions that I would love to ask you guys one is um will you guys ever run another campaign you know I think um if we do another game someday uh I was really impressed with um the amount of positivity that came out of the kickstarter I think around the industry and even more importantly around the player base there was just a tremendous sense of um people coming together and like validation that real-time strategy um does have an audience that's excited about it um those were really positive

things to come out of it so um yeah I think if we do another game I would be very tempted um and then yeah I guess there's a question of even with stormgate because we we hope that stormgate has a very long future ahead of it um you know there there may be other opportunities to do things physical Goods or um other other offshoots of the game so yeah we'll see terrific um and then another final question is you guys have obviously done this you guys have run one of the most successful Kickstarter campaigns for the video game space in the past you know you know two to two to five years um when should a studio actually think about a Kickstarter campaign um and do you think there's an element of timing to it where um it should only be when you're about to run a beta or you're about to offer something or could it be earlier or later into launch either um should be fine but that your expectations in terms of awareness

should be different if it's early naturally you won't have built up a big mailing list you won't have a big following um that you can Market to um but there is still some virality that's possible at that point um and you know usually if you're early you're doing a Kickstarter um to build awareness and also to you know get get money to to bootstrap um so I think that is a valid approach um obviously our experience was much later into the product cycle and because of that we were able to get a bit more scale but um yeah I I I believe either is okay it's funny before I got on this podcast I was talking to Howard Howard feels was important that the product was far enough along that people bought in and were pleased with what they were saying even though the product is far from being what it will be you know by the time we finish and have an official

launch long after Early Access he felt that it was important that the community that buyers could get in um play the game feel the mechanics like what they saw and talk to their friends about it so that's your take yeah I mean that's super valid um and this is great advice um guys this was such a pleasure I I personally learned so much here about crowd Equity crowd financing um all the different different uh hiccups and hurdles of Kickstarter and I'm super happy for your guys' success in the in the campaign and I look forward to you guys uh delivering those keychains to everybody um so um that's the top of our episode and thank you so much for guys for coming on um if anybody wanted to reach out to you um maybe there's someone here listening that realized that they signed up with their Apple ID and they have it reached out to you um how can they do so support atr.com there are six of us

that receive that email one of us will get you yeah that's the best way for support stuff um and yeah otherwise um I'm I'm on LinkedIn and uh I don't know if Cara has a a social channel that she follows to you car um I I answer my LinkedIn messages every day so yeah LinkedIn is a good way but I I did want to say you know thank you to you for having us on but also just thanks to everybody who participated in the kickstarter the indigogo the start engine for frost giant it really has made a huge difference for us as a team to have that support and we are deeply grateful yeah I'm sure there are some people I know there are definitely some people who will listen to this episode that have that are part of your campaign so um on behalf of them I guess I'll say thank you um but this is awesome guys

again so it looks like if you need support support at Frost giant.com or hit these guys up on LinkedIn um but as always if you have feedback or comments um you can hit me up at Alexander nvic.org [Music] the fivestar review and if you want to reach out or provide feedback shoot us a note at podcast nov. or find us on Twitter and Linkedin plus if you want to learn more about what navic has to offer make sure to check out our website www.nic.edu and advisory Services again that is www.nic.edu listening and we'll catch you in the next episode