Do It Yourself or Outsource: The Master List

After running Stonemaier Games for the last 10 years, I’ve learned two crucial things: (a) that time is my most valuable resource and (b) that for any given area of expertise, there’s someone out there who is more talented, faster, and better equipped than me. As a result, my job has evolved to be mostly about project management.

Even after 10 years, the question of how much–and exactly when–to outsource versus doing it myself (or internally among my coworkers) is always on the table.

To help answer that question, I invited Andrew Lowen of Next Level Web and the Crowdfunding Nerds Podcast to share his thoughts on various areas of outsourcing for creators to consider. It’s a long article that Andrew put a lot of effort into, and I hope you find it useful. I’ll chime in at the end of each section to share whether or not Stonemaier Games outsources that specific element.

Disclaimer: I have not personally worked with Next Level Web and cannot vouch for their services. As with any paid service–including those mentioned in this post–please first do your research and talk to others who have worked with the person/organization. The goal of this post is purely to offer information to other creators about outsourcing. 

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This article introduces how you can outsource work and provides first-hand recommendations to help you effectively outsource. There is also a Crowdfunding Nerds podcast episode we produced on this topic just for you!

It all comes down to having an amazing product, demonstrating its awesomeness, and making sure lots of people know that your product exists when you launch. It is as confoundingly complicated and supremely simple as that!

That’s easier said than done, but it doesn’t all have to be done yourself. It takes a team to bring a board game to life in most cases! And in the minority of cases where a person has the talent, time, and knowledge to solo this effort, it is still not advisable.

To quickly introduce myself, I run Next Level Web and am the host of the Crowdfunding Nerds Podcast. I’ve marketed over 100 board game Kickstarter and Gamefound campaigns in the last two years, helping to raise over $8M for creators. Ninety-five percent of our campaigns fund, and most of those fund on launch day.

Framing The Topic

Many of our clients are first-time publishers with a passion project and a dream to see it become a reality. Others are established companies looking to put an exclamation upon the campaign for the awesome IP they acquired. 

Regardless of the level you’re playing at, there are standards that backers expect to see if you want to be successful on Kickstarter, Gamefound, or Backerkit.

I run a marketing agency, but I’m a board game publisher, too. So for those concerned, this article isn’t just about marketing! 

It is about:

• Business Tasks
• Game Design
• Game Development
• Art (Graphic Design, etc.)
• Paid Advertising
• Email Marketing
• Web Design
• Consulting 
• Videos & GIFs
• Logistics & Fulfillment
• Playthroughs
• Social Media Engagement
• Convention Attendance
• Reviews
• Playtesting
• Accounting

Let’s dive in!

Business

There are a few creators that should immediately disqualify themselves from going the self-publishing route for their game. Jamey covered this beautifully in his KS Lesson #275 (Self Publishing vs. Working with a Publisher). 

In our initial consultations, we qualify our clients to be sure they’re prepared for what is ahead. If you’re not ready to run a business, don’t self-publish! If you’re going to run a business, you should be prepared to do all the associated business-related tasks!

The only way I have seen “outsourcing” business-related responsibilities work is to bring on a business partner to do these things. Regardless, I still find it necessary that both partners in a small business should be willing to divide tasks and wear multiple hats. If you self-publish with partners, you’re a small business, and you’ll have to act like it!

For some people, the question is, “Should I run my own crowdfunding campaign or hire someone else to do it for me?” If you’re even asking that question, I think it’s probably an indicator that either (a) you just want to focus on game design and should consider submitting your game to a publisher instead of self-publishing or (b) you need a business partner with equity in your company who feels strongly about what you’re trying to create. Overall, I believe that crowdfunding projects have the greatest chance of success if the crowdfunder is the same person as the creator, and I would not recommend outsourcing the campaign itself to anyone else. It’s almost like saying that you want to be an Olympic sprinter but you don’t like running. It’s okay if you don’t want to run a business; if so, don’t self-publish.]

Game Design

Many of our clients are publishers that outsource game design. For example, one of our clients, Kirk Dennison of Piecekeeper Games, published Rurik: Dawn of Kiev and an expansion called Rurik: Stone & Blade, which were both designed by Stanislav Kordonskiy. We’ve had more than a few small publishers as clients that brought another designer’s game to Kickstarter.

I think this is a great practice to adopt by a publishing company in the long run. As you grow your publishing business, it becomes clearer that you can’t do everything – as a result, designing games is one of the most common things for a publisher to outsource!

Joe Slack is a game designer and publisher who takes a hybrid approach to game design and would be worth considering. 

Game Development

We often see publishers take game submissions and then do intensive development work to make them ready for crowdfunding. Wingspan comes to mind as a game that evolved quite a bit from the original prototype due to Jamey’s development work (and Elizabeth’s commitment to iterative design and playtesting).

The advantage of doing your own development work internally as a publisher is that you become intimately familiar with the interactions of your game. You may elect to outsource this work, or portions of it, to a third-party vendor like Brieger Creative that specializes in this. 

You’ll have to pay for this, which you’ll see is a common thread among outsourcing work to others, but you might appreciate the time saving and expertise service that this affords you!

How does this relate to Kickstarter? First, your backers need to see evidence of a clearly well-tested game, and beyond that, they need to feel it when they play your game after you deliver!

Editing & Proofreading

This is an element of game development that really deserves its own section. It always pays to have professional editors like Ian Tyrrell or Dustin Schwartz take a look at your game! 

While you may elect to save cost and do this yourself, the rulebook is often one of the biggest culprits for great-looking games earning less than they should on Kickstarter. 

Educated Kickstarter backers actively look for the rulebook, and they will often judge the quality of what they see based on your rules.

Art & Graphic Design

This is one of the most common services to outsource. Unless you have expertise in art creation or graphic design, you’ll need help here. 

This involves more than just your board game assets – the design of your Kickstarter page is of great significance to your funding amount!

As a marketing company, we reject more client requests for service due to poor art or graphic design than all other reasons combined. If your game doesn’t have high-quality art and great graphic design, it’s not going to do well on Kickstarter.

One of the best ways to save cost here is to familiarize yourself with a program like Photoshop, Gimp, or InDesign. Your graphic designer can provide you with a page layout, for example, and you can spend the time developing the page. 

For my own campaign, Deliverance, this was essential to my survival! My graphic artist, Chip Cole, had to leave on vacation a week before my KS was supposed to launch. Thankfully, he provided me with the layered Photoshop files I needed to finish the Kickstarter page, and we went on to raise $314K for our first campaign.

I highly recommend you develop some skill in this area – you should ask your graphic artist for help navigating the files they send your way! You might eventually grow to a place where you don’t need to get in and adjust files, but developing an understanding to be useful will really complement your publishing company (and save you a TON of $$$)!

Paid Advertising

We recently did a survey for our own Deliverance campaign and asked our audience how they heard about the game.

Through Facebook ads alone, 19.8% found out about Deliverance- that’s the highest metric outside of Kickstarter itself.

Paid ads are a must for Kickstarter as we have discovered from reviewing multiple successful projects that for every 6 backers you find Kickstarter’s algorithm will bring in 2-4. 

If you are willing to do a lot of research to discover how to optimize your ads, spend a lot of money failing to figure out what works, and devote the time and attention it needs to maintain your ad spend, then, by all means, do it yourself. This could be a very useful life skill that you can leverage moving forward for other campaigns. You also won’t have the wool pulled over your eyes so easily by marketers with bad faith.

However, there will come a time when you will have to outsource your advertising campaign because you simply won’t have enough bandwidth to give it your full attention.

Outsourcing your ads to an agency such as ourselves has many advantages:

• We know how to optimize campaigns and ad spend out the gate, making your advertising spend go further faster.
• We know how to diagnose issues and make meaningful adjustments to improve results.
• We are very experienced with troubleshooting and interfacing with Facebook and Google should something go wrong.
• We can leverage data points from other board game Facebook pages that could aid your campaign.
• We allow you to spend your time and energy on areas of your campaign that only you can do, such as developing relationships with your community and fans.

The bottom line is that you need a way to drive awareness of your project. Self-publishers will often work through Facebook groups, reviewers, and conventions to build awareness. Still, often this isn’t enough for a newer publisher to get a game funded on its own.

When used properly, paid ads can make the difference between funding and failure.

We recommend a strong two month pre-launch advertising campaign that captures emails and drives people into your community.

Email Marketing

For prospective clients that come to us for consultation, I go through the virtuous cycle concept. First, we need the landing page, a Facebook group, or Discord community, and most significantly, we need that all-important email list, which brings us to email marketing.

With email marketing, you really need to inform your audience about what you do. So for us, the email list is something that you should build. It’s the most important asset you have as a company because it allows you to win the right to communicate with your fans across multiple mediums.

Once this foundation is placed, outsourcing email marketing really allows you, the creator, to invest your time in more productive activities and move the needle. It’s one less thing for you to think about.

Another advantage of capturing emails before launching is that it gives you the ability to poll your fans and really custom-tailor the Kickstarter experience to their expectations!

Web Design

Another thing that I would highly recommend is outsourcing web development. We stopped our clients from developing their own web landing pages because there were always problems that negatively impacted their advertising campaigns. 

Things to be aware of are:

• Page load speeds
• Your ability to customize the page to maximize results 
• Facebook Pixel integration (not all systems work well with Facebook’s Pixel & API)

What could take you months to diagnose and fix can take a professional team a week or a few days to complete! 

Outsourcing web development to people who know how to design a landing page for a board game and have tried-and-tested methods can be highly effective for your campaign!

Consulting 

A consultant will provide immense help in your campaign, particularly in areas that are tricky to navigate, like manufacturing, shipping, and fulfillment. 

Finding good consultants in manufacturing and logistics can really help save time and costs. For example, a manufacturer will do their best to quote accurately and give you suggestions. They’ll ask good questions, but they won’t really optimize your quote. They don’t understand how your game works, what components are there, and why. But a good consultant with experience in manufacturing and game design can advise you in this process. In this area, I personally have really benefited from consultants.

Videos & GIFs

Good-quality videos and GIFs are integral for marketing your game. You can use them throughout your marketing and then specifically on your Kickstarter page, and even in other digital assets, like a rulebook!

For your Kickstarter video, you should really seek out a third-party company. Mesa Game Lab is our go-to referral for things like Kickstarter videos and GIFs. 

Check out our detailed outline of different types of video marketing you can do for your Kickstarter here, and make sure to listen to our interview with Mesa Game Lab!

Should you decide to take this on yourself, Ori of Kagan Productions has put together a super Blender kit with tutorials!

Logistics & Fulfillment

As a marketing agency, one of the first things we’ll ask a creator about is their manufacturing and their shipping. Unfortunately, they haven’t figured these things out a lot of the time. 

Logistics and fulfillment are essential elements you should look into from the outset. Different organizations cover different areas, so make sure you find companies based on referrals. 

Utilize social media, like Facebook groups, to get a good list of manufacturing recommendations, or, like we suggested above, arrange a consultation with veterans like Kirk Dennison of Piecekeeper Games or board game designer Jonathan Gilmour. 

Getting these things right is crucial, and we’ve covered these topics on Crowdfunding Nerds to help you navigate this area, like our interview with Nigel Matthews of Shipquest, and our podcast on the major Kickstarter mistakes you need to learn from. Make sure to check those out!

Playthroughs

In my experience, playthroughs answer two vital questions:

1. Will the game be fun?
2. What are the mechanics of the game like in action?

Playthroughs help you see the types of decisions that other players can make in your game and see the different paths to victory or failure.

You can get your A-list reviewer to do your playthrough video in a really fun and engaging way for the audience, as oftentimes reviewers are entertainers and have big personalities.

Listen to our podcast on hygiene factors for your Kickstarter campaign to learn more!

Social Media Engagement

One of the ultimate end goals of outsourcing tasks for your campaign is to leave you with time to engage with your community. We can’t stress enough how important this is! Our clients come to us to market their games because marketing aims to allow creators to get people into their lounge and talk to them there. 

This serves a dual purpose- it strengthens your community, and feeds the virtuous cycle that we spoke about earlier, where you can continually capture emails and send people to your landing page and to your communities. 

You need to be the leading presence that reaches out to your fans. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t outsource some social media engagement. 

Another way to outsource social media engagement would be to simply reach into your community and ask fans to be admins on your groups, strengthening those ties within your community while saving you time!

Convention Attendance

Convention attendance is very similar to community engagement. You get to build your fanbase and create more excitement over your product, and you can gain more email subscribers. 

Although ideally, convention attendance is something you do yourself, at least in part, we know that there are times when it’s not practical. You can outsource certain companies that can represent you at conventions and play your games. 

Or, if you’ve worked on building your email list and generating fans that you talk to in your Facebook community, you can invite them to help you and volunteer their time to run your booth with you.

I can’t emphasize enough, however, how important it is to be on the ground yourself at these events if at all possible. You’ll get to know and understand your target market and see what they think is cool- often, it will be different from what you were expecting. 

The benefit will bleed into so many aspects of your campaign, from Facebook ads to videos and playthroughs, where you’ll be able to talk about your experiences at these events and what players’ feedback was. All of this really helps solidify your game design and build your community.

Reviews

You definitely need at least one high-quality, third-party reviewer to cover your game. This comes back to the hygiene factors mentioned earlier. It will hurt you if you don’t have something like that. 

Thankfully, there are many great reviewers with a solid following to choose from, like Dice Tower or ManVsMeeple. Of course, this costs money, but it will be a good investment. 

Some reviewers will give feedback and inject their opinion, and others will just explain the game and the components, but they will all explain how the game works for the audience and let their viewers decide what they think about your game. Their goal is often to inform rather than to persuade.

Accounting 

One thing that should be outsourced is the taxes, so you should really consider hiring an accountant. 

When it comes to bookkeeping, you should be very intentional in recording your numbers as a business. You might think this doesn’t really matter for now and that you can just keep track of what you’re spending in the bank account, but that will not work out well for your business in the long run. 

Keeping tabs on every aspect of your campaign financially will get very complicated, with different expenses coming out at different times. 

The type of accounting you do for your Kickstarter campaign can really impact how much money you make at the end once Kickstarter has taken its pound of flesh in fees! 

Accrual-based accounting makes it so that you don’t get taxed a crazy amount, plus you get to factor in the manufacturing costs, shipping, freight, and fulfillment costs before you actually have your tax bill. This is a huge deal when crowdfunding and making large amounts of money in one year.

Manufacturing bills don’t come until the following year, and fulfillment and shipping expenses may not come out until the next year or maybe even the year after that. The accrual-based accounting allows you to record revenue as you record expenses- you’ll be glad you outsourced this!

Questions?

Let me know in the comments below if you have any questions or if you want a clarification and I’ll personally respond!

At Crowdfunding Nerds, we put together a Kickstarter Success Calculator to help creators work out their potential return on ad spend for their board game Kickstarter, make sure to check it out!

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Wow, that was incredible, Andrew! Thank you so much for putting together such a detailed list. I’m curious to hear what others think in the comments below.

If you gain value from the 100 articles Jamey publishes on this blog each year, please consider championing this content! You can also listen to posts like this in the audio version of the blog.

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