A few months ago, I started filming short videos for The Dice Tower’s “Crowd Surfing” series. I talk for 2-3 minutes about a specific segment of crowdfunding with the intent of distilling several KS lesson articles into the most important information, usually with board game angle. I wanted to make these videos more easily accessible […]
I was a little lucky in the various jobs I had before I built Stonemaier Games on the back of Kickstarter, as they each helped me practice being a crowdfunder before I actually was one: I learned customer service by working as a waiter for two summers in college. I learned project management at a medical book publishing company […]
Two years ago I received something in my inbox that has been an inspiration for advice that I’ve given to dozens of people. Here’s what I received: Pretty cool, eh? Here’s the twist: This image is a stylized collage by Pawel Niziolek created as an homage to Scythe artist and worldbuilder Jakub Rozalski. A few weeks after […]
I had the pleasure of chatting with Denny Weston at Gen Con 2016 about a game he was preparing for Kickstarter. It was no ordinary game; rather, it was a lawn game for which Denny had extensively researched and tested the components. He asked me a key question about high-cost products that I couldn’t answer, […]
In this series, I highlight some of the interesting choices made by creators regarding their project’s reward levels, stretch goals, and overall campaign design (the projects themselves, not the content or product). This isn’t an endorsement or promotion. Who Goes There? It’s become a best practice for a board game Kickstarter campaign to include a gameplay video on the […]
A little over a year ago, I wrote a post about using Stripe Atlas to set up a US-based company. This post was primarily aimed at non-US creators who wanted to run a US-currency Kickstarter campaign. This is no longer quite as important as it once was, as Kickstarter is now available to creators in […]
Have you ever accepted pre-orders via PayPal? Are you currently doing so? You may be at risk for a funding freeze. Over the last year, there have been several notable instances in the gaming industry where a publisher accepted a significant number of pre-orders via PayPal, only to see those funds frozen until after they […]
A few months ago I saw an interesting thread on a tabletop game Kickstarter Facebook group about a service called InDemand. One of the commenters, Vojkan Krstevski at Final Frontier Games, had experience using InDemand to collect pre-orders after both of his Kickstarter campaigns. He had some interesting data to share, so I invited him to […]
The publisher of my crowdfunding book is having a big sale this week, and it got me thinking about marketing. My techniques for marketing Stonemaier Games have changed over times, so what do they look like now, particularly since we no longer use Kickstarter? I remembered that I had touched up on this topic in […]
“Jamey Stegmaier is an asshole. I’ll never buy anything from Stonemaier Games.” I’ve seen a few people say this over the years on social media, and it stings every time. It stings that someone perceives me that way or that I may have acted in such a way to deserve those harsh words. It’s not […]
