You have a pen. I don’t. Sell me this pen. This is a classic job interview question, especially for sales positions. How would you answer? Quartz recently featured the preferred answer according to hiring manager Mike Hillyer. Here’s his example, which involves a toaster, not a pen: If I ask you to sell me a […]
Every now and then I read an article about a Kickstarter project that goes wrong. These stories seem to get way more attention than all of the other projects that are fulfill rewards largely without a hitch. Perhaps the headline, “Project Creator Does What They Promised to Do” isn’t as sexy as a Kickstarter fail. […]
On Saturday I had an amazing lunch at a new fried chicken restaurant in St. Louis called Southern. Southern shares a building–and even a hallway for the long lines it attracts–with a very popular barbecue restaurant, Pappy’s. After I finished my meal at Southern, I stood in the lobby of Southern while I waited for one […]
Last year I wrote a post called “An Open Letter to New Reviewers of Board Games from a Tiny Publishing Company.” The primary focus of it was to give reviewers a guidepost for when it’s appropriate to request free review copies and how to get to that point. Recently, one of the head writers for GeekDad, Dave Banks, […]
[UPDATE: To date I haven’t heard of anyone successfully using the method described in the following article. Stripe Atlas doesn’t provide you with a US address or SSN, both of which Kickstarter requires for US creators.] I’ve gotten a number of requests lately from non-US creators asking me to write about IF they should try […]
In 2012, early in the design process for Viticulture, I started looking into how we would manufacture the game. I explored bespoke options, US manufacturing, and Chinese manufacturing. The latter was the most daunting to me, as it seemed an insurmountable task to coordinate with several different factories halfway across the world in a language […]
In this series, I highlight some of the interesting choices current crowdfunders have made regarding their project’s reward levels, stretch goals, and overall campaign design (the projects themselves, not the content or product). This isn’t meant as an endorsement of these projects (these creators did not ask for me to promote their work–I disregard all such requests); rather, […]
One of my favorite things about crowfunding is gauging demand before production begins. Before Kickstarter, manufacturers had to make educated guesses about how many units to make in the first print run of a product. If you make too few, you lose the opportunity to maximize sales while the product is hot. If you make too […]
“Free” is a powerful word. It can lower barriers to entry–you’ve experienced the power of the words “free shipping,” “buy one get one free,” or “free upgrade with purchase.” Free gives us permission to say yes. But it can also be quite damaging to a brand. As behavioral psychologist Dan Ariely talks about in this […]
A few days ago I got into a debate with some friends about a specific reward level. The project in question was Too Many Bones, a nice-looking dice game on Kickstarter. The project features a $450 reward (limited to 10 backers) that gives backers a copy of Too Many Bones and every future game the company […]
