First and foremost, thank you so much for reading the Stonemaier Games Kickstarter Lessons blog. I write this blog to share my crowdfunding mistakes, insights, and ideas with other creators in the hopes of leveling up the crowdfunding ecosystem as a whole, but it wouldn’t continue exist without a readership. The website has received over […]
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Today I read two articles that really moved me. The first is by Sam Coster, a St. Louis-based video game developer (Butterscotch Shenanigans). The Polygon article, “Making a Game While Recovering from Cancer,” is about what the title suggests: Sam actually suffered through multiple bouts of life-threatening cancer, and he designed his company’s newest game, […]
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A long-time reader of this blog successfully ran his first Kickstarter campaign earlier this year, and he kindly offered to share a behind-the-scenes look at the things he’s proud of and the things he’ll do differently next time. Thank you, Artem, for taking the time to write this! *** Hi! My name is Artem and […]
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Do you even see banner ads when you browse the internet? Or have you trained yourself over time to blur them out and only focus on the content you’re there to consume? That’s pretty much how I am, with one exception: When I use BoardGameGeek, I’m very interested in the banner ads. Most of them, that is. […]
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Recently I engaged in several discussions on the Facebook Kickstarter Best Practices group about refunding individual backers. I’m going to combine a few quick thoughts on this topic before I update our money-back guarantee stats as I’ve done for our previous projects. How Refunds Work on Kickstarter I contacted Kickstarter last week to figure out […]
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Yesterday I launched Stonemaier Games’ annual charity auction, which is on pace to raise about $4,000 for 10 different charities. On the same day, I turned down two requests from very nice bloggers who asked me to contribute something to their charity giveaway. Why give to some and not to others? Why should a for-profit business like […]
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One of the hardest questions a creator must answer during a struggling or failing crowdfunding campaign is: Do people simply not want this, or do people want it, but my presentation isn’t good enough? On this blog I talk a lot about successful crowdfunding campaigns. Today I have something different: A guest post from a creator […]
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I’ve learned that it never hurts to thank someone. In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I was hoping to write a blog post expressing my gratitude for various types of people who have had a positive impact on me and Stonemaier Games. However, I have a responsibility to my readers–I don’t want to just spew off […]
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You’re in the middle of running a crowdfunding project. Things are going well–you haven’t quite reached your funding goal, but you’re getting close. Then, out of nowhere, someone says some truly horrible things about you on the main comments thread. You refute the claims, but the damage has been done, and you lose some backers […]
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As I hinted at earlier this week on my post about the mistakes I made on the Scythe Kickstarter, today’s entry is all about the data. I’ve written posts like this for each of my Kickstarter campaigns. The intent of these posts is to give other project creators a more detailed, behind-the-scenes look at our data […]
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