Is Old School Crowdfunding Still Possible?

I’ve featured some incredible stories from other creators on this blog, but today’s may top them all. It almost defies explanation, yet the creator has a detailed explanation that checks out.

Today’s story is of a creator who launched a game that had almost no following before the launch…yet it ended up raising over $100k. While this strategy of purposely not building an audience in advance isn’t something I’d advocate, Philipp’s post may give hope to those who are hesitant to invest heavily in a game before you know whether or not it will successfully fund.

Here’s Philipp:

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My main intention in creating games was to play them myself with my friends. However, when I developed “Trench Club”, I felt I was on to something. The game just worked really well. We played it often and every iteration made it better, until it reached a point where it felt finished. That’s when I thought about making it accessible to more players and decided to create a Kickstarter campaign.

However, it turned out that I ran my campaign in a very unusual way – especially in hindsight. I wanted to run the campaign the “old school” way – how (at least I thought) Kickstarter was meant to be. I wanted to present my idea, gauge interest and demand, and get funding to realize it. I did not want to invest too much time or money upfront, when I did not even know if anyone except myself would like the game.

I had NOT built a community before launch and I had NOT spend a ton of money on building nice prototypes or on Facebook ads to build a pre-launch community. I also had NOT spent a ton of time on social media trying to promote my game. Nevertheless, the campaign was more successful than I ever expected (>$100k/>400% funding, ~1000 backers).

Why did I do it that way? Well, first of all, I really did not know if it was worth it. I spent all my energy in the game development. My primary passion was to develop a great game and not to sell it. I wanted to use Kickstarter mainly to find out if anyone would be interested in my product BEFORE I invested a lot. I would give it a try and walk away with zero loss if it didn’t fund. It was an experiment.

The second reason was that I never really understood why building a community before the launch would be more cost-efficient than building it during the campaign. You have to get people to see your ads, direct interested customers to your landing page, have them sign up on a mailing list and then when the campaign launches activate them to actually back the campaign. In each of the steps you will lose some customers. If I only have a limited budget, why would I spend it before the campaign and have additional conversion churn?

So my pre-launch marketing was limited to only 1 weekend at a local board game convention. I hand-collected a bunch of email addresses of interested folks literally on a sheet of paper. I also sent a couple of quite rough prototypes to a few (free) previewers. I have not orchestrated the publication of these reviews towards the launch date, so everyone published when they were ready. They kindly included a link to my landing page with a newsletter signup form.

When I launched the campaign, I had 340 emails on my mailing list and 210 signups on Kickstarter (mostly overlapping with my email list). My Facebook page had 24 followers. I am getting shivers as I write this thinking about how naïve I was. But don’t forget: It was really not about making money, but just testing the appetite for my game.

My campaign started as slowly as you would expect, but it funded after around 1 week:

So where did the backers come from? Let me start with saying that this requires some guesswork. It is very hard to track back where backers originally came from. They might have seen a Facebook ad and got hooked but actually backed later via searching on Kickstarter. That would most likely show up as an organic Kickstarter customer. My first backers came from my mailing list: The hand-scribbled list from the board game fair had a very high conversion. This is a good reminder that not every lead has the same value. Someone I talked to in person on the fair and who could physically see my prototype converted much better than someone who saw an ad on Facebook.

When I reached my funding goal of $20k after one week I was thrilled that I would really be able to produce this. With the additional funding I collected, I started spending some of it on Facebook and BGG ads. I only spent some of what I had actually earned during the campaign. That gave my funding curve an unusual shape. It looks pretty linear, not the typical S-Curve. You can see funding increases as the word spread about my game. Funding accelerated in the last few days, as the advertising kicked in that I had “earned” during the campaign.

There was also some traffic coming from the reviewer channels. Most of them posted on social media referring to their earlier review when the campaign launched. As the campaign progressed, I also started classic advertising methods. I assigned every Facebook ad a unique URL so I could track (manually) their conversion in the Kickstarter dashboard. I sat down every evening comparing the Facebook spend (in the Facebook ads manager) with the pledges coming from this ad (on the Kickstarter dashboard) and changed the ads that did not “pay for themselves”. You can see that the share of customers coming from external increases during the course of the campaign. In total, I invested about $1000 in Facebook ads and $1000 BGG ads, which I could track back to at least 5x the pledges (I took a 20% ad spend as my guideline to determine they “paid for themselves “). Please keep in mind that these ads probably were the root cause for some pledges that show up as organic from Kickstarter as well.

I gave the prediction algorithms a pretty hard time forecasting my campaign:

I also did most of my community-building and -engagement only during the campaign. I grew an incredible community who helped improve the game, provided feedback, helped me with translations, I got in touch with a solo rules developer, etc. I met really fantastic people who helped me bring the game to another level.

This is my story of running a campaign in an unusual way. Would I do it again this way? It depends. If I am out for a big commercial success: no. If I am an indie developer getting started and wanting to test if anyone is interested at all in what I am creating? Then absolutely yes. And I am very glad Kickstarter can still work the way it was originally designed.

For me and my game this was a very important part of the journey. I learned a lot about board game design and even more so about online marketing and game manufacturing – all in a relatively risk-free environment, one step at a time. With the amazing community that built up during the campaign and with the many actual players after the campaign, I was able to improve the game and launch a new version. With everything I have learned and with some confidence now, that there are people enjoying this game, I have invested a lot more upfront in advertising to start the campaign with some momentum. I am very curious how it will turn out and more though, how I will reflect about today’s situation in a couple of years from now. Here is the link to the new campaign:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/trench-club/trench-club-legacy

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I’m truly happy for Philipp that he followed his passion and discovered that thousands of people shared it with him. I really enjoyed learning about what he did and didn’t do, and the one bit of commentary I’d add is that there are many ways to build a crowd before launching without spending a cent (see some links below).

• 10 Daily Actions to Build Your Crowd
• Kickstarter Lesson #86: Preventing a Dud
• Top 5 Things to Know About Content Marketing
• Top 10 Ways to Be a Likable Content Creator
• Kickstarter Lesson #146: Start an E-Newsletter
• Kickstarter Lesson #250: What Motivates People to Subscribe to an E-Newsletter?
• Kickstarter Lesson #94: The Top 10 Ways to Survive and Thrive on Board Game Geek
• Kickstarter Lesson #230: Is Your Crowd Big Enough?
• Kickstarter Lesson #242: How I Run Our Facebook Groups
• How Do You Typically Discover New Crowdfunding and Preorder Campaigns?

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