Kickstarter Lesson #36: For Better or for Worse – Stonemaier Games

Kickstarter Lesson #36: For Better or for Worse

The second your project ends, one of two things will happen:

  1. Your project will reach or exceed the funding goal.
  2. Your project will not reach the funding goal.

Obviously the hope is that your project will fall into the first category. But it might not. So let’s first look at what you should do if you don’t reach that goal.

Note that I’m avoiding using the word “fail.” The word isn’t entirely inaccurate; after all, one of your goals was to fund the project, and you did not achieve that goal, so you failed.

But that’s just one of many goals you might have. In fact, if you go into a Kickstarter project with “making money” as your one and only goal, there’s a decent chance you will fail. Consider these additional goals:

  1. Connect and interact with strangers who have never heard of you or your product.
  2. Learn how to market and promote yourself and your product.
  3. Learn what works and doesn’t work on Kickstarter.
  4. Establish yourself as a competent, communicative, trustworthy project creator.

You might have other goals–add them to the list. The point is that even though you may not reach your funding goal, Kickstarter is a learning experience if you’re open to the possibility that you don’t know everything about everything.

So if you don’t reach your funding goal, make sure that you follow through on your other goals post-campaign. I know one project creator who reached 50% funding on her young-adult novel project. When her project ended, she sent individual e-mails to each of the 100+ people who backed her project to thank them one by one for being a part of her dream. She pledged to keep writing and to stay in touch.

Failing sucks, but people can relate to it. We’ve all failed at something. If your project fails, send out a big update a few days later to reflect on what you learned. Share your gratitude for your backer support and show them what you gained from the experience. There might be future project creators among those backers–tell them where you stumbled so they don’t have to.

Also, the great thing about Kickstarter is that you can continue to update backers of failed projects. So if you re-launch a similar project in the future, you can tell all of your previous backers to check out version 2.0.

Of course, all of this still applies if you reach your funding goal. Don’t make it all about the money. The money is good–it means you can follow through on your dream and your promises–but let backers know that you’re going to continue to treat them as individuals, not numbers.

This means you’re going to be human with them. You’re going to share your passion, excitement, and successes as you go down the path of production, but it also means that you’re going to share your failures, mistakes, and unforeseen barriers. Bad news is better than no news.

Don’t be incessant with your project updates–go with one every week or so after the project, and then move to one every 4-5 weeks. Keep a notepad of non-urgent news, and when you have really big news, put that at the top of a longer update. If you have an update for a specific subset of backers, e-mail those backers, not everyone. Backers will tune you out if you fill their inbox with news that doesn’t apply to them.

Finally, don’t tell backers the product will ship. Tell them when it has already shipped. Like most of my Kickstarter Lessons, I learned this the hard way many times. The point is that as much as you can speculate about future progress, the only real progress is that which has already happened. Don’t give your backers false hope. Keep them in the loop, but don’t tell them to expect anything until you know for sure.

Next: Conventions and Face Time

12 Comments on “Kickstarter Lesson #36: For Better or for Worse

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  1. Following a few sub-optimal interactions with KS founders, the following points crystallised for me. Interested to read any feedback.

    Crisis Comms: The Plan
    An action checklist for when the ‘fit hits the shan’
    (TL;DR Skip to the apology at the end for the simplified version …)

    You’re in trouble because you or your organisation did something bad to a lot of people (and you got caught).

    Maybe it was unintentional, unavoidable or just poorly communicated but it’s done and very many important people—your customers, partners, collaborators or neighbours—are disappointed, angry or even threatening legal action. Before you curl up into a ball and rock back and forth in a corner, circle the wagons or call in the lawyers … take a deep breath.

    You did this. So you can fix it.

    The first step is to understand that you betrayed a significant number of people who relied on and believed in you.

    Did that electric bolt that coursed through your brain stem on reading that sentence give you tingles? Good, that’s realisation and empathy kicking in.

    It is now up to you to restore people’s trust and faith in you.

    Understand that the broader community also has an interest and that regulators, lawmakers and influencers could play a role or step in.

    But, for now, you must address the people you directly affected. So start the long haul to restore their trust in you by writing “The Plan”. NB this approach applies to a crisis at ‘scale’; individuals may have their own, unique problems with you—and elements of the Plan may help—but that’s a specific customer challenge to meet outside the scope of this discussion. Of course, the first inkling of a wider or systemic problem tends to spring from one or two sources—who may even be inside your organisation—so listen for the early bells of a mounting crisis and you may even win points because you got ahead of it.

    So when your actions spark a furore with a big and noisy audience, start with these three steps …

    1. Don’t lie
    2. Don’t lie
    3. Don’t lie.

    Lying means any form of deception including but not limited to spin, excuses, blame-shifting, dissembling, ghosting, gaslighting, twisting or concealing relevant facts or behaving in any way that obscures the situation. You only get one shot at restoring trust, don’t screw it up.

    Next, set in motion these 10 steps to make good on your commitment to restore trust …

    1. Never blame the victim or minimise their feelings; empathetically acknowledge they are entitled to their perspectiive and never centre yourself or your organisation in the story
    2. Take full and public ownership of the problem you or your organisation created (just say, “Sorry” — see note below)
    3. Explain simply & crisply how you messed up, how and by when you will fix it
    4. Publish frequent updates at predictable intervals about how you’re repairing the situation (DO NOT hunker down, ignore emails, fail to pick up the phone or go into hiding)
    5. Answer any and all questions calmly, respectfully and clearly while transparently detailing what you know, when you knew it and what you are doing or will do to fix it
    6. Ask people affected how you can make amends, champion their realistic ideas while acknowledging and thanking them for all suggestions (and, if any aren’t feasible right now, explain why)
    7. Offer restitution like financial compensation (even full, no-questions-asked refunds), or non-financial recognition of the inconvenience, cost and pain you inflicted
    8. Provide support services, inform people of their legal rights and direct them to third-party and trusted information
    9. Invite people to contact you with their concerns, however big or small (“Have an open line and an open mind”, see the point at the start about whether it’s a crisis at scale)
    10. Stick to the Plan especially when it gets uncomfortable for you because that means it’s working (Pro tip: it will get uncomfortable).

    And if you can’t do all that up front, start out by just saying …

    “We’re sorry. We messed up, and we know it. You have no reason right now to believe us but we’re going all-out to win back your trust. Meantime, we’ll do all we can to help you. Tell us what you need. And we’ll learn from this to do better in future. We are here for you.”

    Say it and MEAN IT!

    — Thanks to Jamey Stegmaier for his insight on identifying a crisis at scale.

  2. It is my understanding that before you launch a kickstarter, you have two options to get your game into the market,

    Option A: Plow forward. Launch the kickstarter and found the business, a la every article on this blog (for which I cannot thank you enough).

    Option B: Hand your game off to a publisher and let them take it from here (assuming you’ve got a decent, thoroughly playtested game).

    Is it true that these options are mutually exclusive? Obviously, I can’t kickstart a game I just signed with a publisher, but what if I choose A and fail to fund? I’ve heard failing to fund is basically a kiss of death and no publisher will touch your game at that point. Does the moment I choose option A mean option B is no longer available to me?

    1. Kevin: For the most part, I think what you say here is true. There are a few instances of failed and successful Kickstarter projects being picked up by publishers, but it’s pretty rare.

  3. When Is It Okay to Sell a Kickstarted Product Before Backers Receive It? (KS Lesson #267) – Stonemaier Games says:

    […] For Better or for Worse […]

  4. […] For me, the Theo Chocolate tour was a great reminder of the impact of sharing behind-the-scenes information about the design, development, and production processes. Sure, this information typically only reaches people who have already opted in to consume it, but I think the transparency reinforces their loyalty and trust, especially if I’m open about both good and bad news. […]

  5. Kickstarter Lesson #130: Maintaining Peace During Shipping Season | Stonemaier Games says:

    […] The backers responded really, really well to the news. Obviously a few were disappointed, but as a whole they were completely understanding. My perception is that the vast majority of backers who weren’t even affected by the miscalculation still appreciated knowing about it in the project update–it’s that type of communication that reinforces the trust that I’m going to keep them in the loop, for better or for worse. […]

  6. […] talked about post-project updates here and here, but I’ll reiterate my point under the context of product delivery: Good […]

  7. […] First of all, if your sole goal is to make money via Kickstarter, you really need to do some hard thinking. I think that Jamey Stegmaier of Stonemaier Games games said it best: […]

  8. […] in Kickstarter Lesson #36 I talked about the fact that you should continue to communicate with backers after your project on […]

  9. […] The first step in evaluating the decision to end a struggling project is to figure out if your project is highly likely to not reach its funding goal (I’m avoiding the word “fail” here because very few projects on Kickstarter are actually failures. If you engaged an audience and shared your passion project with the world, you didn’t fail. I write about this here.) […]

  10. […] Next: For Better or for Worse […]

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