Tinder, Reddit…and Kickstarter? (guest post)

One of the most active participants in the comments on this blog over the last year has been Wonmin Lee, who has been studiously preparing for his Kickstarter campaign for quite a while. During that time, he was also using some interesting ways to find playtesters and potential future backers, and he shares that experience in today’s guest post. Thanks, Wonmin!

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In this post, I’m going to be outlining two different ways to generate attention for your Kickstarter campaign—one with Tinder and one with Reddit.

I am an indie developer designing and launching my first ever board game. It’s been a crazy uphill battle the entire way and I hope that I can share some of my experiences and lessons learned with you.

Tinder method—the flash in a hot pan method, aka the “viral” method

A few years ago before the global pandemic destroyed all in-person interaction, I used Tinder to find playtesters for my new board game. I needed fresh eyes—and what better way to find them than using everyone’s favorite dating app!

The gist of the experiment was, I offered free pizza for anyone who matched with me if they could beat me at my own game. It was a fun little experiment that got me some good feedback and led to many great changes in my game. 

But, to be honest, the most important thing I got out of the whole thing was the blog post I was able to write about it afterwards. (You can read the post here)

Cool interesting posts generate clicks and clicks means eyeballs for your campaign.

It obviously worked for this post because you are reading this right now ;)

Since my blog post, I’ve crossposted that piece of content across as many other forums as possible. Each time it generated a bunch of upvotes / clicks that ultimately ended up as followers to my campaign.

But there is a limit to this method. And you can only post so many times before people start accusing you of spam. It’s a very fine line between spam and just trying to get your voice heard.

You will undoubtedly run into people who think it’s spam. Just try to be cordial and maybe start dialing back on the reposting.

So what can you do? Make more wacky interesting content to try to go “viral.”

Or you can try to apply method #2.

Reddit method—build a community or following

I won’t bother you on how to build a community around your campaign. Jamey has a ton of articles already covering this topic. Instead I’ll just talk about how I implemented it using my favorite drug of choice—Reddit.

Starting a few months before my campaign launch date, I started thinking about my target audience and who they might be.

Aside from the obvious audience of board game enthusiasts, I was also thinking about my own personal journey.

I used to work for a big corporation straight out of college. It was a cushy job with great benefits and job security that afforded me a very comfortable lifestyle. But I felt empty inside. Since then, I’ve quit and pursued my own interests (including designing board games).

Since my game is about corporate life, I thought it would be relevant to people who are currently in similar situations to what I went through. I wrote posts on /r/simpleliving about not participating in the rat race and constantly pursuing the next promotion. I wrote posts on /r/findapath about when exactly I knew I needed to quit. And of course, I posted to /r/boardgames as well.

The posts were met with a lot of positive feedback from others in similar positions. And while these posts were not directly advertising or talking about my game, I think it definitely helped in getting some traffic to my profile page where people could see the Kickstarter campaign.

Even if your game’s theme might not be for everyone, you can always refer to your own personal experiences to try to build a following of like-minded individuals.

So if you are an indie developer out there working on your first game, know that you are not alone. It’s a tough journey but it’s worth it.

I have a campaign going on right now for my first ever board game! It’s a take-that, hand management, tile-placing racing game, the theme is a cut-throat corporate office, and the gameplay is a sort of mix between Yu-Gi-Oh and Mario Kart. If you are interested, please take a look here.

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What do you think about these innovative techniques? Have you recently seen (or used) any interesting methods for building a community?

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