What I learned from Kickstarter

What I learned from Kickstarter

What I learned from Kickstarter
By Tyson Bennett

As you know, Act of Treason went live on Kickstarter recently (early February) and it didn’t perform as well as I had hoped. It’s unfortunate, but it has given me the opportunity to learn, grow, and grow. There are a number of reasons for this and I would like to take this opportunity to reflect on what is happening here. Hopefully you can gain some insight from my thoughts and observations.

I’ve ordered this list, the biggest mistakes are at the top:

  1. 1,000 followers, but in the wrong place: I had 1,000 followers as my initial audience. These 1,000s are spread across Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, the Treason Act mailing list, etc. The conversion rate for most of these is quite low. I attribute it to 1) my lack of involvement and the long time span between their acquisition and when the Kickstarter launched. 2) announcements and posts can be very easy to miss on Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook, where many of my followers live. And 3) Following doesn’t necessarily mean “I’m interested in your product and want to buy.” Sometimes it’s just a follow-up, or “I love what you posted.” This is a weaker link to your product when compared to an email subscription. All of this results in low success rates and fewer promises than expected. Email registration may perform the best, but it is also the method that has the fewest followers. In hindsight, I would have just focused on the Treason Act Mailing List as my method for gauging expected pledge levels. I would also consider sending periodic key updates to the mailing list to get a rough idea of ​​engagement and openness. If only 1% of your audience opens your emails, then that’s a pretty good estimate of the number of active subscribers you have. You can calculate from your Kickstarter budgeting how many engaged customers you need to have a successful campaign and there you have it, a roughly accurate estimate.
  2. Campaign duration: My initial research showed that many Kickstarter campaigners choose to manage their projects full time. This helps them to get the most out of it and gives them time and resources to respond to all questions, adjust marketing campaigns, add more details & create art assets, and so on. Additionally, I’ve read that campaigns up to 14 days long perform better than campaigns up to 30 or 60 days long. This is believed to be caused by a shorter timeframe which creates an “urgency”, where people are more inclined to take action sooner, rather than planning to act later – but then forgetting about it. This isn’t my full time job, so I decided to do a 14 day campaign and I took time off work to check on the campaign. Come to think of it, if you’re a small publisher, it only takes one day off – launch day. You use launch day to spread it across all your social media channels and tell friends and family. This gives your project a good start. After that, you just monitor it for a few hours every day. If you’ve done your due diligence, things will work out fine, and you won’t need to make any major corrections. If you are a small publisher or start-up publisher, you will likely have a much smaller, more manageable audience – full-time monitoring is unlikely to be necessary. In hindsight, I was aiming for 30 to 90 days, especially as a new publisher.
  3. Ineffective advertising: I made the mistake of thinking that I could use advertising to bridge the gap between funding and my Kickstarter goal. This can only work in rare circumstances. It is possible to pump marketing with cash to get conversions if, and only if, there is already a large following. If there are no initial followers then nothing can be built on. The thing that drives most pledge conversions is confidence – am I confident that what I’m about to purchase will provide me value? In the case of a rapidly growing Kickstarter Project, a great deal of trust is placed in visitors simply due to the fact that there are so many other people willing to contribute. A visitor thinks, “Wow, all these people have seen the benefits – there must be something here” (perhaps subconsciously). I think it’s similar to walking down the street, looking for a restaurant. If you see an empty restaurant located in a sea of ​​busy restaurants, one might ask, “Why are there no customers?” It could be that the service is bad, the food is bad, the food takes too long to arrive, or all of these things, or none of these things. But it doesn’t inspire confidence, so you don’t usually take risks. After all, there has to be a reason, right?… Right? The fact that the restaurant has no customers scares away potential customers. It’s a vicious cycle, and it’s well known among restaurateurs. How to get over this “hump” is an art in itself, and a very important aspect of running a successful restaurant. It may be the best restaurant ever, but if no one wants to go there, it doesn’t matter. PMany people use popularity as a barometer of success. This is a form of efficiency and outsourcing in decision making. It would be a tiresome affair to go to every restaurant and try their food. Outsourcing decisions for the sake of this kind of popularity is something we humans do all the time – it’s an easy decision, and usually quite adequate. Simply put, the ad might get some clicks, but those clicks likely won’t result in pledges because the Act of Treason Kickstarter page is an “empty restaurant.” Advertising will be almost completely ineffective unless you can get enough pledges so that the Kickstarter page can inspire the confidence of passersby. Overall, this means you can use advertising to add fuel to the fire – but you can’t use it to start the fire! Lesson learned!
  4. Time: I launched my campaign on Friday. Not ideal. At first I thought it wouldn’t make a difference, but you get a window of about 24 to 48 hours to show up as “New to Kickstarter”, as well as on other sites that have “new to Kickstarter” embedded in their sites. web page. This is prime traffic, and best of all, it’s free. Ultimately, the best time to launch is when Kickstarter and other affiliate sites are getting the most traffic. Jamie Stegmair has some great information on this. He suggests avoiding Mondays and Fridays and launching mid-morning. I plan my launch strategy based on what works best for me so I can keep an eye on the campaign – not what will generate the most traffic. In hindsight, I think it’s best to set it up solidly from day one so it doesn’t require childcare, and then squeeze every last drop out of launch time unless it’s absolutely not possible to do that.
  5. More details: People are still unsure about some aspects of the Act of Treason, such as the Court and Quest cards. There are a lot of details about the game, but there are a few blanks here and there for some of my more discerning visitors. Luckily, this is an easy fix. In the future I may include some more details. Simple additions like showing some Court and Quest cards, as well as having rules videos and playback videos are great additions. These additions to the Kickstarter page are definitely planned for the next Kickstarter run.
  6. Comparison with Resistance: These comparisons were made in comments sections here and there and in some questions directed to me. It’s kind of annoying to have your creation compared to something else like this – and not just because I’m not a huge fan of The Resistance. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great game and I understand why people enjoy it. But Act of Treason is nothing like The Resistance in my opinion – and I didn’t design it to be like The Resistance. I totally get it, it’s a popular game, and it’s the same genre. For the uninformed, the first question to ask is natural – “What is the difference between these two things?” Act of Treason is more of a mash-up of Mafia and Battlestar Galactica, which happen to be the two games I played the most before starting my work on Act of Treason. I think doing a direct compare and contrast between the Treason Acts would be beneficial because it would help people with the question “What’s the difference from the Resistance”, and help them find out very quickly about the Treason Acts and the reasons for them. that’s different. I will write a blog post that goes into depth on the specific differences between these two games as well as a game theory analysis of Avalon. This can then be included in my FAQ for the next Kickstarter. I might do a blog post about some in-depth strategy on Avalon/Mafia, and why I can’t get too deep into the game.

In short, Kickstarter chewed me up and spat me out – I didn’t know what to expect. This is one of those classic situations where you don’t know what you don’t know. Which is probably one of my favorite sayings of the moment. That and: Sometimes you have to look stupid so you can be a master. Both quotes are great and I think they really help explain that you have to be willing to try and fail if you want to be successful – everyone looks stupid when starting something new. It’s just life. I’m happy to get up, dust myself off, and try again.

That’s what rap is about. I will soon be publishing a Dominant Strategy article as well as a Developer Diary, discussing what I’ve done and my next steps.

Until next time,
Tyson

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