hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr2422.txt

Episode: 2422
Title: HPR2422: Kickstarter Post Mortem
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2422/hpr2422.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 02:44:06

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This is HBR episode 2422 entitled, Kickstarter post-mortem, and is part of the series, tabletop
gaming.
It is posted by Klaatu and is about 46 minutes long and can rim a clean flag.
The summary is Klaatu talks about his failed Kickstarter campaign.
This episode of HBR is brought to you by an honesthost.com.
With 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HBR15, that's HBR15.
Better web hosting that's honest and fair at an honesthost.com.
This is my post-mortem of a failed Kickstarter campaign.
I think that post-mortems or debriefings, whatever you want to call them, are really
valuable because we are after all supposed to learn from history or learn from our
mistakes or whatever.
And I think in the appropriately open source sort of model, we may as well share what I
have learned or at least what has happened so that possibly you, if you're ever going
to do a Kickstarter campaign, can learn from my mistake.
Now, this of course assumes that I know what my mistake was, and while I have some theories,
I can't obviously be sure what exactly my mistake was.
So some of this advice might not even be useful, but anyway, that's what a post-mortem
is.
It's not necessarily a diagnosis.
It's just a review of what happened and sort of some theories on why it happened.
So case you missed the episode in question, I think it was 2402.
It's about a card game that I came up with, that I call Petition.
And the card game is, well, I mean, if you want to know more about the card game, just
go listen to the episode.
The card game I designed many years ago now, no, not many years, like two years ago.
And I play tested it, and it went really well, like everyone enjoyed it, quite a lot, found
some bugs, fixed the bugs, and so on.
And so I finally figured that I finally felt that maybe you would be interesting to get
some proper artwork done, because for my play testing, I had just grabbed some tarot
card art from the internet, and just kind of put them on the cards and kind of repurposed
it and sort of designed a card game, or made the tarot art fit my card game, and since
it was a fantasy-based card game, it was actually a pretty good match to be honest.
But I felt like it might be neat to have, like, really cool artwork, and I can do abstract,
I can do gritty and ugly stuff, I can do various styles, and none of them evoke fantasy
whatsoever.
So I thought, well, it might be really cool to get someone who knows what they're doing
to sit down and illustrate artwork for this game and really give it sort of an identity.
But I mean, there are plenty of illustrators out there online who will sell you pictures
or even do custom work for you, but I felt very strongly that if I was going to spend
money on something that technically didn't really need money, I mean, you know, the card
game, it's a set of mechanics, and you could just play the game with clip art, you know,
it would work.
So I felt like if I was going to spend money on this thing, I would want to support,
because the whole card game, obviously, maybe not obviously, but certainly had been designed
and created on open source, completely open source stack.
So I felt like the artwork should also be created on open source.
So I hunted down an illustrator who used nothing but open source, he's really quite
a good illustrator, I contacted him through the Sinfig studio people, well, actually the
project Marev and the people, but they seem to be doing most development on Sinfig out
of anyone.
So I contacted them, they hooked me up with this one, dude, and I had him, I pre-ordered
some artwork for the card game and paid him some upfront money and really liked what
I saw, so I thought, okay, what I'm going to do is do the Kickstarter campaign and get
people to contribute so that I can then pay the artist and then we'll all have a game.
And that seemed like a good idea to me.
Now it did not work, I was asking for $5,000 New Zealand dollars, which if I do a quick
calculation in my head, I'm going to assume that that's about $2,500 US dollars.
And I figured that would be enough, well, I mean, I calculated that that would be enough
to pay the artist for a full set of artwork that I would need, because I had obviously
all the cards figured out and I knew exactly what I would need.
So I kind of felt like that would be enough to fund to finance the whole thing.
I didn't want to ask for, you know, like, I don't know, $20,000 or $50,000 or something
and end up with a situation where I had to, you know, send the artwork out to China
for printing and then get boxes and, you know, I didn't want to go into manufacturing.
That was not my interest and is not my interest.
And I certainly didn't want to end up with a scenario where I had to have like 100 games
shipped to me and then I had to distribute them to local stores.
You know, that's not what I'm interested in.
I don't want to become a game publisher or anything like that.
I just wanted to create a game, pay for the art and then do a print on demand service,
preferably something that's more or less local.
I couldn't find a super dedicated print on demand place in New Zealand, but I know
of a couple in the U.S. and so I figured that was pretty good, so yeah, so that was my
plan.
Now, as I said, none of this worked, but what did happen was that I sat down and took
a bunch of the graphics that the illustrator had sent me and kind of made up a really nice
looking Kickstarter campaign and I did some research on what other people do and what
a good Kickstarter campaign looks like and certainly in terms of Kickstarter, I'm no stranger,
I think I've backed something like 33 or 35 projects, so I've gone through quite a few
Kickstarter campaigns as a user and that was good and I felt like I had some research
on what Kickstarter, sort of what the masses expect from a Kickstarter campaign.
So I kind of slapped something together that approximated what everyone else was doing.
I like to think I put my own spin on it.
Everyone was saying that a Kickstarter needs a video, you've got to have a video.
So I did this little one minute video on an animated video that I did in Sinfig and just
had like a little bit of a sort of a presentation, just kind of like this is what the game, you
know, these are what some of the cards look like, this is what the game is about, hey, you
should finance this game.
And I, Kickstarter gives you a whole bunch of metrics on the backend, so if you ever
do a Kickstarter campaign, you will find that you have a lot of information and you can
be, I could have even gotten more if I'd tied it, from what I understand, I could have
tied it into like a Google tracking account or whatever they're called, like a Google,
you know, a Google, what do you call it, a Google tracker or a Google analytics, that's
what it is.
Google analytics account and then I think I would have gotten even more data, but I really
can't be bothered with that sort of thing.
Not really, yeah, I don't really need that kind of data, I don't think, I mean, who
knows, maybe this is part of the problem.
Oh, look at that, I'm actually looking at my Kickstarter page now and someone just gave
me more money, that's pretty funny, that's, I mean, 44 more hours to go as of this recording,
so I guess technically this hasn't failed yet, but it is kind of funny.
Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that you get a lot of data on the reporting side of
Kickstarter when you create a campaign.
And one of the things that you get is the amount, or the amount of, is the amount of video
plays that, you know, people who come to your page and you even kind of get where they're
coming from, so I'll talk about that in a moment, but one of the things that I did get
data on was the video plays, there were 307 video plays and 55.05% of them actually
completed the plays, which I felt was kind of interesting because the video, like I say,
it is literally, I can tell you, I mean, I think it's a minute, I keep wanting to say,
yeah, it's like, it's under a minute, it is 42 seconds long.
So for 55% of the plays, only 55% of the hits to actually finish, it was a little bit
honestly surprising.
I felt like a commercial length video, you know, like 30 seconds, okay, it's 42 seconds,
whatever.
I thought that that would really sort of be the average consumer attention span.
And apparently it was only half of the average consumer attention span.
And by half, I mean 153, because as I say, there were 308, oh that's because I just clicked
on it, 307 plays, 55% completed.
So that was, that was interesting.
Okay, anyway, so I did that, I threw the video on, I put all the text in there, told
people what they were funding and why I needed the money and stuff like that.
And I felt like I needed to justify having the money and maybe I was wrong about that.
Because after all, I think there is, I mean if it's on Kickstarter, there is an expectation
that apparently you think you need money for something.
So maybe, you know, people on Kickstarter, maybe they don't need to be convinced that
you need money.
I don't know.
I tend to need to be convinced that that project needs money.
So I felt this burden to really tell people that I needed money.
And maybe I was wrong to do that.
Maybe people were already sold on the idea that I was asking for money because I was on Kickstarter.
And so maybe I wasted too much time with that.
And what I did leave out, and this is something that's, that's probably the top, this is
the top thing on my list of where did I go wrong, the top item, and I'll just actually
quote this person, it's from Hacker Public Radio itself on episode 2402 in a comment by
this listener named McNalloo, MCNALU.
And McNalloo says, I'm quoting, I'm just, I'm cutting off most of the comment, and I'm
just getting, I'm getting the, the, the meat of it.
It says, I love the, that's a pun by the way, you can actually read the comment and find
out why.
I love the idea of your game and will give its serious consideration, it gives serious consideration
to the Kickstarter.
Any chance of a summary or audio or even video of an actual game.
And that's the key right there my friends, I think, and obviously this is very, probably
very specific to a Kickstarter that is financing a game.
But the mechanics just weren't anywhere on the Kickstarter.
And I, I got feedback here on McNalloo saying that from McNalloo saying, hey, some, some
gameplay would be really cool to see.
And then later I got some feedback in person from someone who said that their friend had
not contributed to the project because specifically the game mechanics weren't sort of spelled
out in the description or in the video or anywhere that it just wasn't there.
And I, I heard that the criticism twice so that obviously means that it's, I mean if
I'm hearing it once, that means other people are thinking about it.
So I kind of thought, well, I really should put my, the game mechanics up there.
But by the time all of this sort of happened, the numbers were looking pretty low anyway.
And I felt, well, I don't think I'm going to make this Kickstarter goal.
And that didn't stop me.
I did.
I typed up a whole update on the gameplay and then I thought, oh my gosh, if I just do
an update, people aren't going to see that.
They're just going to see the campaign text.
So then I thought, well, I should really put the campaign text in there.
And then apparently I'm a perfectionist.
And it took me so long to, I went back to the, the manual, the game manual that I designed
and scribes.
And I wanted to put that in the campaign.
And I just kind of kept going back and forth on the best presentation and, and all this
other stuff.
And I ended up, you know, by the, by the last week I hadn't put the, the game mechanics
in there.
And it just, it just seemed a little bit silly to, to bother at that point.
So I think I, I feel like if there was one thing I would really, really do differently.
If I, if I had to go back, it would have been to really, really lessen the, the, the,
the detail, the gory detail on why I needed the money.
And just really concentrate on exactly what people were purchasing.
And I think that, I think right there, if you take one thing away from this episode and
you're going to go do your own Kickstarter campaign, that, that, that, my money would
be on, on that right there is that, that you don't have to sell people on Kickstarter,
the fact that you need money or, and you don't have to tell them necessarily a whole bunch
of why you need the money.
I mean, you probably ought to mention it, I, I imagine.
But I don't think you really need to tell them, like, line item by line item.
This is how the money is going to get spent.
This is why I'm doing this.
You know, tell them the actual, about the actual product.
So essentially, I think on Kickstarter, rather than explaining the project, it's more like,
you want to hand them the back of the box before, before it's off to the printer, you know,
like the things that they're going to turn around and look at when they're, in the fake
store that they're not going to be in, when they're going to not buy your project,
you're buy your product.
So give them the blurb of, oh my gosh, you're going to have so much fun with this thing,
and here's why, and that's what you're really selling them in the end.
And I, I, I didn't do that.
So number one problem, that right there, in my opinion, of course, I don't know.
This is a failed Kickstarter campaign.
So I might be analyzing this incorrectly.
That's my bet though.
So the next thing that I kind of thought about as I kind of sort of pondered the, the,
the failure in my head, and I'm, I'm saying failure a lot and, and it almost seems like
that's, like I, that's usually a very negative term, but understand that this was more of
an experiment for me because I really don't need the money and I'll, I'll go into exactly
why I say that later, but, but this was more of a, a nice to have rather than a need to
have.
So the fact that I tried it and it failed is, is more of an academic issue to me.
It's kind of something that I'm looking at and, and just sort of having fun analyzing
really rather than thinking, uh, this is, this is horrible, why, why does this sort of
thing happen to me?
I, I don't care that much.
So the second thing that I kind of really thought about, about how the campaign did not succeed,
some more positive spin on it, um, was this whole crowdfunding concept.
And I, I mean, I've, like I said, I've kick started a lot of things, but I will, I will
say that a lot of the things that I've kick started have been very successful things.
So like they've been Linux video games or they've been mystery science theater, 3,000
Bible or, you know, weird little things like that that, that generally speaking, not always,
there were some that, that just made their, their, their goal, but a lot of times I was
just jumping on board something that was already really well funded.
And so I didn't really have a concept of how many people were funding, for instance,
at a thousand dollar level versus a one dollar level.
And so in my mind, kick starter, at least certainly when it had first come out, like back
in, I don't really remember, but let's just randomly say 2009.
Back when it first came out, when I first heard about it at least, the idea was that
it was crowdfunding.
That was, that was the, the big term that, and I guess it is still a term that people
use, but crowdfunding to me meant that you sort of put, you, you pitch a thing to the
internet and lots and lots of people, I'm talking about 1,500 people, 2,500 people, more
maybe, 5,000 people, they throw like a dollar at you.
And because all those people threw one dollar at you, you now have 5,000 dollars.
Or they throw 50 cents at you and now you have 5,000 New Zealand dollars.
So that was crowdfunding to me.
So I kind of kept thinking that people were going to jump on this sort of $2, $3 pledge
level that I had set up, because in my mind that was what crowdfunding was.
Lots of little donations.
Now, I think in the life of kick starter, the way that it is kind of ended up being, and
it's probably out of the scope of this analysis to really talk a whole lot about why it developed
this way.
I'll say briefly that I think it's because a lot of companies started using kick starter
as basically a marketing scheme, you know, kind of like, hey, we've made this product.
It's ready to go.
Let's sell it on kick starter.
So it's, you know, rather than being like your prototype financing stop, you've already
prototype, you've got your final product, all you need are the orders so that you can
ship your product.
Now, I realize that doesn't happen all the time, but I do think that it does happen.
And even if it doesn't happen directly like that, I think there are a lot of companies
out there who just kind of know that kick starter is their pre-order system.
So even if they haven't made the product, they know that if they get those pre-orders
on kick starter, then they have financed this project.
And so they pull the trigger once they meet their goal on kick starter.
And that's a little bit different than what I was doing.
I had a project.
I had the prototype all done.
And I wanted the financing to go from prototype to, hey, you can buy this thing.
So I feel, in other words, that a lot of people may come to kick starter, and I think I'm
probably guilty of this myself.
I think a lot of people come to kick starter thinking, okay, cool, what's my reward?
And I mean, I had built into kick starter.
That's part of what kick starter is.
It's rewards, especially if there's a physical product involved.
You go to kick starter to get the physical product, which is different.
That's the store, it's a store mentality, you're going to a store to buy a thing.
So you go to kick starter and you buy a thing, and there's just this weird delay between
when you pay for it and when it actually ships.
And hopefully that's not discouraging other things that don't actually have a whole lot
of physical evidence that they've been done, at least not something that you can necessarily
get.
Because I remember early, early in kick starter, you would have artists financing shows and
stuff that, yeah, if you're in New York and they're in California, you're not going
to get to their gallery opening, you're never going to see their gallery, but you financed
it because it sounded like a cool project and you like their other stuff.
So yeah, there's a little bit of a difference there, and I'm not sure how rampant it is,
and it might even be something within certain disciplines.
So for instance, one of the things that I had kick started once was a trip for a singer,
this fantastic jazz singer that I really, really like, jazz is actually almost saying,
it's more like cabaret or something, it's really freaky, strange, trippy jazz.
And I really like her work, so I financed this trip that she was going to make to Europe.
She was going to have someone following her around with a camera, you know, in Austin,
we were going to sort of do like a documentary or something, and I don't really know whatever
came of that, and yeah, it was, you know, I think, and it got funded, and I don't know
how many people who financed the thing were necessarily financing it because they want,
because they were expecting a physical object in the mail, you know, it wasn't like a mail
order thing, it was just like, oh, I love your art, and you're doing this other art thing,
so here's some money to finance that. And maybe that's more frequent within the arts than it is,
and for instance, something like whatever a little niche, the gaming community has carved out
for itself in Kickstarter, where there is an expectation, certainly, of, well, I'm purchasing a game,
so eventually I want the game, that's part of the deal, right? So quite possibly, in other words,
by going to Kickstarter with a game, I was targeting an audience that had an expectation of
getting a game in the end, meaning, therefore, that their pledge level was kind of locked in,
and this bears, this bears itself out in my little, in my data. If I go to the backer report,
I see that, like, as of this recording, I have 17 backers, and of those backers, all but
five of them were backing at the level where you would get a game at the end of it.
So what's that? Less than a third chose the smaller options for this project,
meaning that two-thirds of them, over two-thirds of them, let's call it two-thirds, two-thirds of them,
were essentially pre-ordering a game. So I don't know what crowdfunding exactly
really means. Maybe it never meant what I thought it meant, but I kind of feel like crowdfunding,
and maybe crowdfunding, yeah, maybe crowdfunding is maybe, because if it's a crowd, it's in a
confined area, right? I still, in my mind, I'm thinking this isn't crowdfunding anymore,
it's flash mob funding. It's kind of like, you get a bunch of people together, and get them excited
about a product, and make sure that they throw some set amount of money, and the money must equal,
you know, you have to look at the size of your crowd, and then you have to adjust the money
expected from them, such that you, you know, you meet your funding goal. Whereas I feel that,
you know, crowdfunding, or something like populous funding, maybe, would have been, to me,
throw a net out, and you hit like 5,000 people, and you get those sort of two-dollar
contributions, and you just get a bunch of those, and then you've got your financing.
And I don't know if that would work, I'm not proposing an economic solution here to anything,
I'm just saying that I think I fundamentally misunderstood how kickstarter
finance mentality sort of went. And again, this is a little bit odd, because if you look at my
history on kickstarter personally, I really do, I tend towards exactly what I'm saying, like I am,
I am all the proof that you need, really, of how kickstarter, you know, of how certainly
an average kickstarter person might think. Like almost every project I've ever backed,
not all of them, but most of them certainly have resulted in some kind of thing at the end.
Actually, you know what, I'm actually lying to you a little bit, because I just kind of randomly
clicked on my back or history, and it probably still is most, but it might not be all. I've
actually funded my fair share of things that would not render anything in return, that were,
they're just, oh, I just clicked the more button. No, okay, so I definitely have clicked more
than more towards the, yes, I will get something at the end of this kickstarter
than I have the things that sort of don't give me anything in return.
I mean, a lot of, and I say that, I mean, I don't get the main, the central thing, you know,
so there have been some RPG rulebooks that I've financed, and there was no, I wasn't going to get
the rulebook at the end of the thing, it just wouldn't have, that's not at a five dollar pledge,
you know, $5, $12, $17, $18, $10, $1, that was a technology book, $2. Yeah, there's been,
actually quite a few things that I have just thrown small amounts of money, and maybe that's why,
maybe that is, after all, why I was wrong, maybe I was incorrect about the perception, maybe,
I did perceive that there was a healthy market for, for those small donations, and I guess that
does bear out in my, in my off, in the, in the rewards that I'm offering, that I offered in the
campaign. I set the lowest contribution to $3, and then I had a five dollar level, and then I had
an $11 level, and, and finally I went up to like a $31 level, which I think with shipping,
it had to be a little bit more, but anyway, you know, there was like, that, I definitely was
lowballing the, the potential for contribution. I mean, I did have some fairly high contribution levels,
and amazingly, someone actually took me up on one of them, there was a $150 level, and someone
actually did, did pledge at that level, which, which I find amazing, thank you, Merff, I think,
is what, what the username was. But anyway, um, yeah, I feel like I, I, I didn't go in understanding
the nature of my potential investors, and I don't know the answer to how to find that sort of
thing out, I honestly don't, and I, I do suspect, as I said, I do suspect that it will change,
depending on what you're pitching to, to your, your investors, you know, if you're,
if you're pitching something fairly esoteric, esoteric, maybe that'll be something that you will
get smaller amounts for, you know, like I'll send this person a buck or two, I mean, yeah,
I won't get anything out of it, but I'll feel good about donating, versus, hey, I'm pitching
something that, that you're going to hold in your hand at some point, but in order for you to get
it, it's going to be 40 bucks, then maybe you need to, to, to, to go lighter on the, on the,
on the tiny donations, on the micro donations, or micro pledges, whatever, and, and sort of be biased
towards like the 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 dollar kind of reward tiers where you give people things,
you know, based on, hey, you've given 40 to get a copy of the thing, but if you do 50,
you get a copy of the thing and you'll get, you know, something else. So yeah, that sort of thing,
and I guess that would be one more, so that's my second thing is, is not understanding,
not, not having a good grasp on crowd, the concept of crowd funding. And then the third,
the third thing that I believe I might have gone wrong on is the possibility that I don't really know,
yeah, I didn't really have a good handle on the rewards. I felt like I did, but I don't think
I did. Like the first couple of tiers, like I say, were way under, you know, that was low-balling,
the, the donation tiers anyway. So the, the lower ones were just sort of like, yeah, you'll get
your name on the credits or the, the, in the blurb, and, and I think that's it. And then finally,
at one point, you get the game. No, at one lower point, you get some PDFs that I'd send you,
which, you know, big deal PDFs. And then you get the game and then above that, you start to get
to actually contribute stuff into the game, like you can name one of the gods, you can name one of
the, the, the, the plagues or the power-ups, and so on. So I, I kind of felt like, I don't know,
I felt they were vaguely attractive. I mean, I didn't think they were like amazing, but at the same
time, I didn't want to overcommit either. So I didn't want to do anything too crazy. At one point,
I thought, and I think I actually did, I did end up adding it. I thought, well, maybe I could offer
to host a game, a session of a, of like an RPG over mumble or something. And maybe people would
be into that, because I don't know, people like personal connection. So yeah, I kind of thought,
maybe I'll do that. No one took me up on that anyway. So it didn't, it didn't really end up matter,
mattering all that much. And besides that, this is a card game. And, and I was offering sort of,
like, as one of the rewards, a completely unrelated tabletop RPG session, you know. So it's, I don't
know. I, I don't feel like my rewards were necessarily the, the, the most, the most amazing sort
of rewards. And, and maybe someone with better marketing sense could have could have come up with
something a little bit more consistent in, in theme. I don't know. So that's the third thing is
the rewards question mark. And then the fourth and final thing I think is just going to be,
an acknowledgement that I, I'm really not interested in marketing. I, I don't like marketing,
I don't like to think about marketing. I don't like to, to try to sell things. I'm not good at
selling things. So I think that this Kickstarter kind of, you know, in a way bears that out. You
know, it's, it's, I don't know how to get a lot of people to do something. That's just not a skill
that I've ever had. I can get a couple of people sometimes to do something, or you know what,
I can do something. And then sometimes a couple of people are kind enough to jump on board with
me. That's, that's generally how it goes. Because I don't do a whole lot of outreach for anything.
And I feel like for petition, I, I did, I wrote an article online about the card game itself,
but I wasn't permitted in that article to point back to the Kickstarter. So as marketing goes,
as probably not, you know, amazing. I had, I think I had already walked away from most social media
around the same time that the petitioned Kickstarter went live. So I, I basically broadcast the
Kickstarter to, um, mastodon, which is the open source, uh, federated implementation of
GNU social. And then I, I think I, well, I did the hacker public radio, um, episode, which you may
or may not have heard. And, and yeah, who knows how, how that did. I, I don't think like in my
little backer report, if I look, if I look at the, the dashboard, it does not appear that people came
to this, I mean, and I guess they have to click through probably, but they, um, they, they didn't appear,
doesn't appear that people came to this page directly from hacker public radio.
And again, that could be, that could be, that could be false. That could be wrong. That could be
incorrect. I don't know. But there you go. Um, so, so I did that. And then I think finally,
maybe the other thing that I did was went to conferences locally. I went to some local game
conferences that just happened to be around this time. There was an RPG conference and a
tabletop game conference. So those two things I attended and talked about my game some,
and again, I'm really, really bad about doing, um, outreach and marketing and selling. So,
I, I did what I could, but honestly, not a whole lot. And I, I didn't even have like business
cards printed out with the Kickstarter on it. I just kept telling people the name and I just kind
of thought, well, they'll just search for it on Kickstarter, right? And some did actually. I got
a couple of people who, who actually, who did follow on from those conferences. Um, I don't know
exactly how many, because I mean, some of these names I just don't recognize, but there's one on
there that I definitely know because I played Shadow Run with him. And so I know his name quite well
now. I'd never met him before, but now I, now I know him. And, and he popped up like a day after
the, the RPG conference. So yeah, poor marketing skills, I think would be my, my, my fourth thing.
And I think that's probably kind of an illusion of the internet, unfortunately. And I, I, I feel like
like it's an illusion that I'm okay, not sort of not falling for. And it's this illusion that
things on the internet become a thing sort of just by being on the internet. And you can argue that
there are plenty of cases where that actually is a thing, like someone just threw something online
and then oops, overnight it became like this huge thing and look at that. They're, they're,
they're super popular now or they're super internet rich or internet famous or whatever. I don't
know. I just don't think that happens. I think that behind the scenes, and maybe it's just a conspiracy
theorist in me, but, but I think that that behind the scenes when something gets really big on
the internet, it's because people are working really hard to make sure that it gets really big
on the internet. And I say this knowing that they're, you know, especially back in the days,
and I guess it's still a thing, but there was, you know, there was that time when viral video,
like everyone would always talk about, oh my gosh, it's gone viral. And that was the, that was the
thing. And there was a lot of people's goals. And I knew a marketing person in Los Angeles,
personally, who, well, I knew him because I had hired him at one point for a company that I
worked with, I didn't personally hire him, but he got hired and he was doing the marketing for
this thing. And one of his goals was to make it go viral. And, and that's what he did. Like one
of his, that was one of his major things was, he, he specialized in two things. And that was
making things go viral on the internet and making things go viral at film festivals, like trying to
get people to purchase little indie films and turn them into big indie films from film festivals.
That was, that was all he did. And he just had this, the proverbial black book of contacts who he
would call and just talk up this property. And, you know, just, you know, like you've got to get
on this, you got to, you got to look at this. If you don't like it, let me know. I'll call someone
you know, it's just like just endless harping on people and, and just driving it, driving it,
driving it until it starts to catch. So, in that vein, I did get several emails and several
messages on Kickstarter as well from people who, who were with Kickstarter promotional companies,
and they would, they would say things like, your Kickstarter was really great.
Send me, you know, if, if, if you want to partner with us, we will, we will make sure that,
you know, we will search engine, optimize this and make sure that it gets promoted on Kickstarter.
And, you know, all of the Kickstarter projects that we do are 70% successful or, you know, whatever.
And, I, I could have gone that way. I could have spent 50 bucks here, 50 bucks there, 200 bucks
there to have someone out in the internet supposedly do some magical optimizations and pull some
strings and, you know, make it, this thing get big. And, I just didn't want to do that. I just
felt like if that's what it takes to be a successful Kickstarter on the internet,
then I just don't really want to be a successful Kickstarter project on the internet. And, you know,
what? I got my wish. I was not a successful Kickstarter thing on the internet and I am so happy
about that. So, that's everything that I know about Kickstarter campaigns and how not to get them
funded. So, hopefully you'll, you'll learn from my, my mistake if you are someone who wants
to do a Kickstarter on the internet that actually gets funded. Then, yeah, maybe sort of take
everything that I did and sort of do it the opposite way and see how you go. It might, might work
out for you. Might not. Like I say, a lot of this is just raw data. I don't know what to do with it.
I don't know how to necessarily interpret it. It's just, it's the thing that I, this is the
information that I have. So, one last thing and that is sort of not about Kickstarter and more about
just kind of like my project. I do have a plan, a plan B happily. I, I, I decided, well early on
when I was doing this card game, my, my first, my first thing was my, my first idea was that I would
just work and spend money on getting the art done. And so, the only reason I went to Kickstarter
at all was the idea that maybe I could speed that up sort of the, the whole strength and numbers
type of thing. Like, if I, if I get this out there and get a bunch of people to contribute some
money, then, then, then the, the art will get financed. So, Kickstarter was my plan B. So, now that
Kickstarter has kind of fallen through for me, I'm just reverting to plan A. So, it's, it's not,
I don't view any of this as I said. As a failure, I just, I view it as, as something that I tried,
something that didn't work and now something that I will do anyway. So, my plan is, or, or what I've
been working on is that I'm, I'm picking up some systems administration gigs, little jobs on the
side to get paid extra money outside of my, my allotted budget for, for, for quality. And,
also, I am going to be writing some articles for an online magazine type thing that actually
pays money. So, I'll be doing that for a little bit. And between, between the income, the extra
income for, from, from those two things, I'm going to pay the artist and then the, the game will
be done. And, and I expect it will be done by Christmas. So, whether you are interested in the game
or not, it will exist at some point in the future. And if you are interested in it, then you can go
to thegamecrafter.com slash games slash petition. So, that again is the gamecrafter.com slash games
slash petition. Now, it is not actually for sale yet, but eventually it will be and it'll be
probably by my calculations, $17. It might be a little bit more depending on how exactly, you know,
how much money I actually end up spending on, on the various components of it. But, but that's
what I'm expecting. I'm expecting about, about $17. And it'll be something that you can purchase.
And they will print up on demand and send it to you. Now, there won't be a box and stuff like
that. It's going to come with the cards, which I imagine will be shrink wrapped or something.
I don't know. I've never, I've never purchased anything from them yet. And then a, a small collection
of tokens, little glass tokens, with the prayer beads in the game, if you've listened to the
gameplay. And, and that's it. So, yeah, like I said, I'm not really interested, oh, in a manual,
but I'm also going to do a video on how to play the game. So, so people don't won't have to read
the manual. Although, if I do say so myself, the manual is quite easy to follow. It's lots of big
words, big writing, lots of pictures. And it's not very long. So, I think ideally it will be really
easy to learn how to play. You will be able to play it. And it will be a reasonable price, I reckon.
Not a whole lot of control over that, because there's a bunch of custom stuff that I have to kind of
do for it, which drives up the price a little bit. You know, things like, oh, certain cards have
to have different backings on them than the other cards. And yeah, you kind of do need the tokens,
in order to be able to play it. So, yeah, there's some stuff that that kind of control the price point.
But I think 17 is what it will cost to print. Or that's I think five cents more than what it'll
cost to print. So, it'll be available. And then the whole thing, like I say, is Creative Commons
Open Source. So, if you don't want to have to spend any money on it at all, you can always go to my
GitLab.com account and find petition there. And, and it's pretty much all the assets will end up
there anyway. So, not not really a big deal. You could print and play at home or or do whatever you want.
You could make it into a video game for all I care. Anyway, that's that's Kickstarter for you.
And a little update on the game that I made. And I hope you've learned something. I sure did. Talk to you later.
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It smells really good.