Fair warning, this overview of our Kickstarter experience might be a bit long winded – we’ve trying to touch on a lot of areas that we felt made an impact for our Kickstarter journey – our path to Kickstarter was odd to say the least!
Before we get into anything, we want to say: EVERY STORY IS DIFFERENT. If there was a simple, easy, obvious way to succeed, Kickstarter wouldn’t even be necessary. We were so fortunate with how ours turned out, but that doesn’t mean our path is necessarily the right path for you and your game. But there are a few things that tend to help a lot, at least from what we’ve seen/heard – the main one being a large email list.
We have some statistics you’d probably be interested in, but first we want to give some background on Alynthia and the challenges / opportunities we had because of it.
Game Weight
Alynthia is a game that people want to learn more about before they decide to purchase because it’s a medium-heavyweight in complexity and in price. It’s not really an impulse purchase. So having a good demo was vital for us.
Demo / Pitch
On top of that, it’s also a game that’s not particularly fast to teach. We struggled a LOT in making a quick pitch and succinct demo so that we could reach as many people as possible. At PAX in 2023, every time slot we had for demos had at least 1 signup, and most were completely full. But that’s still only 5 people every 30 minutes. That doesn’t add up to much. But what it does mean is that we had a solid sales funnel – most people saw our booth, a large amount of people heard our pitch, a medium amount of people signed up for our email list, and a small group of people sat through a demo and learned what makes Alynthia special (at least according to us).
Networking
We spent the majority of our time over the last few years focusing on UnPub and things like it. It was a slow burn for sure, but it also meant we got to know people. We played their games, they played ours, we got great feedback and we followed each other’s progress. Those connections made a world of difference for us because we had the opportunity to get our name in front of their audiences as well. It also meant that we had Kickstarter veterans who we could ask for insight and advice. The support we’ve had from the gaming community played a huge role in getting us to where we are.
Grassroots
This was maybe the hardest part for us to do because we’re introverts and it’s hard for us to see value in the things that we do. That said, it probably had the highest success rate of every method – we just had to ask everyone we knew. “Have you heard about Alynthia? Are you interested in it? Would you consider backing it?” Every gaming group we were in, every relative or friend or friend of a friend that we knew liked games, work Slack channels dedicated to gaming, local game shops,… everywhere we could think of.
High-Value Audience
What a lot of that adds up to is a small list of people that were genuinely excited about Alynthia. It’s important to nurture those relationships – the ’super fans’ are the ones that carried us through the Kickstarter by telling their friends and backing for more than the standard pledge amount.
Ads
We committed to a modest ad-spend pre-Kickstarter and a smaller spend during. Our thinking was that we wanted to bolster our KS followers going into day 1 so that we had a higher pledge value out of the gate. We think that helped us and we would do that again. But it’s hard to qualify what amount is worth that because a conversion is just a follow – it’s very noncommittal. We pushed everything to the KS page though – completely bypassed our website / email list. Was that the right call? We’re not sure.
Reviewers
We didn’t put a ton of money behind reviewers – instead opting to select a handful of paid reviewers with high audience numbers and who had positively reviewed games similar to ours in the past. This helped to get Alynthia in front of the right audience, and it validated the gameplay of a newcomer to the game design scene. We also identified a handful of free reviewers that we felt had the right audience and asked them as well. This had mixed success because ‘free’ usually still means ‘I get to keep the copy of the game’. And when the copy is a prototype that costs several hundred dollars, it’s not cheap.
Kickstarter Community
Thanks to our previous networking, we were able to get contact info for a KS rep. We asked if we could be added to the KS ‘Games We Love’ list, and they agreed. That was a great bump for us in organic conversions from the KS platform. It also put some weight behind our claims – all of a sudden it was Kickstarter saying this was a cool project.
Page Design
We hate to brag / toot our own horn, but here goes: Our KS design was one of the better ones for board game campaigns running at the same time. Thankfully Andrew is the graphic designer for the game and the campaign, and he’s a designer in his day job. We spent a ton of time reworking things until it looked polished and it showcased the elements we had already heard were audience favorites. We also spent a lot of time researching both successful and unsuccessful KS campaigns and seeing what common elements were there. We did everything we could to make it look like we knew what we were doing. We really think that was the tipping factor for us considering how small our audience was.
Statistics
Now on to the statistics! These are basically raw numbers – and statistics can be manipulated to say whatever you want them to say. But they’re interesting nonetheless.
Kickstarter stats at launch:
– Email list: 479
– KS followers: 700+
– Funding day 1: $6,926
– Backers day 1: 110
KS stats over the campaign:
– 628 backers
– ~37% from our community
– ~4% from Facebook ads during the campaign
– The rest was from Kickstarter
– Over the whole campaign we had 1,833 followers, 258 of those converted
– 2,423 video plays with 32.36% of those plays completing
Take it with a grain of salt
After all that, would we advise you to follow the same path as us? Honestly, probably not. There are much quicker methods we’ve seen work. However, we’re very happy with our small but mighty network and the strong relationships we’ve built. We genuinely look forward to seeing our new friends at various booths each convention. That alone makes it worth it to us.
As we said, if it weren’t for the fantastic people giving us advice along the way, we wouldn’t be where we are.
Keep having fun!