What We're Learning: Share the Love

If you're marketing your game, there are few practices easier and more fruitful than marketing other people's games, too. We live in a very small sea and the rising tide lifts all boats. Take a look at the chart above for Josh Roby's Kickstarter campaign for his Houses of the Blooded supplement. Note the spike where Do's Kickstarter launched around April 9th. Josh explains it best via Twitter: "Lookit the curve, man. It had dropped down to nothing, coasting to the deadline, and then all the sudden Boom! I got a lot of backers through You Might Also Like links."

Amazon's On To Something: It shouldn't be surprising that a mega-retailer should know a thing or two about people's buying habits. When a shopper is in a buying mood, they like seeing other things that would complement their recent purchase. Thus, we have the "You Might Also Like..." feature. Get to know what other projects are similar to yours and promote them enthusiastically.

Make Your Project Easy to Stumble Upon: Yeah, this is where "SEO" rears its ugly head. Know what your project is and find the right key words that would make it show up in searches on Kickstarter. In my case, I categorized Do under Games, but I also used key words "storytelling," "evil hat," and "airbender," in the project description.

Share the Love with Greg: Greg Stolze is the most prolific creator on Kickstarter. Not an exaggeration, he's actually had more Kickstarter campaigns than anyone else in the history of the site. Few people have been in the game business as long as Greg who are still innovating new ways to promote and market their games independently. He was holding ransoms even before Fundable got its start. Now that Kickstarter is on the scene, that makes producing small, low-price, open-content PDF supplements that much easier. Toss a couple bucks his way for the new REIGN supplement. It's got giant monsters! Giant monsters! Yay!

You might also like... Amaranthine.

By the way, thank you to everyone who has RT'd a link to Do's Kickstarter. You've given us plenty of love to share.

What We're Learning is a series of lessons we've learned from crowdfunding and marketing Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple.

What We're Learning: Crowdsource Early, But Not Too Often

Here's the thing about being an public person asking for crowdsourcing. It's all about social capital. In other words, you must first build faith that you are someone who can work and deliver. In my case, I designed small games and posted them for free on my blog. I made sure they're each uniquely branded with their own title, a bit of imagery and a compelling aesthetic. (In other words, I'm trying to be a John Harper of board games.) Here's how I pitched the first call for letters. Though that initial call was successful, I have since learned some better parameters to follow.

Prime the Pump: As you build a work history, others will be more likely to have faith enough to offer their own creativity to your project. Write about what work you've done so far, what challenges you face and why you need some help. So let's say you're ready to crowdsource something. First, outline very briefly what it is you want people to contribute and how you'll use their contribution. Post this on forums and on your blog.

Make It Easy, Specific and Fast: When you put out a call for crowdsourcing, set the parameters so each contribution is easy to submit. Allow people to enter their submission right on that forum thread or as a comment or on Twitter. In your call, be specific enough that people have a clear idea of what you need. For example, I recently called on my Twitter followers to come up with British-sounding names for Belle of the Ball. Lastly, make it fast by highlighting your favorite contributions in real-time. This last tip is why Twitter is such fertile ground for crowdsourcing. Just take a look at the next popular hashtag to see what I mean.

You Are A Curator of Solutions: I don't normally recommend crowdsourcing critical things like central mechanics for games. Still, I often spoke about my dilemmas with Do's early character creation process, for example. I eventually scrapped it altogether, despite many positive responses to it. I did this because chargen was too long and didn't let people actually play the game in the first session. Being open and specific about your direction lets others know their solutions were considered, even if they were not ultimately implemented. You'll get a million great solutions, but not all are great for your project.

Lastly, about "not too often." When you crowdsource, you're cashing in chips. You're trying to yield dividends based on your audience's interest in your project, your work history, and, yes, your popularity. When you crowdsource, know that you can't do it again for at least a couple weeks. Between now and then, work publicly, speak openly, offer help to others, respond to comments with civility (or not at all) and genuinely appreciate everyone's contributions.

What We're Learning is a series of lessons we've learned from crowdfunding and marketing Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple.

» Photo: CC BY-NC-ND Matt Karp

What We're Learning: Develop in the Open

Many of the Kickstarter supporters mention how long they've waited for Do to finally be available for purchase. One thing's for sure, I've been developing Do off and on for a loooong while. From 2007, it's been an open and transparent process. Throughout that time, we've gone through many revisions, playtests, and brain-blocks. Here are some things I've learned about developing in the open and how that may have helped Do's Kickstarter support.

Progress Comes in Many Forms: My process of game development builds up many, many visual artifacts. I took pictures of scratchy notebook pages and index cards as they piled up, to keep myself accountable to the public at large. I also posted letters, actual play reports, and a TON of Liz Radtke's art.

Some Will Be Disappointed, More Will Appreciate The Progress: When you post any kind of document that gets people playing, and then later on you change a critical rule or mechanic, you'll get some disappointed people. This will make you question your current direction and lead to building a bloated, over-burdened game. Just remember to follow your vision. This game is not done yet and everyone knows it. You may lose some interest when you change a rule, but you'll gain more faith in yourself that you're really making progress.

Know When You're Ready: A couple years ago, I sent in a little ad for Evil Hat to insert in the back of Chad Underkoffler's Swashbucklers of the Seven Skies. I figured, hey, it's a game about big open skies, so there would be crossover interest for my game. Indeed, there was, but I was still very premature in sending out that ad. There have also been times where I called for playtesters before a playtest doc was complete and then had to delay or cancel those sessions. This made me anxious about Do appearing to be vaporware. Avoid those fears. Make sure you have goods to deliver before making any promises.

What We're Learning is a series of lessons we've learned from crowdfunding and marketing Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple.

Week 1 [Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple | Where We're Learning]

On this day last week, Fred and I were chatting about the Kickstarter video, cutting length, and making edits to the animation. We were also deciding whether to launch Sunday or go ahead and push the big red button immediately. Boy, am I glad we decided to push.

The chart above shows our funding progress thus far. I also translated dollars to meters, just to give some perspective on how great the response has been so far. In less than a week, we have over tripled our initial fundraising goals!

After seven days of media coverage, preparing future rewards, organizing schedules for print production and, oh yeah, a very busy full-time job, I'm looking forward to hitting our cruising altitude. If we follow the same trajectory as the past few days, we'll end this campaign in the mid-$14,000 range. We may even surpass the current record-holder for highest funded tabletop gaming product (e20), but I'm more than happy to sit in second-place.

Anyway, over the next couple of days, I'll post some tips and lessons we're learning as we go. Look for more under the "What We're Learning" tag in coming days.