Not Horrifically Failing at Kickstarter: a Guide

Adapted from a guide I wrote several years ago that you probably didn't see.

Hello! I'm writing this guide to cover the basics of making a Kickstarter page and campaign that probably won't horrifically fail.

A couple of conditions and caveats to that:

1. At time of writing, I've done four Kickstarter campaigns (soon to be five, since ZineQuest 3 is around the corner). All four succeeded, but only one of them was a major success in anything approaching a strong, influential way; the other three did fine, but they weren't anything to write home about.
2. All of my Kickstarters were for tabletop RPGs. That's what most of this blog is about, but if you wandered here for some other purpose, bear in mind that TTRPGs will be the focus. I would tentatively guess that what I advise could be extrapolated; something similar (a board or card game) would be pretty similar, but something more different (a video game) would take significant tweaking.

Regardless, caveat emptor.

This guide is divided into several sections. My advice is loosely ordered according to priority; that is, the first things are more important than the last things—but everything I'm telling you is worth at least something. 

With all that said and done, the guide itself:

1. ACTUALLY MAKE SOMETHING GOOD

This is the simplest part of Kickstarter, but is also probably the most difficult. If you don't make something good, it's much, much harder to get funded. It's worse than that, really: even if your bad thing does get funded (which happens all the time), once it comes out people will realize it's bad, and then you're screwed.

On some level, this feels obvious: "No duh, Sam, of course my game actually has to be good." Sure, sure. Everyone knows you should always do your best.

It's a bit different here, though. While backers don't get to see the final product of what you're making until it's done, they can sniff out a lot about you. Don't cut corners. Keep your standards high the whole way. Show some effort in your product and your page. If you do these, it will show: backers will realize that even if you're not the most ingenious designer or have the snazziest budget, you've poured some heart and soul into the making of it, which counts for a lot.

Dedication is important: part of the allure of Kickstarter is the fabled pipe-dream—the plucky underdog creator that couldn't find a home for their work in the mainstream, and so turned to the crowd.I f you can sell this image, this story, this allure, your project is far more likely to succeed.

The best and simplest way for that dream to feel true is for it to actually be true: if you can show, quickly and easily, that you are turning to Kickstarter as your last best hope, people will latch onto that. 

Likewise, the pages that succeed are the ones that don't feel like sales pitches. Everyone knows a sales pitch and can spot it from a mile off; if you frame your page not as "buy this thing" but as "here is this cool thing I made," you will see more success. 

That's why dedication matters: you have to really and truly love whatever it is you're putting up. People can see that, they can feel it, and they'll back your project because of it.

2. ART MATTERS

There's a notion in some circles—particularly very-online DIY-ish blog-centric game circles—that art basically doesn't matter. That gameplay (and thus, in RPGs, rules text) is king, and art is for the sidelines: window-dressing on the main event.

This is wrong. 

Art is critically important in pitching your game: art is what people first see, what immediately draws their attention, and what sticks in their head after they've gone. A mediocre project with amazing art can and will succeed more than a good project with mediocre art.

The most important art piece in the whole of your game is the pitch thumbnail: it's this art that people see when they're scrolling by your project on Kickstarter, it's this art that will get publicized elsewhere online, and it's this art that will be the icon of your game.

For the page itself, the more art you have, the better. You need text (don't do that weird thing where the entire page is one giant image), but the more you convey about your game through images and artwork and expression, the better. Use art for titling your sections, for breaking up text, for showing off stretch goals, for diagrams, for gameplay, whatever you can. More art is good.

Bad art is death. You could have the best, most creative, most brilliant project in the world, and if you have crummy art, your game will die. The flipside, as mentioned, is that you can have an utterly garbage game, but if it has amazing art, it will sell like hotcakes.

Ideally, you have the liquid cash on-hand ahead of time to fund commissioned pieces for the Kickstarter. You can work with one artist to have a more detailed vision and a clearer idea of what you want—once you've funded and made your money back, you can hire them again for the final book.

If you have zero art and have zero budget, trawl around online for royalty-free images and use those (check pexels, unsplash, wikimedia commons, etc.), or fork over a pittance of cash (<$50 is enough usually) and grab some stock images that fit your game. For any royalty-free images, don't be afraid of recoloring, tweaking, and adjusting them using Photoshop (or gimp, or paint.net, or whatever you have). Having at least a visuals is critical, so get whatever you can, but make it look good.

3. PROVE THAT YOU'RE LEGIT

Straight-up scammers on Kickstarter are relatively rare these days, but everyone's heard horror stories of campaigns that promise the world, hit their funding goal in spades, and then vanish with the cash. Or maybe the creators don't disappear, but they over-promise and then produce mostly garbage once the game's actually released.

There are two key parts to proving you're legit:

First, show you're not a scam. There's no direct etiquette to this, but you should explain who you are, what you need the money for, where the money's going, and what your general estimates are. Be transparent, be honest, and be yourself. If your backers smell something fishy going on, they'll be quick to withdraw and leave you in the lurch. 

Don't promise too much. One of the most common reasons that Kickstarter projects fail after being funded is that they smash through their goal, wildly promise extra content, and only then realize they've massively overscoped and can't pull through. If your stretch goals smack of being too ambitious—let alone the base goals of your campaign—backers will be wary of a scam.

Second, you have to prove that you can actually pull off making the game itself. There are a thousand wannabe game devs that jump on Kickstarter with what they think is a million-dollar idea—and may well be, honestly—but they have zero skills to back up their lofty ambitions. You need to prove that you're a talented designer, one that can actually deliver on what you're promising.

There are several ways to do this: showing off past projects is very helpful. If you've made a 200-page RPG, making a 300-page RPG isn't that much of a stretch for you. It's rare that people will actually click through your portfolio and actually look at what you've made, but just having a volume of work on-hand for reference is extremely useful in proving your credibility.

The best way, really, is to just have a lot of the work done already. Show demos, examples, instances, scenarios, whatever you can to show that you know what you're doing. Getting started is usually the hardest part of these sorts of things; showing you have the core of your game done is a good way to prove that you can get the rest of the way. 

This ties into Point #4:

4. SHOW SOMETHING OFF

Your game is made of stuff. Show that stuff off.

What this stuff is varies a lot based on your game, but a good possible includes:

• Page/spread samples
• Rules text
• Example play procedures
• Actual play of your game
• In-game art
• Character sheets
• Content (items, monsters, classes/playbooks, events, tables, etc.) that will be in the game

Show off as much of this as you can. Don't just tell your backers why your game is cool, show them. Let them see for themselves what they can get if they back your project. Tantalize them. Show off one really dope feature or level or example and they'll want more.

For some games, you might actually give away some for free ahead of time. Lots of RPGs put out their basic hacks or the basic rules early, for free, before the Kickstarter page even launches. This is a good marketing tactic, since it A) gets eyeballs on the project, and B) it means that people know what they're getting their hands on before they dump a bunch of cash. It's also just a good way to build goodwill: people love free stuff, and are a lot more willing to contribute to a paid thing if they already like the free thing.

Ideally, you've actually been doing this for a while before your campaign launches: putting out blog posts, releasing snippets of content, maybe running some playtests for strangers.

This ties into Advice #5:

5. HAVE SOMETHING TO GIVE OUT RIGHT NOW

People love shinies. If you can hang something on a string right in front of them, they’ll take it.

This means that you should have a tier reward, ideally for every tier, that gives something out right then and there. This is probably some kind of playtest kit or early backers kit, something that lets them start playing right away, but it could be something else, like a set of player’s options or an intro module or something.

However you figure it, you want something that you can give away, right now. It's a really good incentive to get people to pledge sooner, rather than later, to hook them in on the impulse buy. Lots of would-be backers think about backing a project and then forget about it, or wait to see if it’s doing well first, or otherwise hang around a lot, and putting something right in front of them is a good way to sell that.

This ties in to #4, too: if you’ve put something out earlier, for free, that can do basically the same thing. A souped-up or revised version of what’s already free is a great incentive: people know what they’re getting and it’s nothing too crazy, but it’s still shiny. Likewise, if backers know they already like something (your free thing), they’ll jump to get more of it (your shiny). It’s a vicious cycle, sorta, but one that profits you immensely.

6. KNOW YOUR MATH

There's a lot of tricky math on Kickstarter, and there are lots of other posts and articles that cover it in more detail than me. I'll hit the best-of list here:

1. On paper, Kickstarter eats 5%, but they will usually end up charging closer to 10% in processing fees. If your budget is super-tight, this might sink you.
2. You'll want separate shipping fees depending where in the world you're sending your physical products; these shipping fees get added onto your total funding amount. If you have a $20 tier and $5 shipping, the total contribution added to your campaign is $25. 
3. You can change tiers after launch, but only if nobody has pledged to them. Go through your tiers and make sure they're all perfect before launching.
   
4. You can always add more tiers; if you have some special reward or early bird tier that sell outs ultra-fast, do another round. Make some more cash.
5. Budget in a little buffer cash. Things always end up a little more expensive than you think, so make sure your "oh shit" fund is intact, in the event that things really go south.

Review all of Kickstarter's funding math. It's very important.

7. ALWAYS BE AROUND

Hit up every single social media outlet you can find: be on Kickstarter constantly, but also be on Twitter, reddit, the Gauntlet, rpg.net, enworld, the RPG blogosphere, the podcast beat, the RPG Discord servers, wherever you can. Be there. As often as you can, as fast as you can. 

Hawk your game. Tell everyone who will listen about it. Always be around to answer questions. There are a number of YouTube channels and blogs and podcasts that will just talk about the newest Kickstarter releases—if any of them turn hits on your game, be there to answer questions (google your project incognito to find them). People will leave comments on your posts, always be ready to answer them. If anyone DMs you, answer them, too. Word of mouth is a powerful force in the RPG sphere, so don’t be afraid to use it.

Likewise, there’s a chance that someone will message you to be on their podcast or come on their show or do something on their chatroom. Take it. There’s a chance they’ll be weird and scummy to you, but more often than not they’re just trying to hawk their own brand, same as you. Those opportunities are beneficial, even if it's just for the eyeballs. 

While your project is live and afterwards, update frequently. I've never heard of anybody complaining about too many updates, and while I could theoretically imagine it, it's better to update more often than necessary than not often enough. Your backers are the most important people to you, so keep them in the loop.

8. DON'T CAP YOUR WHALES

This ties into #6. Whales are the big spenders on projects, the people who will dump proportionately huge amounts of cash into your game. Lots of people will take the low tiers, some people will take the middle tiers, and a few people will grab the high tiers—those are the whales.

Don’t be afraid to have some high tiers. People will take them. Probably not all of them and probably not very fast, but there are definitely backers out there that have deep wallets and are willing to spend on the projects they care about.

Because of this, don’t cap your whales. Always let people spend more money in exchange for stuff. Do combo deals, add on fun knick-knacks, offer to run games, let them name the example NPCs, do whatever you can to charge more. Your whales will eat it up, and you’ll be all the closer to funded for it.

That said—don’t really lose your mind. If your basic low tier is in the $5-$10 range, don’t go putting up tiers for $1000. You can get away with those huge tiers on projects where the baseline is $50, maybe, but don’t do it for small projects. It’s not often that a whale bites by any means, but it definitely does happen. 

Don’t cap your whales. Let people spend their money.

9. USE EVENTS TO YOUR ADVANTAGE

Every once in a while, Kickstarter will run events. For an event, Kickstarter will do some advertising ahead of time to let creators know, and then they’ll have special conditions to join the event. My first game was a part of ZineQuest, where you made a very short RPG (a zine) with some specific formatting conditions. If you fulfilled the requirements and tagged your project correctly, you’d show up on Kickstarter’s ZineQuest page.

There are several other events like this, where doing certain projects can earn you visibility. If you can fit your project into one of these, you’ll be rewarded with lots of free clicks, and possibly the illustrious “Project We Love” tag, which is very hard to get otherwise. Boosting visibility is extremely helpful, and will increase your chances of getting funded.

If you can’t fit your project into the current event, you should be wary. Other projects that are in the event will be getting boosted on Kickstarter, and yours will not. You won’t necessarily get buried, per se, but you’ll be fighting against the current. Trying to launch a non-event project in the middle of an existing event is a dangerous business, one that shouldn’t be undertaken lightly. Be careful, and do your research ahead of time.

IN CONCLUSION

Kickstarter is hard. It’s scary. It’s a lot of work. But! You can use it to fulfill dreams you otherwise could not, to push projects that otherwise would not exist, and to earn the cash needed to keep working the entire time. 

Follow these rules, and you might not horrifically fail. You still might, though. Uncertain. Anyway, good luck.