Yes, I’d backed one or two projects before. No, we didn’t have the slightest idea of how to do a Kickstarter campaign. And most importantly, we knew that.
So we started gathering information. Kickstarter officially came to Slovenia in October 2020, three months before the SnowBoardGames project was born. My colleague who knew I was interested in the platform forwarded the news to me, and after that, it really went viral within my community. A bunch of Slovene projects also launched their campaigns at that time and they were covered by the media, so when I was looking for information about Kickstarter in January, I was certain that I would find a lecture or an event on the topic.
I was right. I didn’t really have to look hard, and the event was scheduled for the next day. It was a lecture given by Žiga Vrtačič and Franci Zidar, two of the key team members of Bird Buddy, which was becoming the most funded Slovenian Kickstarter project, and had raised over 4 million Euros with a few days until the end of the campaign.
The event was held online — one of the few positive things that covid has brought, as it makes afternoon events much more accessible if I don’t have to drive all the way to Ljubljana. So my fiancé and I sat in front of a computer, armed with pen and paper and ready to take notes. Bird Buddy is a smart bird feeder with a camera that connects to your mobile, so I was expecting a lot of talk about technical aspects of the project and development process, prototypes and stuff like that that I’m familiar with.
And I was in for a surprise. A few minutes in, we were hearing about guerrilla marketing, landing page, pitch deck, Facebook ads, ROAS, some sort of a pixel and something called leads. Most of it was _(insert a language that you have no idea about) to me, and I was writing down a list of keywords to google. I was completely out of my depth and I had no idea that marketing was such an important part of going to Kickstarter. That was one of the key points that I took from the lecture.
Another one was that backers want to be part of a story. At the end, there was some time for questions, and someone said that they have a developed product and want to go to Kickstarter, and asked for some advice. And the response from the lecturers was, why go to Kickstarter if they are so far along with the project. They explained that people love to be included in the development process and that a major part of their pre-launch was focused on that. Apparently, this way, people feel more involved with the project and are more likely to back it.
This information came just at the right time from us — the game was in an early prototype stage and we realised that we don’t have to keep it to ourselves until we think it’s finished, but rather we can share it with the public and ask questions. We can get early feedback and end up with a much better end result than we would on our own, and we can ask our potential customers about the design dilemmas as we face them. And as an added bonus, people will learn about our game and take part in its development. It was a win-win.
We googled through the list of keywords after the lecture and did some research about some of the things that were mentioned, but we felt we were just scratching the surface and that there must be more unknowns that we are not aware of, and that we would have a hard time finding on our own
Having a mentor
When I was little, a very wise person told me that experience is the best teacher, but that the knowledge learned through personal experience is expensive. And that I should learn from other people’s experience too, since it’s much cheaper and faster, as I don’t have to repeat the same mistakes they did. I agree with that principle and it has proven valuable several times before. (On a side note: of course, there are times when I don’t follow it and when I want to try something my way and think the outcome for me will be different because I’ll do something that no one has thought of before. There are times when one has to try untried approaches to achieve progress. But this was definitely not one of those times.)
So we talked to some people we knew who had experience with Kickstarter and we got some really great insights. But there was also someone we didn’t know personally that we wished to talk to. He has run very successful Kickstarter projects himself and he has helped several others, and if you mention Slovenia and Kickstarter, his name is guaranteed to come up. Niko Klanšek. So, how do we get in touch with him?
Google didn’t find any events that he would be speaking at, so I decided I would simply connect with him on LinkedIn first, follow his posts, and hopefully, there’ll be one about him giving a lecture on Kickstarter somewhere soon. And if not, I’d message him personally and ask about it. So I clicked that ‘Connect’ button. There was no immediate response and I was beginning to doubt my approach and realised I should’ve at least included a note about who I am and what my motivation is, as I was some random stranger. Oh well. But Niko did in fact accept my invitation.
And I learned through his post that he’s organising an online Crowdfunding Boot Camp, where he’ll be working with teams and individuals who want to prepare and launch a crowdfunding campaign. Well, what more could we wish for? The timeline, 12 weeks, seemed a bit tight for our project, as we only had an early prototype, and there was that tiny detail that the original post was published in December. It was already mid-January when we discovered it, and the Boot Camp was supposed to start on January 25th, with only 7 projects accepted into the programme.
It was a long shot that the applications were still open, but hey, we were committed by then. So in a few hours, we prepared a short presentation of our project and our team, included some photos of the prototype, found a photo of us that we were kind of happy with, gave it to a few people to read through to make sure that we’re not messing up anything important and then sent it and kept our fingers crossed. We got a reply from Niko that the project looks interesting. That he already has the 7 projects selected, as the start of the Boot Camp is only a week away, but that there is room for a project like ours and that we should meet online (soon). And we got in!
We were guessing about what it was that got us in so last minute and we later learned that a major factor was that our project was a game. There were 4 other board game projects already in the Boot Camp and we looked like a good fit. Sometimes luck really is on your side.
The Boot Camp group got together twice a week. Monday, we would cover a new topic and get assignments related to that topic and our project, and Thursday, we had an online co-working session. The first weeks seem a lifetime ago now, so much has happened in those 3 and a half months, but I remember the sheer amount of information we got condensed in each session was just incredible. All of the stuff that the Bird Buddy team talked about that was Chinese to me at that time, and that I’ve googled and understood later, started to come together as we were doing it in practice and integrating it into our projects. Niko separated information into topics and structured it perfectly, so that we got just the right amount of information we were prepared for the task at hand (although the tasks sometimes still felt humongous), but not too much that we would be completely drowned in it.
One occasion where I realised just how precious his guidance is was when we talked to Predrag from Forsage Games. He has done 5 successful Kickstarter campaigns in board games and Niko invited him to join us on a co-working session and share his experience. We were still relatively at the beginning of the Boot Camp and Predrag, of course, talked about the whole campaign. At some point, he mentioned something called BackerKit that you do after Kickstarter and I remember thinking: ‘Wait, what? Aren’t we only doing Kickstarter? What’s that Backer-something now?’ And I looked at others and I don’t know if they were really as confused (and alarmed) as I was, or if it was just me, projecting my feelings. But then I looked at Niko and he was calm, nodding, and he shared a link to BackerKit in chat and I was like: ‘Okay, Niko knows about it. We’ve got it covered.’
Another major part of the Crowdfunding Boot Camp is that there are 8 projects sharing the same experience. It’s incredibly helpful to be in contact with people who are going through something similar to what we are and share ideas and advice. And I think our group is really amazing and I feel incredibly lucky and privileged to be a part of it. The projects were at different stages when the Boot Camp started, and two of them have already launched their Kickstarter campaigns, while some of us still have a lot of work to do before we can launch the pre-launch page.
But more about that in the next posts! Taking a look back at how it all began has given me motivation to squeeze in some more work before I go to bed. And we’re a bit behind on materials for our Kickstarter page, so I’d better take it!
I wish you loads of motivation in your endeavours!
Nika