Kickstarter Tips

last updated Tue May 1 11:08:15 UTC 2012

If you know of other good articles on Kickstarter for RPGs I'd like to hear about them at cdr AT telemancy.com.

• Kickstarter Bulletpoints by Fred Hicks
• Running a Kickstarter is like running a business on G+ by Fred Hicks
• Fred Hicks' Kickstarter Links on pinterest
• Successful Kickstarter Campaigns | Visual Storytelling a summary of principles learned about Kickstarter
• 15 Steps for a Successful Kickstarter Project | GMSarli Games
• Advent of the Insurgent Creative Day 2: Kickstarter - “what is far more valuable than the money is the community that you've created at the end of your funding period.”
• The Kickstarter RPG Marketplace | Sandy's Soapbox #173 | RPGnet
• How to Succeed or Fail on Kickstarter | Purple Pawn
• Kickstarter: Managing Expectations and Evaluating Goals by Joe McDaldno re Perfect vs. Monsterhearts
• 150 RPG Crowdfunding Projects analyzed at Geek Industrial Complex. Part 2 Part 3
• Steven Long's Reflections of a First Time Kickstarter
• Purple Pawn's list of Kickstarter tabletop game projects (RPG, board, card)
• RPG Kickstarters Tumblr

These aren't about RPGs but have very interesting information anyway:

• How to Make an Awesome Kickstarter Video
• Kickstarter has a preview link to share project with friends and collaboraters before launch
• Kickstarter tips from a fan of crowd-funding
• Kickstarter projects that reach 30% of funding succeed more than 90% of the time April 28, 2011
• Kickstarter Trends in Pricing and Duration September 21, 2010
• How to Increase Your Video Viewership: Keep it short, frontload, be specific and personal
• Kickstartup - Successful fundraising with Kickstarter and the (re)making of Art Space Tokyo - Craig Mod
• Olga Nunes' Kickstarter advice
• Kickstarted: How one company is revolutionizing product development tips: Tell a passionate story, Keep it simple, Get the word out, Expect failure but prepare for success (Communication, Execution) - “We found a good company -- Shipwire -- that does order fulfillment, so that worked out really well.”
• 2011 Kickstarter stats
• Lessons for Kickstarter creators from the worst project I ever funded by Matt Haughey.
• 10 Project Tips from Ted Rall of Comix Journalism
• Ze Frank Kickstarter postmortem - “I have noticed a tendency to give updates related to trying to get more money - ‘We are almost there, help me raise another X amount.’ I don't think this is a good strategy. You are speaking to people that have already supported you, and if you want them to promote you further I think you owe it to them to come up with new interesting and fun things to share instead of just asking them to restate your cause. I would think foremost about giving back, and then about creating new, shareable media.”
• Dan Abrams Guide to Kickstarter Success
• Tim Schafer's Top 5 Pitch Tips for Kickstarter Success (from Double Fine Adventure)

One tricky bit of the Kickstarter interface: you to use the same button you use to make proposals to go ahead and set up/launch an approved project.

For people who haven't done Kickstarter before, here are some useful things to know about the surveys you do at the end to gather information from backers. These are courtesy Steven Long from Hero Games' Book of the Empress Kickstarter:

• You can customize questions by reward level, and have to.
• There's no way no way to re-arrange the questions once you type them in, so get it right the first time or start all over.
• Questions can be single-answer or multiple choice. The latter start with two default choice slots but you can add more.
• the survey comes with a pre-built "what's your name and address?" question that handles international addresses. You can remove it if you want.
• You can only send a survey once per reward tier.
• There's no option to establish a deadline for responses; you have to type one into the text of the question if you want an answer quickly.
• For multiple choice questions with "Yes" or "No" responses, you have to type out the whole word, or the options will be labeled Y or N.