This article was written by Marcus Beard from The MMOLab Team.
We launched our Kickstarter for Chosen Space: Relaunched about a week ago, and we got to 50%, then 60% far quicker than we thought we ever would.
People have pledged for a variety of reasons: previous players want early access to the new version, curious gamers want a back-to-basics strategic MMORPG, and game designers want to see what’s capable with an engine that requires no programming knowledge.
Despite months of research and planning, running the Kickstarter for a week has taught us more than any post-mortem or blog post (like this one…) could.
We’re still not entirely sure how we got there, but we think these 7 things have something to do with it.
#1. Have a good product
Whether it’s a game like Chosen Space, a water cooler like Coolest or an organisational method like Bullet Journal, the project you’re funding has to inspire people.
No matter what we say below, Chosen Space has drawn pledges because people want to play the game, or they want to use the engine it’s built with. It’s as simple as that.
Fund something that people want to pay for. No one wants to pay for you and your girlfriend to build a gaming PC.
#2. Start Prefundia as early as possible
For those that don’t know, a Prefundia page lets people preview your campaign and sign up to be notified as soon as the Kickstarter goes live. We found it helped people discover and commit to us early.
We only registered a few weeks before but gained 100 people on our mailing list that were potentially interested in the kickstarter.
(Same advice for getting on Kicktraq, but you can only do that when your campaign launch – register the minute it does!)
This can’t be overstated. We’ve probably gained more supporters from our Twitter presence than anywhere else. However ‘getting a twitter feed’ isn’t enough.
@TheMMOLab had less than 100 followers before we started our campaign. When we launched our Prefundia, we starting engaging with people as much as we humanly could.
Sure, #gamedev and #kickstarter and their retweet bots are easy ways to broadcast your message, but nothing beats having a human voice. We engaged in conversations and followed people who are interesting. We also followed people who weren’t that interesting but had backed similar games on Kickstarter.
Of course, followers != backers, but knowing we’ve got 350+ interested enough to follow us on Twitter is a great asset.
#4. Make it easy for press to write about you
Mainstream press don’t really want to write about a text-heavy, turn-based, in-browser space MMORPG. Not when there’s games like Elite: Dangerous around.
We had to get creative when writing to journalists (which we did individually). Bullet point and bold your most exciting features. Learn what certain publications like to write about, and trim your pitches to match. Give them the links they need without being too heavy on text.
We haven’t had coverage from major outlets yet, but we’ve scored quite a few press hits which were no doubt responsible for a handful of backers each.
#5. Don’t invest in advertising without testing first
We spend a lot of time thinking about how we’d use our very limited advertising budget – where to advertise, when to advertise and on which platforms.
For Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and Google Ads, we ran a short test-run in the first week of the Chosen Space Kickstarter. The results ranged from negligible to nonexistent, so we scrapped everything before seeing more money go down the drain.
That’s not to say it won’t work well for your campaign, but we found our time, energy and money was better spent elsewhere.
#6. Make your limited rewards limited
The biggest return we got from a single action was changing the number of ‘limited’ rewards we could give out.
For Chosen Space, most reward tiers will let you name either a planet, a star or a solar system. There’s technically no limit to how many of these we can give out, but we wouldn’t want to do more than, say, 500 each – that would be a ball ache.
The problem is, seeing [487 of 500 remaining] is much less attractive than seeing [12 of 25 remaining]. If we sell all 25, we’re doing very well – and you can always add more rewards if they sell out.
After we restricted the amount at each tier, people were more inclined to pledge now, rather than thinking ‘I can just pledge later’ before forgetting about the campaign entirely.
#7. Make friends
Project creators look out for other project creators. If you plug a Kickstarter as it’s nearing its final days, chances are you’ll have the same done for you in return. We even had another creator back Chosen Space just because he wants to play it!
Twitter is a great way to do this, follow the campaign you look up to, and follow the good people on #kickstarter. Kickspy is a great tool for finding similar projects launching at the same time as you – they’ll be the best friends you ever make.
If you want advice or help, people will rarely say ‘no’ if you ask. Especially us, we’re only an email away.
(Addendum: Don’t understimate the power of real life friends & family, and don’t assume they’ll back you because they love you. It will be harder than you think to get them to actually do it so start early. Don’t ask them to just back with $1 – they may be inclined to give more!)
Conclusion
That’s some of the bigger things we’ve learned (so far) and that’s only in the first week. You’ll learn a whole heap of new things in your first week if you do it yourself – trust us.
