So, I made a thing (part 1)
a post-mortem of Distal's campaign, funding, and delivery.
This time May of last year, I was a couple weeks out from the end of my BackerKit campaign. It was an attempt to fund a new (solo-developed and distinctly my own,) TTRPG by the name of Distal. It was to be funded by a community of folks who either liked what I was aiming for, or supported me as a person enough to contribute.
Now, if you’re reading this, there’s a high likelihood that you’ve never tried to fund a major project through a crowdfunding platform.
Don’t worry, neither had I.
In this post, we’re going to walk through what the process was like, for me. Including the how-tos, how-not-tos, and whether-you-shoulds.
First Thing’s First: Results
Distal was successfully funded May 29, 2024. It reached $19,560 of its $18,000 goal via 216 Backers over the course of a 36-day campaign, and ended up making an additional $5,222 via pre-orders after the campaign closed. That’s a total of $24,782 funds raised.
As of this month, all orders of Distal have been shipped to Backers, putting my turnaround time at less than a year from receiving funds. Pretty dope, given the scope of the project. Even projects with dedicated teams and buckets of funding (where’s my freaking book, MCDM?) don’t move this fast.
To be fair: Development tends to move slower when you’ve got a lot of cooks in the (design) kitchen. Same is also true of the games industry, except you have to deal with a bunch of corporate bureaucracy on top of it. It’s much easier to keep momentum when the vision holder is also the one doing all the work.
What Was the Project, Anyway?
Distal is a traditional, d20 fantasy TTRPG where yadda yadda yadda, there’s a website. The BackerKit campaign aimed to mainly fund the art and production of the books, and I figured $18,000 was the respectable, bare minimum I could get by with. Art is expensive, printing books is expensive (especially 8.5 x 11in format and a little under 300 pages), and simultaneously living “real life” — is also expensive.
Originally though, I wanted more than this. My self-bargained threshold to get the system developed, the books made, and be able to have enough to live off of was $80,000. After all, if I was doing the work, I should also be paying myself a salary so that I can.
Fortunately, I was talked out of doing that by some mentors I found in the BackerKit Discord. Shout out to Josh from Lone Colossus (who also does the solo-dev thing) in particular.
That said, the $18,000 price point was my first mistake, though one I don’t regret. It was, by modern standards (believe it or not,) too high, and I would have “made more” if I had set that price much lower.
So how did I get by? I ended up pulling all the money from my 401K and just living off of that while I built the game. Please don’t do that, if you can help it. I don’t recommend it.
I’m going to take a brief intermission here to get on my soapbox.
Based on how crowdfunding platforms work, you need interest and momentum. A way to do that cheaply is to slap a FUNDED IN UNDER TWO MINUTES!!! sticker on your thumbnail, and people think “wow, it must be good!” or “wow, this must be a safe bet!” Neither are true.
Then you open up the page and, surprise surprise, it’s “funded” because the asking price is unrealistically low. Too low to fund what you’re asking for (art, production, etc.), and certainly too low to fund the wages of anyone who is working on the project.
The justification for this practice is often that “it’s fine as long as you are willing to pay out of pocket for the rest of it,” which is very much a marketing gray area. Like putting clickbait thumbnail titles on your videos and saying “it’s not clickbait if you address the video title.”
I think deep down we all know that’s a garbage mentality, but the viewership is complicit in clicking on the hyperbolic drama-fueled thumbnails, or funding projects who are engaging in obviously-deceptive practices.
MCDM, to their credit, said “This is the amount we need ($800,000) in order to make this game. If there isn’t enough interest, we won’t make it.” and then went on to have one of the most successful ($4,600,520 and 30,177 Backers) crowd funding campaigns on BackerKit full stop.
That’s what we should be doing, as creators. Using the platform to make an honest pitch and plea to the public. But feasibility often trumps possibility, so here were are.
Alright, soapbox off.
What Skills Do You Have?
I’ve worked with Photoshop for a long time. Decades at this point. I also write a lot, have experience in marketing & advertising, know my way around social media, and am fairly tech savvy. That jack-of-all trades skillset allowed me to be the designer, editor, writer, advertiser, campaign manager, fulfillment provider, and so on.
You’ll need to be, too. (Or find others who can fill your deficiencies.)
A lot goes into building a crowdfunding page. Among other things, it needs to be…
Consistent, Concise, Coherent
Visually compelling
Well-organized
Continually maintained (constantly updated, engaged with the community, etc.)
Below is a snippet of the campaign page, and just a handful of the elements that needed to be designed, considered, and executed on.
Quick resources breakdown.
Finding brand colors: https://coolors.co
(Here’s what I use for Distal: https://coolors.co/fcfafa-6d6e51-3b5249-313d3aMockup Templates: https://elements.envato.com/
Both Envato Elements (as above) and Adobe Fonts are good resources for Fonts you can license: https://fonts.adobe.com/
The Juxtaposition of a Crowdfunder
Successful crowd funding campaigns have a great hook, which includes great art. However… presumably, if you’re looking for support via crowdfunding, you may not have the funds for art to begin with.
For better and for worse, there is definitely some level of investment you’ll need to make right out the gate it you want anyone to pay attention.
There are a few ways to do that. One of which is…
Advertising
The main investment I made early on was a fair deal of Advertising, and a little bit of art. If I could go back in time, I would have flipped that, focusing instead on a fair deal of Art, with a little bit of advertising.
Advertising Efforts:
$1760 - Facebook
$493 - Reddit
$144 - Business Cards (made for PAX, and none of which were given out)
$139 - Twitter
$40 - RPG.net (banner ad for a month)
The bulk of the above was prior to the campaign, to gather Followers on the BackerKit pre-launch page, but there was a steady flow throughout the entirety of the campaign, in hopes that the spend would be outpaced by the gain.
I was wrong.
It’s a bit difficult to track the damage, but below are some charts showing checkout rates, amounts pledged, and the incoming links.
This first one is sorted by “Number of Visits”. Notice Reddit at 4,766 visits and no conversions; “t.co” which is Twitter at the bottom there with 263 visits, 1 checkout, and… also no conversions.
Facebook had more success, but it’s difficult to survey, because the link referrals are based on which ad they clicked on (of which there were many permutations,) which campaign, and whether they were on mobile, and I wasn’t being diligent about my link tracking.
Here’s another chart, sorted by pledge amount. Notice the big one there at the top, YouTube. That was “free” advertising. Both from my own YouTube channel, as well as Commander Cyrious’ channel (which was a saving grace toward the end of the campaign, we’ll talk about that later.)
Overall, the results were pretty clear. The most external value came from YouTube, where the folks who knew me already frequented, and could be most easily reached.
The majority of the combined revenue came from marketing natively through BackerKit itself, via updates on the campaign, email campaigns, the community sharing via the social buttons, and searches occurring on BackerKit.
From advertising alone, Facebook performed the best, and I invested more money into it to prop up those numbers once some experimentation was done showing that Reddit and Twitter just weren’t working out.
THAT SAID. I didn’t nearly make my money back from advertising on Facebook directly, and was hoping that word of mouth would help prop the numbers up. I don’t believe that happened, however.
So, would I do advertising again? Maybe. I definitely made some mistakes early on.
The Mistakes
I mentioned earlier that, if I could do this over again, I would have invested more in art, and less in advertising, early on. This was one of the biggest lessons I took away from the entire crowdfunding experience.
For a long time, my main source of imagery was just my game’s logo on top of a thematic background image I had commissioned on Fiverr ($126). This was reused in variation for all of the marketing material, nearly all the imagery on the BackerKit page, and social channels (Facebook, Discord, Twitter, etc.)
I tried to make it apparent at a glance what the project was about, given my limited resources. That said, there was plenty of room to grow.
The imagery above didn’t garner much in the way of attention, via advertising (which occurred on Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter, primarily,) so I tried A/B testing some alternatives.
Later in the process, I had commissioned my first proper character art ($550). It was a species from the game called an “Atlean”. Knowing that people love faces on advertisements, I slapped her visage on them and gave that a shot. Here’s an example.
It performed worse.
Granted, there was more going on here, and there were loads of permutations that I made for Facebook, in different sizes, different arrangements, colors, focuses. It’s all par for the course when you’re making advertising material, and Facebook does a good job at finding which permutations work best.
That said. Worse. Consistently worse.
The reason was obvious to me (in hindsight) that it was telling people less about my game, or giving the wrong impression. “I’m not super interested in this game about fish-people.”
About half way through the campaign, I had new art made ($550). Human art.
There were loads of permutations of this one, as well. In every instance, it performed better. People can say “Oh, medieval fantasy. I get it.” and align themselves with the idea more quickly.
Garnering (More) Attention
This imagery ended up being a big part of my campaign moving forward. Not the only imagery, but certainly a piece that folks started recognizing and glomming onto.
Too little too late, however.
BackerKit is a very momentum-based platform. Campaigns that get on the front page (and stay there) tend to do incredibly well. You want to be above the fold, top 3 of the top 10 carousel, if you can manage.
Here’s the front page I’m talking about.
But getting there in the first place is driven by community interaction. Liking all your posts, sharing your posts, spending money, starting (and maintaining hype trains.) All of these play into the algorithm that BackerKit uses to determine the cream of the crop.
Momentum means that it needs to keep happening, too.
My follower count was small, and there was only so much I could do to motivate them to action, and at every turn, I tried to make that as frictionless as possible.
Here’s an example of a video where I offered guidance on how to help. This was embedded into an email along with other useful information:
Aside from updates like these, I got a lot of help from “real life” folks who were helping prop up the engagement numbers. After a hard fought battle, we did broach the 10th spot, after starting off in like… the 20s or 30s, but that was short lived.
Momentum was lost, at that point. Inertia set in, and I was left to suffer that mid-campaign dip that nearly all campaigns do… but I went into it far, far from my goals.
TO BE CONTINUED…
Alright folks. This post is long enough that I’d like to break it up into multiple parts. In the next one, we’ll get into how the campaign played out as it went on.
-Wrel
"game about fish-people" :D