Reflections on my First Kickstarter – Part 1 of 3: Planning and Launch

There’s the moment just before it all starts, when your mouse hovers over the ‘launch’ button and you know you can step back. No-one will know you didn’t follow through. That watching page will just disappear and everyone will forget. You don’t need to do this to yourself. You can take the easier route.

Or you can press ‘launch’ and enter into the weird world of crowdfunding – a world where you have seen so many people lose money, be locked into years of passive aggressive commentary because they offered too much, or be battered by real life issues to the point of breakdown. And you know you’re the sort of person who frets if they owe someone as much as a penny. The sort of person who will take every cancelled pledge personally, and who will suffer paralysing imposter syndrome before, during and after the campaign.

All of this flashes through your mind as you click ‘launch’

How did I get here?

Hi, my name’s Neil – some of you will remember me from the late 2000s as a part of the UK design posse, the Collective Endeavour. I wrote games about Napoleonic daring-do, and one of them even got a runners-up nod at the Indie RPG Awards. It was cool. I left my games design boots in the ring around 2013 as I faced massive personal changes and a realisation that the games design space was taking a horrible turn for the toxic. I just didn’t need that in my life. Cut forwards nearly a decade and became part of the Liminal RPG community and did some writing for that game, as the entire subject matter it covers is like catnip to me. I even went as far as to set up a Patreon for my non-canon writings and I have a lovely little community there.

There has, however, always been a niggle in the back of my brain to get back to publishing. I’m a different person now – more resilient and certainly more forthright. Maybe even thicker skinned. And I have ideas – so many ideas. But the indie publishing game has changed, as has the hobby’s perception of good product and bad product. Could I still ‘compete’?

Well, my Mam didn’t raise a quiet bairn, so I hatched a plan. Take the material I had already written for the Patreon, repackage it and see whether anyone would buy it! That’s a good shout – minimal new effort and a nice barometer for my tolerance for this stuff. Let’s go!

Having the skills to pay the bills

One of the first hurdles I had to overcome was working out whether this venture would be profitable. The first thing I did was whip up a quick spreadsheet to have a working model for costing, taking into account good old fixed and variable costs, and those costs which are tiered, like boxes of envelopes and well, printing.

Now I consider myself fortunate when it comes to certain parts of this process. Obviously I write my own words, but I’ve worked with layout software for years so I can do that by myself too. My daughter is an English graduate and a grammar pendant, so she’s going to be doing the editing once-over on the text. And the nature of the format I chose means I can use a lot of rights free art and keep a consistent feel for the project. I won’t always be this lucky in projects, but I am on this one. Oh, and I have a very nice local printer who I do things with in my professional life, who does things with very reasonable rates. Easy communication and minimal chances of a shipping crisis. All good. 

So after some spreadsheeting I had the cost down to something workable, and a decent surplus, even taking into account tax and Kickstarter take. This could work!

Setting up Kickstarter

This wasn’t as hard as I expected, at all. I chose Kickstarter because it was the system I was most familiar with as a pledger and the onboarding process was a step-by-step guide through what was needed. Probably the most ‘tricky’ part was setting up my bank account and there are handy guides for that online. 

One thing I would note is that you really need a plan beforehand, especially for the look and feel of your pages, and the text you’re going to use. I tried to do it ‘live’ in the system and then come back to edit it after it had been approved, and some can change, but others cannot. For example, I couldn’t hold in my mind whether the phrase was ‘paranormal studies’ or ‘paranormal research’ and if you look closely you can see details on the pages where one version was locked down when I chose the other as the final version.

Shipping. Oh, Bloody Shipping

Shipping was by far and away the hardest part of this entire process and to be honest, I bottled it.

The first hurdle I faced was the EU General Product Safety Regulation rules. Without going into the long weeds with this one, it renders exporting even a simple 32-page booklet into the EU almost impossible without huge admin burdens and a third party appointed on your behalf in the EU. Sure, you could ignore it and risk a fine, but no, that’s not on the cards. So I had to make the difficult decision to exclude the EU from shipping physical product. 

And then Trump decided to declare open tariff wars on the world. While I know that wouldn’t have any impact on me directly, it’s not something I wanted to deal with on the other end. And finally I just couldn’t work out how to exclude the EU from the shipping menu. It allows you to specify countries, but not just exclude one.

At this point, I could see that perfect was acting as a barrier to the good, and decided to keep it UK only, and explain in the campaign. I wasn’t happy with that decision and I wish it was different. This isn’t even a Brexit thing either, so I can’t do my normal ranting!

Promotion

Another thing to work out beforehand is the degree to which you want to promote your project. And what I really mean by that is how much appetite you have to splurge yourself across the internet begging for pledges. 

I love crowdfunding because many successes are like a masterclass in Seth Godin’s concept of permission marketing. You bank permission prior to the campaign by being a good actor online, contributing to the community and generally being seen by people as a giver rather than a taker. Then, when the time comes, you spend that permission by asking people to tolerate your constant pimping of your project.

I’ve been pretty present in all of the Liminal spaces online for a while now – Facebook, Discord, Reddit – and I’ve got used to posting on Bluesky now with the frequency I used to on Twitter. I’m active on a couple of forum based sites and well, that’s enough for me. 

Even though I’ve worked professionally or academically in marketing almost all my working life, when it comes to personal marketing … I hate it. So I made a plan of posting on very specific days in the campaign and keeping it to that. I activated the pre-launch page about four weeks before the campaign with a little pimpage and got a lot more watchers than I thought I would.

Ignore the Science.

And then I went on holiday! While other people would have been building the promotion towards the launch, I was lounging in a bar in Tunisia, watching Newcastle beat Leicester. When I got back, I pottered around the house, and then got up on Sunday morning and thought … well, might as well launch the thing eh? At 7am. On a Sunday.

Somewhere, deep in the depths of the internet, a cabal of kickstarter professionals are screaming at the screen, cursing me. Why would I do that?

Because, dear reader, I haven’t bought into the ‘fulfilled in seven seconds’ hype. I also know that having something being in someone’s feed when they are lazily scrolling on a Sunday morning is more likely to see a conversion to action than it appearing when they are at work. And – and really this is the most important part – I was going out later on that day, and if I didn’t do it then it would never get done.

Funded in an hour. Ha ha – go, go breakfast gamers!

Now what?

Was it difficult? No, but I also realise I had a lot of advantages and well, I kept it as simple as possible, Painfully so, in fact. No stretch goals, no video, no complicated tiers. All very simple. And frankly, I don’t think it suffered because of that simplicity. In many ways though, the main barrier I faced was my own qualms over the whole process and that niggling feeling it would be easier to not do it, than do it.

Anyway, the cat was out of the bag now though, and the campaign was underway. What would happen? How big would it get? What pitfalls would I face? That’s in Part Two!