Using Kickstarter to fund your Kickstarter
Ideas are like crack. I think I‘m an addict.
A few months ago I had an idea. Can you Kickstarter a Kickstarter (what th-)?
I asked that question because of another idea I had. What if someone could tell an interesting epic fantasy story, not through books or movies, but through a series of fun card games? It would be a visual, character-rich, action-packed, cinematic, artistic, gaming storyverse (a universe of stories?). Basically, I just had questions at this point. Had it been done? Could it be done? How would I even go about doing this? Would anyone care?
I had to start somewhere. Probably the place to begin would be a story? Or the characters? Wait, maybe a loose plot? Unsure, I started to sketch.
And over the course of the next few minutes I sketched out a skeleton of what would later be called the world of Ridian. There were ideas that sounded interesting: names, rhyming quests, plots, characters and so forth?—?but up until now they were just words. Once I started, the ideas kept coming, and I got caught up in the rush of an idea high, but I still hadn’t come any closer to learning if anyone would care.
I needed a sounding board. I needed creative and passionate people to bounce ideas off of. I needed to build this with people, not just for people.
How might I go about designing this with a community? There were a number of things I wanted to initially test but I decided to pick one thing: will people pay for a concept as crazy as this? “If people pay, people care,” I thought. My hypothesis was by putting up a pay wall, it might filter out the well wishers and would leave people who self select to join the project and would actually help build it. I felt like the right method for testing this was to launch a Kickstarter. “I should just launch one as fast as I can,” I thought. There were two clear benefits I saw to doing a Kickstarter; It is relatively easy to setup on my end, and Kickstarter is a safe place to build a small community of passionate supporters.
So the plan was Kickstarter 1 would build a community and discuss ideas with that community to develop Kickstarter 2 which would be even bigger and better!
The funding goal was set to cover the cost of printing the card game, shipping and the upfront cost of the art. Thus Assassins was born. What started out as a plan to do a Kickstarter, turned into a plan to do a pre-Kickstarter Kickstarter. The first to fund the second.
The first one needed a premise though and it had to be simple. After agonizing over gameplay and mechanics for a while, I settled on the popular gametype of secret identity political party game, akin to Mafia, or Werewolf. The stage was now set. I had a gametype, strong characters, and a plan to execute. With that I launched my Kickstarter and watched the “funded” bar slowly climb towards 100%.
Using Kickstarter to fund my future Kickstarter was a great way to test the appeal of the characters and some of the core concepts.
The key here is that I was just looking for people to help me decide the direction I should head in the future?—?rushing to get a group to learn from. I am using this first Kickstarter to find like minds, people who care about what I am trying to accomplish, and I know they care because they have already put money toward it. I am now going to be developing out the story, characters and lore of the world of Ridian. No more guessing, just a 1 to 1 connection with an engaged and interested community.
Using Kickstarter to fund your new ideas is a great way to find people to help you develop them into good ones.
The results
The experiment was a success. In case you were curious, I thought I would also share some data from the campaign. I shipped to 13 different countries?—?83 people bought 98 decks. I still get orders every week, and I am currently negotiating a deal with a game shop in Seattle to sell Assassins.
There are so many things I learned from this Kickstarter experiment, things I got right, things I got wrong, and many things I learned along the way. If you have an (bad or good) idea, that still needs to be tested, consider doing a Kickstarter. Benefits include:
- gauge interest level
- very low risk if it’s a bad idea
- safe way to collect money and start a small community
The end result was I got the assets I needed to start work on my card game series, so yeah, I guess you can use Kickstarter to fund your Kickstarter?—?cool.
If you were one of the 83 who helped bring Assassins to life— thank you, and I look forward to working with you to develop it further.
“Great minds discuss ideas.”~Eleanor Roosevelt
The cool money image can be found here. Thanks for reading! Oh and, please tap or click “??” to help to promote this tale to others.