Crowdfunding Post-Mortem: Big Trouble For A Little Blood & Visitors To Fairhaven
Crowdfunding niche products and trying out new techniques
This one is for the other creators out there! My recent Kickstarter is completely fulfilled (minus a couple folks who haven’t filled out their survey). I’ve shipped out inventory to Goodman Games and they’ve be carrying some copies at Gen Con too. The PoD/PDF will be on sale on DTRPG shortly thereafter. That means that it’s time for a post-mortem on this project. So this post is primarily for the creators out there! It’s gonna cover what I learned from this project. I tried a few new things out and I’m gonna covered whether or not I think they’re techniques that I’ll try again and if other folks should try them.
Profitability
The first thing that we need to discuss is whether or not this project made money. The short version of yes, but only barely. After Kickstarter took their cut, I got about 3.9k from this campaign. I spent about 2.1k on art and editing, 1.2k on print production, and $800 on shipping costs. So that’s 4.1k. However, there’s about another $750 in revenue that I get from sales to online retailers. So I only made about $650 in profit here, but I do get a couple more cool things to sell online so there’ll be future income from that. But for now that means I got about a 13% profit from all the resulting revenue from this and that’s pretty low.
Do I count that level of profitability as “successful?”? How could it have been more profitable?
Well, I could have spent less on art, but I think I would have come away with an inferior product. I used stock art in this product but only where I felt it was a good fit. The only other option here is to do the illustrations myself and that definitely would have made it an inferior product. I think it’s important to note that all the art money was spent on Big Trouble For A Little Blood. Visitors to Fairhaven was all public domain art. So it’s actually the more “profitable” product.
Alternatively, I could have charged more on one or both of these products. I did think about that but still feel like I offered these products at fair prices and don’t think that just increasing the price would have been a great solution either.
In the end, yes, this project was successful and I’m happy with it. I really wanted to get these adventures out into the world because I’m proud of them.
Why am I still using Kickstarter?
Both these books were basically done. I could have just printed and sold them. So why still use Kickstarter (or any other crowdfunding platform for that matter)? Basically it’s for marketing purposes, which was not apart of the original intent of Kickstarter’s business model but it certainly is now. Kickstarter also offloading a lot of work that I’d have to do if I wanted to take pre-orders off my own online store (which is not something that I currently have so that’d be a whole task). They take care of payments and taxes. That alone relieves me of a huge headache that I’d prefer to not to add to my plate.
New Things That I Tried
This will be the largest section. I have a couple big projects that I’m planning for next year so I wanted to test out a couple things on a small level.
Enamel Pins
I’ve done patches before and wanted to see how folks like enamel pins. I think they’re cool and have tons of them on my jacket. But I didn’t see that much excitement about these. Admittedly, the “lucky halfling foot” wasn’t super on theme, but it was still weird. Let me know in the comments. Do you prefer getting pins or patches?
Signed Copies - Add-On vs Pledge Level
Before I’ve done signed copies of the new books as a pledge level. This time I tried it out as an add-on. I think it’s important to not have too many different pledge levels, as that can get confusing. That was the reasoning behind moving them to be an “add-on” item. This seems to result in fewer (percentage wise) people choosing to get this.
On one hand, that’s profit lost. But on the other hand, signing copies does complicate the packaging process (any level of package customization does). I think this was an okay move. Unsure if I’ll do it again, but I’m good with the result. May require another test to get more information on this.
Not Directly Selling PDFs of Product Backlog
For the duration of the Kickstarter, I put the PDFs of everything that I’ve done on sale via DriveThruRPG. This was done to offload the small effort of manually sending out PDF pledges to backers. This is not a huge effort, but I wanted to see if I could make it easier.
However, I looked at the previous month of sales on DTRPG and also the same month from last year. There wasn’t a sales increase of PDFs on the same level as I’d expect to get directly through the KS campaign. I honestly expected to see this, but wanted to confirm my theory. When you add extra clicks to any process, especially when it requires folks going to a whole different website, then you’re bound to get less folks completing the process. I definitely won’t be doing this again. I’ll be selling backlog PDFs directly through all future crowdfunding campaigns.
Add-ons: Bundles Instead of Individual Items
With old KS campaigns, I’d sell individual products but I did bundles of items on this one. So I didn’t sell my Elfland zine, I instead sold my Elfland zine, the pamphlet adventure, and the adventure module that were all produced together and are thematically linked. Only a single person added this to their order. With the MCC bundle, only two people added that to their orders. That is a huge downwards change as opposed to physical product backlog sales on my previous Kickstarter campaigns.
I made this change because adding any level of customization to the packaging process makes it more confusing. So when I have 8 different items that I could add and a ton of combinations of different items, that means that it can get real complex. Plus, people who want a single item could also go order them from sites like Goodman Games.
Why such a huge downward change? Well, it could be because folks backing my KS simply already had everything that I was offering. But I don’t think so. I used some simple Excel functions to compare backer names with ones from a couple previous KS campaigns. There was actually only about 15-20% repeated names. I think the real reason is because the add-on bundles were more expensive than the actual core pledge. Adding a single $5 or $10 item to a $20 KS pledge is probably a bit easier to do than adding an extra $30 (even if it does get you four extra zines/modules). I don’t think I’ll be doing bundles again. This one really did not work.
Crowdfunding Two Products for Two Different Systems
Out of all the things that I tried, this worked the best. Having two new products allowed me to offer something valuable enough to warrant a higher price on the tiers for when you got both items. The price of your different pledge levels is the main aspect of your KS that lets you have the information that you need to forecast funding levels.
Neither Weird Frontiers or WHPA are widely well-known and popular. But WHPA is the less well-known among those two. By bundling these products together under the theme of Games With “Weird” In The Title, I got more eyes on the WHPA product that would have otherwise had way less sales. And more than just for my own profitability, it helped expose more folks to the wonder that is WHPA!
The idea to do this kinda comes from how Goodman Games does some of their crowdfunding campaigns. They do dual-system publications with their OAR material, but they also use campaigns to fund reprinting older items like the Annual or hardback adventure collections. For GG, they offer those items as add-ons but I took a little different of an approach here.
Summary
So there it is. Some things weren’t great ideas but other things were. But I learned a lot and that’s the most valuable thing. I hope this article helps out some other creators out there!
What do you think about my takeaways from this recent crowdfunding campaign? Any surprises about what I said or questions about something that you’d like me to take a deeper dive into?
What else is going on?
Summer Knights Online Charity Con (Aug 2-4)
Summer Knights Online Charity Con is looking for GMs to run games. Proceeds from the event will support World Central Kitchen. Its the same weekend as Gen Con but online. So if you can't make that Gen Con trip but still want to game a ton that weekend, join in!
I think this was very informative. Every project is different and there are a lot of variables to consider.
I've been thinking a lot about patches lately and though some battle vests are a collection of whatever nonsense people pick receive, when I was a metalhead I was VERY discriminating. Both pins and patches were a representation of an aesthetic I wanted to present. Most patches I've received do not carry a vibe. Your elfland patch was one of the better ones. Now, the Mothership patches made me ask myself, "should I buy a bomber jacket, just for these?" Always ask yourself, "would I be STOKED to wear this?" That should be the ruling principle on all wearable merch.
Pricing: I think you under-priced this one. Big Trouble could have been $15 and the WHPA zine could have been $12. That being said, you charged $17 for what you priced for retail at $22. I didn't look at the split between print vs PDF, but not giving your backers a $5 discount off of retail would have brought in another $500, most likely. I think you should be charging more for what you are offering. But that's my opinion.