❖ Version History ❖
January – March, 2024
Okay. It’s Time. Gotta make our Phoenix Farm Kickstarter happen… but where do we even start?
In order to make a Kickstarter Campaign even work, it takes a hell of a lot of planning. There are so many steps, and assessing the timeline of these things takes some critical thinking, some incredible budgeting, and a very solid schedule organization. So, to begin our epic journey of discussing the Phoenix Farm Kickstarter Campaign, how about we begin with a laundry list of “what must be done” and then pick a topic to dissect a bit for today!
Here are the most important things that need to be accomplished in the months leading up to the launch day of our fund raising campaign (that have not already been discussed relentlessly in our previous posts):
1. Peer Reviewed Content
2. Scripting/Filming/Editing/Mastering a Kickstarter Launch Video
3. Writing the Kickstarter Story, and filling it with artwork / section breaks.
4. Digital Marketing Campaign (made up of many parts)
•Preparing Banner-Ads for websites & social media
•Scheduling specific times & dates for layered content releases / press releases
•Scripting/Scheduling a commercial to be made
5. Building shop menus (assessing pricing for all retail/wholesale/ and bundled items)
6. Product Photography
7. Planning secret releases (like stretch goals & budgeting items that have not yet been made).
8. Making ABSOLUTE CERTAIN that you have your shipping information assessed correctly!!!!
9. Setting a realistic timeline for everything, from start/end dates to manufacturing to mailing.
And if that doesn’t seem like enough, you’re probably right. I am sure there are things I am not even adding to this list at this point in time that are just as important, but that’s not quite the point. The big point of the matter is that there is a lot to get done… and you cannot be sleeping on any of this homework if you want your dreams to come true!
Now, today, we are not going to focus quite as much on the design side of things (that will be our next story as we delve into creating our advertisements). Today we are going to focus on what you might want to anticipate for some budgeting before you embark on a crazy journey such as this… because at this point in time we haven’t really paid for much in the creation of Phoenix Farm, other than our own time and labor on the project. However, this is the moment in the story where we will begin bringing in lots of other potential people, which of course means: $$$.
So as it currently stands, our prep begins in a very serious way back in January 2024. We have about three months until the Kickstarter Launch Date (Which we have set as an April 1st objective). Here is our order of operations, and the costs we are looking at:
1. Peer Review Process
First up, we want to make sure that we are getting peer review up and running as early in this timeline as possible. Why? Because it is going to take the entire x3 months we have right now to get this ready the way we want to. How could it possibly take three months you ask? Well, we not only need to find people willing to do the work of reviewing the game & prepping their photography / feedback, but we also need to: get the game to them, give them a week or two to learn, play, and ask questions, and then get the game back from them so that we might get it to another reviewer to do the same. This means that with one copy of the game, we might be able to get three reviews before launch… which is not enough… so we need multiple copies of the game, which of course is: $$$… Not to mention, we are gonna have some bills to pay on the mail system.
So, here is our shopping list for peer review process:
•Prototype Copies of Phoenix Farm = $40-50 each. + two weeks to ship & shipping costs
•Peer Reviews = $0-40 depending on: 1. are you charging? / 2. are you offering them a game? etc.
•Shipping = $10-15/trip. This means that it is about $20 per review to send a game there & back.
This means that for 8-10 reviews in our three month timeline, we are looking at a budget of about $400-$700 just to properly pay those who are doing work with us, get the game to travel where it needs, and to have good enough content to post about for a few weeks during the campaign.
2. Digital Marketing Campaign
This one is complicated… because no two people are going to do the exact same path to victory here. But. There is one path that seems somewhat universally agreed upon that we will highlight in full here for what we are scheming in this Kickstarter Launch, and that is: Board Game Geek (or BGG). It is well known that BGG is a critical place to advertise, because so many people interact with this web forum when doing their research for games (whether it be shopping purposes, or reviews, or information about the rules etc). As I have had customers say to me in the past: “You know you’ve made it once you’re on BGG”, and its true. Once you have worked through the process of assembling your presence on BGG, it pays off. But what does that price look like, well, here’s what we are considering (and to be clear, this is a poor man’s approach for BGG content, as, there are a wealth of bigger options to consider on their ad-campaign menu).
Here is our shopping list for BGG content:
•BGG Banner Ad Campaign = $1,000-$3,000 depending on your content needs & outreach.
•In-Focus Video Campaign =$1,200 for a full-blown commercial ad campaign for your game.
So, if you are keeping track thus far, we are looking at about $2,200 for our minimal involvement with BGG + we’ll say about $500 for our peer-review process. This means that we are about $3,000 deep before we even launch the Kickstarter… so:
3. Kickstarter & BackerKit Campaign Costs
Luckily, Kickstarter handles their finances in a… “friendly” sort of way, where, you don’t really pay for anything up front… but you will be paying for things to use this service on the back end, so they should definitely be considered on the budget side of things before we get started. If you did not know, a quick google search would be happy to tell you to anticipate: “Allow two weeks for Kickstarter funds to clear after your campaign ends. Remember, Kickstarter takes a 5% cut, credit card companies take another 3%, and expect a 1-3% failed transaction rate”. To us common-folk, this means that nearly 10% of your earnings on Kickstarter are not yours, and what’s worse is that potentially upwards of 5% of your backers are not financially savvy enough to make their payment correctly (this is no exaggeration, collecting payment after a Kickstarter is.. not fun).
So, in total thus far, we are now adding this to our shopping list:
•Kickstarter Processing Fee = 5% of total sales on the platform
•Credit Card Processing Fee = 3% of total sales on the platform
•Approximately 1-2% of your sales are a total failure on the back end.
Now, that doesn’t look like a shopping list by comparison to our ad & review campaigns, but this is still serious business. Let’s assume that you need $10,000 in order to make this game real. If you had nothing at the start, and set your funding goal to $10,000 exactly… you are not accounting for almost 25% of your total needs for this campaign!! Because about $3,000 is going into your ads, and another $1,000 is coming out of your profits before you have any money coming in from your sales. And after all of this work you only have $6,000 to buy your $10,000 game, which is no good for you!!
So please, remember, whatever your needs are for the Kickstarter need to be at least 10% higher than your initial budget might suggest, and that is before we even consider how to advertise to the world that you exist!
4. Shipping, Shipping, Shipping!!!
Did I say it enough to make you think about it? Hopefully. Shipping is an astronomical cost in the back end of the Kickstarter design process… it’s basically the same exact problem that we faced back in the review costs, except now it is multiplied by a factor of 100 to 1,000,000 depending on your success. If you are not factoring in this cost before you start your campaign, this can completely bankrupt you before you’ve even started.
here’s how I calculate the shopping list for shipping before we start:
•Pick your smallest bundle, package it up, check shipping cost from MA to CA = $8-$12/package
•Same process, but now with your biggest bundle from MA to CA = $10-$15/package
•Consider doing international shipping, pick your countries carefully = $25-$45/package
So, if we have x100 orders at the end of this process, and 95 of them are domestic, but the other 5 or so are international, we are looking at an expected shipping cost of about… $1,000-$1,2000. Now imagine that same outcome for 1,000 customers!? that’s literally $10,000-$12,000 in just shipping… and there’s literally no knowing how many customers you are going to get in a Kickstarter Campaign. If it is wildly successful beyond your expectation, then you NEEEEED to know what you are getting yourself into.
Now, this post has already gotten very very wordy… and that’s not how we like to do things around here at the Librarium Games Design Journal. So, we are going to put an end to this budget conversation here & start up our next tale in the adventure, which is going to revolve all around these crazy plans that we have budgeted for in our discussion today. Be sure to check back soon where we will cover everything you could possibly imagine in web advertising! And as always, thank you for reading!!
