❖ Version History ❖

16th of July, 2021
On the 30th, when we finished the first $5k in funding, I was getting phone calls from a lot of people who wanted to congratulate me. The most important of these phone calls comes in from my brilliant girlfriend Caroline who wants to talk to me about the success and my plan for moving forward from here. We talk about a lot of ideas that I have running through my head, but there is exactly one point of amazing inspiration that runs through this conversation that will change the entire course of my marketing mindset. She suggests that I contact the local newspaper to see if they would do an article on the 25 hour success of our project, and texts me the name of a local reporter that she knows.

Hopping off the phone with her, I begin doing research immediately. Her suggestion to contact the paper is such a good idea, but I want to make sure that I send the perfect message to catch the attention we need. I write something very simple and title the email: Local Author and Artist Team Up! Then I nervously hit send and desperately await to see what happens.

Within only about an hour, I get an email back from Taylor Bradford, who seems especially excited to take on the article! She and I have a quick chat on the phone, and then I immediately call Matt. in under a couple of hours, we have an interview date scheduled for Monday the 12th of July.

Frantically nervous and excited, I try to prepare as many other media documents as I can in anticipation of this event. I only have one more day off before this interview date, and then the following week I have plans to be traveling with Caroline to celebrate our anniversary… so I need as much made as I can, because I know there will be little to no other opportunity to do content creation once we begin traveling.

During this time, I come to a phone call with Ben, who has another brilliant suggestion for advertising ideas we could make in a very simple series of short videos: Character Spotlights that showcase all the cool powers each character possesses in the gameplay of The Great Chase. Looking at the clock, I can see that it is noon… I know that I have about 5 hours left in the day before my next activity, so I shut all the blinds, set up my tripod and get ferociously to work filming the base content that I can edit on the off shift of my next few days at work. These videos are a blast to make, and they come together so smoothly after all the other video making practice I had while making content for the rule book! Here is an example of the spotlights, with our heroine Miranda Chase:

I post one video from this series of six each day while traveling, resulting in awesome amount of interaction on the Instagram account when I have little time to focus on it. But nothing is as powerful as the day that the Gloucester Times article launches:

We were the headline article! in full color!

Before that article, we were barely scratching past $9k in our kickstarter funds two full weeks into the campaign). This day though, on the 16th of July, the article goes live, and an overwhelming $3k-$4k of additional funding comes through the Kickstarter over this next 24 hours, including our most important $2,000 investor who buys our top-tier reward! This investment got us the third of our stretch goals & truly made me feel that our campaign was big a success with 250% funding.

Needless to say, it is a great day.