Kickstarter in Review Part II: Mistakes Made
[Read the full Kickstarter in Review series]
A lot of the content of this series of articles will be a fairly critical look at how we ran our Kickstarter campaign for Nut Hunt. This isn’t to take away from what we accomplished, or to diminish our amazing community.
In fact, I believe that our campaign had a lot of successes and has positioned Pine Island Games well for a long future of publishing amazing games and growing our audience.
But, we did not run a flawless campaign. In fact, we made a lot of mistakes.
I am a big believer in examining where we messed up. It’s the only way that we can improve.
Today I am going to touch on the largest and most costly mistakes of the campaign, and in future articles we’ll go more into the nitty gritty of these mistakes and others, as well as dissect our victories, and talk through how we’ll do better next time.
Tearing the Band-Aid Off
The Nut Hunt Kickstarter was only the first step of our distribution and sales plan for the game. But, for many creators a Kickstarter makes up the majority of their go to market plan. Therefore, I think it is important to contextualize our investment in bringing Nut Hunt to market, and the economics of our campaign.
There is some opacity over how I allocate expenses for Nut Hunt, versus corporate Pine Island, and I am waiting on one last meaningful bill to come in, but it is safe to say that our investment to develop and market Nut Hunt was solidly north of $40k.
There is also uncertainty around the number of games ultimately sold, and things like freight costs. But, if the Kickstarter were 100% of our total sales for Nut Hunt, we would lose meaningfully north of $20k on the campaign.
What is interesting is that we had two semi-quantifiable and costly mistakes – the avoidance of which alone would have brought our campaign close to break even.
Facebook Advertising
First, I was fairly excited about the prospect of Facebook advertising. If we could get it right, it would be a highly scalable revenue driver.
I also believed that even if we lost a little on a per-lead basis, there would be a momentum factor from early campaign support that would slingshot the overall campaign higher.
To be candid, our Facebook advertising was an abject failure.
This was our most successful Facebook ad image (and we tried a lot of images & renders)
Between advertising assets, some miscellaneous expenses, and ad spend, we spent close to $9k on Facebook advertising, mostly for lead generation.
Those efforts won us 32 backers for $1,156 of pledges (not profit, but revenue).
I do think that Facebook advertising can be profitable for some campaigns, under the appropriate circumstances.
Strong onboarding cycle to integrate leads into the community.
A good lookalike audience – Meta’s AI is best at matching to lookalike audiences. Publishers’ I’ve talked to see the best results when matching to consumers who have already purchased similar games from them. Similarly, services like Backerkit marketing have deep databases and should have lower per-lead costs (and better conversions).
Wider margin (higher price) games. The wider your margins, the higher your per-lead costs, and lower conversion rates can be to still be profitable.
Our campaign didn’t meet any of the above criteria. Lack of robust onboarding is a clear and remediable mistake. Price point and lacking a lookalike audience was a symptom of the game we published, and where our company is in its lifecycle.
There were also some idiosyncratic drivers for underperformance for Nut Hunt.
Lack of a clear demographic target.
Rapid listserv growth negatively impacted domain health.
Over-estimation of the momentum benefit we would earn from Facebook lead conversions (only 14 of our first 200 backers were from Facebook leads).
People interacting with our ads due to the game name, negatively impacted Meta AI’s ability to optimize our ad placement - increasing our cost per lead (I can’t verify this but believe it to be the case).
I plan to go into more detail on a lot of these points in future articles. But, the long-short of it is that I will be much more wary of ad spend going forward.
My time would have been better spent on organic outreach, and our money would have been much better spent on a broader review campaign (and promoting review content), or by just leaving it in the bank.
I think that Facebook ads likely can be profitable (after all, a lot of large, smart games publishers use them), but our execution, and the idiosyncrasies of our campaign turned them into a massive money sink with little payoff.
We Charged Too Little
We charged $35 per game, and US shipping is $11. I squeezed our margins as tight as possible, including subsidizing shipping, in order to give backers the best possible price for our game.
I over-estimated the elasticity of demand on Kickstarter and believe that we would have seen minimal negative impact to backer count if I had charged a more sustainable price of $39 + $15 shipping.
This belief comes from toying around with the Kickstarter cover image, with verbiage in my communication around the game, and from talking with backers. Price sensitive consumers are vocal, but for a game already as affordable as Nut Hunt, they are the minority.
Undercharging likely actually cost us backers for two reasons:
Charging a higher dollar amount would have driven higher dollar funding levels which are more impactful for Kickstarter’s algorithms and would have kept our campaign on the front pages longer.
Undercharging may have cheapened some consumers’ impression of the value and quality of the game.
I want to be careful to continue to provide value for our backers - including a good price relative to what is available upon release, as well as preferential treatment and/or exclusives. But I will be much more aware that Kickstarter backers are less price sensitive than I assumed, and that trying to compete on price is a losing proposition for an indie company. I also plan to be proactive in offering more premium options for less price-sensitive backers.
I believe these first two mistakes alone cost us close to $20k (of profit) on our Nut Hunt campaign. While they are our most quantifiable large mistakes, I want to call out a couple of other meaningful but less tangible mistakes from our campaign.
Lack of Demographic Focus
Our marketing efforts for Nut Hunt were too broad.
I view Nut Hunt as a game that would fit in most collections as a welcoming game, or as a nice filler when you don’t want to spend all evening crunching. It’s fun, fast-paced, and easy to learn. But, it also has a good bit of strategy layered on top of variance.
The issue is that my view of Nut Hunt translates terribly to marketing.
We should have focused on:
Families
Gateway gamers
Our marketing strategy for our next game (Sigil) is much more focused: competitive gamers who like dueling games.
And, when Nut Hunt fulfills, we’ll do a second marketing push that includes a lot more momfluencers & dadfluencers (our campaign only included one family influencer).
Timing & Lack of an Immediate Call to Action
I’m grouping a couple of semi-related mistakes in this category. I think they can be summed up by two examples.
I wrote an article for Jamey Stegmaier’s blog in April. Jamey offered postponing publishing it until our Kickstarter was live. I declined, as I over-estimated our ability to retain interest in our game and company.
While writing the article was good visibility, and created social proof and legitimacy around our brand, we should have coordinated the article to go live during the Kickstarter. The direct traffic, with a “back now” call to action would have been much more powerful – and retained the social proof and goodwill benefits.
Our mistakes with timing extended to the timing of the overall campaign.
We launched Nut Hunt in June because 1) the game and campaign was ready, 2) we have a GenCon booth (so wanted it wrapped up a head of time), and 3) wanted to maintain a schedule for our next release.
In retrospect I think our game would have done better in the fall. It’s a nature themed game about squirrels foraging for nuts and is chalk full of beautiful fall imagery.
Also, more generally, there were a number of indie games that launched at similar timing to ours, that underperformed relative to what I would have expected.
It is unclear whether our campaigns suffered from a slight summer slump, if they coincided too closely with Origins, or if I am reading into white noise. In the future however, I will be more conscious of timing, at least around theme.
Closing Thoughts
I am trying to be very careful with my tone in these articles. I don’t want to give the impression that we aren’t incredibly proud of our Nut Hunt campaign (because we are), and the truth is that we are well positioned to bring Nut Hunt to market, to expand its base, and to knock it out of the park with Sigil and all of our subsequent games.
But, these conversations are important. We need to examine where we misstepped. And, our mistakes are likely not unique.
So, by talking through our victories and what went wrong, I hope that we can help other creators bring their games to market more successfully.
What is a mistake that you’ve turned into a learning experience?
