3 Tools & Models for Kickstarter Publishers
I put together a couple of tools to help indie publishers conceptualize their campaign and marketing. They are all Google Sheets based, so feel free to save them to your drive and play around with them.
They have a lot of embedded assumptions, but plugging and playing should give you a good idea of some of the main drivers.
Tool 1 - Simple Kickstarter P&L
I first came up with this tool leading into our Nut Hunt campaign and wrote a pretty well received article Making Board Games Your Business, talking through the economics of a campaign, and highlighting a few successful campaigns along with a breakdown of their economics.
I wanted to re-share it here along with some linked resources in the model.
The basic idea is that you can input your development costs (to market costs), along with unit economics (manufacture cost per game, freight, shipping, etc), and see how many games you need to sell to break even, along with your P&L for any given number of games sold.
Tool 2 - ROAS Calculator (for Ad Campaigns & Review Campaigns)
This tool is inspired by Crowdfunding Nerd’s e-mail list tool “Kickstarter Success Calculator”, but it has some material differences. It also goes farther with a section to calculate your return on ad spend (ROAS) not just for a paid advertising campaign, but also for a review & preview campaign.
Tool 3 - Organic Marketing Reach
This tool has the most assumptions and likely-hood of material deviation from the model. It attempts to quantify your organic marketing reach based on subscribers on your various social media platforms, as well as mid campaign organic marketing.
The success of mid-campaign posts and videos, and how they drive momentum can be highly variable. This is intended more as a baseline to think about your marketing rather than a truly predictive tool.
What tools do you use to figure out the economics for your game?
