When to Hit that Launch Button?
We’re getting into the home stretch for pre-launch prep for Nut Hunt – games are off with the first round of reviewers, we have free digital and print and play playtesting, and contracted Ori Kegan to produce an awesome video.
The question that is keeping me up at night is: how do I know when we are ready to hit that big green launch button?
A lot of it will come down to our expectations for the project, and confidence that we can not only hit our Kickstarter funding goal (which will pay for a print run), but that we can also hit my personal funding goal to recoup our initial investment, and hopefully make a little bit of money (see this article on budgeting for a game).
This brings us full circle – how do we quantify whether we are well positioned to hit our target funding level?
The Data
Earlier this week I asked other publishers for data on e-mail subscriptions and social media following at the time of their campaign launch. Here is the data.
We’ve had a modest 11 respondents so far, including one one-million-dollar campaign and three six-figure campaigns. If you’ve Kickstarted a board game – drop your data in the comments, or message me.
At first blush, the data implies that the ultimate number of backers should be about 65% the size of the pre-launch e-mail list.
But…
The Analysis is Flawed
The ultra-small sample size means that our analysis is dominated by two campaigns:
Senjutsu: Battle for Japan – 18,000 pre-launch e-mails & backer kit subscribers // $1.26 million raised from 11,661 backers
Deliverance - 4,400 pre-launch e-mails // $314k raised from 2,717 backers
At the lower end of the chart, things get messy. Sure, we have Quests & Cannons at 930 backers versus a ~1,500 pre-launch list (62%), but we also have some wild outliers like Connecting Flights with 2,000 backers and over $100k raised, versus a pre-launch e-mail list of 30, and 500 followers across all social media.
So, What’s Going On?
We have stats for our 40+ Kickstarter campaigns, and the one thing we can quickly say is that the pledge numbers vary so much from game to game. - Button Shy Games
There are a lot of additional inputs that determine the success of a campaign beyond e-mail list subscribers.
I asked a number of the publishers for their thoughts on what drove the success of their campaigns and received an array of responses including: paid advertising, review campaign reach, fan engagement, and getting a “projects we love” Kickstarter badge.
In order to smooth out the noise from less tangible drivers, we’d need a much larger sample size.
But, I think our small sample analysis is still useful.
Known Knowns and Known Unknowns
I spent most of my career in finance. When formulating a thesis around an investment, we would break down the information we had into a couple of buckets.
Known knowns – data or information that we have – often that is differentiated from the market (or what’s priced in).
Known unknows – the drivers that we know can impact the investment performance, but that we don’t know which way they will go.
Unknown unknowns – the scary left field events and risks that could make or break the position.
So, for example if I were pitching an investment in a title insurance company a known known might be real estate listing data, a known unknown could be the interest rate environment, and an unknown unknown is something like a global pandemic – that we can only quantify in hindsight.
The fact that you don’t have all of the information isn’t an excuse to not think critically about the information that you do have – and to try and frame what you don’t know.
So, when it comes to pressing that launch button, I’ll be very conscious of our mailing list size, and I’ll do my best to be thoughtful around all the other drivers: paid advertising during the campaign, engagement, and quality of review and preview content.
What data points did you look to before launching your crowdfunding campaign?
