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We turned $140k on Kickstarter into $40k debt and broke even
- markwaldron 10y agoInterested to know how many sales come through from this Hackernews/Medium post.
- pg_is_a_butt 10y agoi actually returned mine after learning they considered manufacturing in china. -1
- curiousgal 10y agoHopefully a lot, the knowledge they provide is priceless.
- progx 10y agoI think it is like all Hackernews, 3 days up, then back to normal counts.
- fpgaminer 10y agoThat's not necessarily true. Getting content marketing articles up on the front page of big news sites (like Hacker News) can be an important spark to longer term sales. Once your article hits one big site, the other bigs sites tend to pick it up and you see lots of viral spread on Twitter. If viewership is wide enough and your product worthwhile this can be a big enough spark to initiate organic word-of-mouth marketing. In addition all this aggregation of your content drives increased link ranking back to your site, which improves SEO. That last part works better if the article is hosted on your own domain, though. Source: I recently finished researching a ton of successful startups to determine what common factors they share (and wrote an article with all the data and analysis).
- progx 10y agoYes, IF it goes viral. If not, you got only 3 days more visitors.
- JPTeasdale 10y agoMy friend just texted me that we were #1 on HR. Had to check for myself. I'll post an update here at the end of the day with any numbers I can scrape from our analytics.
- pryelluw 10y agoPing me if you want to chat about marketing. No bs or strings attached. pr@yelluw.com
- JPTeasdale 10y agoWill do!
- flanbiscuit 10y agoYou're getting a lot of advice and offers for private discussions because of this post. At some point down the line I'd be curious to know how all of this affects your sales. Were any of the offline discussions helpful? Did you make a switch to a different X company (fulfillment, shipment, whatever)? I'm sure being at the top of HN will give you a spike in sales but I'm just curious what the overall affects will be (in the longer run) so please post a follow-up after the holidays. thanks!
- JPTeasdale 10y agoWill do.
- pryelluw 10y agoI really cant offer advice because I lack the necessary context. What I aim to do is to serve as a fresh set of ears and eyes that have previous experience selling shit online. Ive helped others discover things that later down the line helped them sell or market better. So, I really like your comment because it brings transparency to the whole thing. I feel thats something we could all potentially benefit from.
- bbctol 10y agoEspecially given that their final conclusion is "just trust that our game is great, because it really is Fun to Play for All Ages." I thought this was a good and interesting post, but it's so transparent I thought they would at least hang a lampshade on the fact that this is clearly another strategy they're testing.
- tempestn 10y agoWould've been funny too. Just add, "Submit <title of this post> to HN and hope it makes the first page" to the end of the list of strategies tried. Result: We'll see
- kevindqc 10y agoDid they not? > Tried: Write a series of tell-alls about your buisiness and hope someone blows it up on Hacker News. > Result: Hi everyone!
- JPTeasdale 10y agoTo be fair to @bbctol, I did add that in after I saw we were #1.
- tempestn 10y agoAh, ya, must've been after I read it as well. Good addition!
- CaliforniaKarl 10y agoActually, that's what I was thinking! I've watched Justin before, and realized that HN might be interested in the article. Looks like people are!
- JustinRYoung 10y agoHi, I'm Justin. I co-created the game with John. It certainly crossed our miiiiind that a post like this would give us some "earned media" but we certainly would have wished it was a rosier story.
- JPTeasdale 10y agoWe just passed 5k in sales on our store today with 2,868 visitors! This is by far our best single day post-Kickstarter and is actually higher than the average funding / day we had through our entire campaign! Thanks so much everyone who shared this! I guess all you have to do is spend all your money, work for a year to get it back, and then write about it. Next week, I'll make another post with all the graphs/numbers from this, crazy-ass day, and how long it took to return to normal. I can't imagine it will rank again, so you can follow @JohnTeasdale_ or @ContenderGame if you don't want to miss it.
- tudorw 10y agothanks for sharing the level of detail on sales efforts, interesting read
- mmastrac 10y agoDestroying thousands of units kind of sucks - would it cost a great deal to have the inventory shipped to some sort of low-cost offline storage for later sale? Or is that just going to eat into margins? Edit: since the game appears to be kid-friendly and non-partisan, maybe the company should consider a crowdfunding campaign to buy back the extra stock and send them to schools for free.
- ikeboy 10y agoIt costs 50 cents per item to recall, but you sometimes can't send the same item in again for some time. By the way, based on the rank of the items, it's selling around 50-100 units a month as of now.
- mmastrac 10y agoI know zilch about the physical inventory world - is that $.50 something Amazon will charge?
- ikeboy 10y agoYes, Amazon charges 50 cents to recall an item. Sometimes they offer free recalls (right before q4 when they wanted to clear out their warehouse, for instance), but then you usually can't send the same item in for some time. They really don't want people using them for long term storage, they've been pushing for people to only send in inventory that will sell soon. That's why they have extra fees if you have something there past 6 months, and again past 12 months. They also started charging extra for storage during q4 (November and December).
- acveilleux 10y agoIt's likely to add up to the printing cost pretty fast.
- JPTeasdale 10y agoYeah it does suck. We're going to look exactly at how much it'll cost to ship / warehouse them vs destroy. My gut instinct is shipping + storing 5000 for the duration until they sellout would be comparable to just printing a second edition in China if demand picks up again.
- Mz 10y agoKickstarter is a magical fantasy land where people get excited about your stuff in a way that doesn’t translate into your small business. I don't really get Kickstarter. The above sums up a lot of my concerns about it and why I have yet to look into it in a serious way.
- fredleblanc 10y agoI think it depends on what you're making through it. For board/card/tabletop games, it's quite possibly the most popular way to get initial funding to make your game. But a game is not a business, it's the start of a product — a massive pre-order system if all goes well. Many that get into the game self-publishing game aren't doing it to make money, they're doing it to make a thing and get it into people's hands. Kickstarter is a nice way to raise money and have a central micro-social-network of sorts for your game. Social media will do its thing, but most of the games that I've kickstarted are ones that I've seen at conventions, I've tried them myself or watched a demo live, found myself interested, signed up for a newsletter at the booth, then got an email about the kickstarter. And lucky me, I'm batting 1.000 with actually getting a game from the things I back. (Source: I've been working on a tabletop game for a couple years now, and have been doing a lot of board-game-based research on kickstarter.)
- enraged_camel 10y agoI view Kickstarter contributions as a form of gambling: even if the Kickstarter reaches its goal, the odds are heavily stacked against you that something will actually get produced and shipped, but if it does then it's pretty sweet. The trick, as a backer, is to keep your expectations low and not get too emotionally attached to whatever you are backing.
- dublinben 10y agoThe problem is that many Kickstarter campaigns are now offering a non-existing product as the main reward that people are paying for. Under the Kickstarter Terms of Service, they are obligated to deliver all rewards upon the successful funding of the campaign.
- TheGRS 10y agoThanks for the write-up. Marketing seems really hard in many of the entertainment-oriented businesses out there. Weak ties and word of mouth are still the dominate way to sell things effectively, but they remain very hard to strategize around.
- guiomie 10y agoTried: Facebook Advertisements. Result: Spent ~$1000 on 30 different ads, ~20 clicks, 0 sales. Is this a typical result with facebook ads?
- enraged_camel 10y agoNot sure if we have the stats for it, but as with most advertisement it depends heavily on who you are targeting (as well as when) and what you say on the ad. It's complicated... Which is why consultants exist in this space.
- soreal 10y agoFacebook ads: spent $1000, got 20 clicks and 0 sales Is that for real? Is everyone else's experience with Facebook advertising similar?
- ohyoutravel 10y agoI had the same experience with Facebook and with Google AdWords. Zero sales, not that many clicks.
- sosborn 10y agoSometimes it's the platform and sometimes it's the product.
- JPTeasdale 10y agoIt's real. I asked all my digital marketing friends for advice too. I made ~20 iterations, tried different pictures, headlines, targeting schemes to no avail. There are def ways to make it work, but it's not an easy thing. If I were to try again, I'd make an audio-less video.
- netrap 10y agoHow about adding an ad on reddit?
- madenine 10y agoGetting started from 0 with ads on facebook is hard. If you don't have good email lists, have the money to throw at ads to figure out your ad groups / demographics (just because purple fish people are your #1 customers doesn't mean they buy things off of facebook ads), and don't have a whole ecosystem (landing pages, cross platform re targeting, etc), its an uphill battle that even the pros can't always get working right. Good on you for trying. Back when I ran ads, a common story from small clients was "I spent $50 - $200 and didn't get any sales, so I figured it wasn't for us" - At least you figured out it wasn't for you, or it wasn't for your budget/time scale.
- xphilter 10y ago
- JPTeasdale 10y agoHey gang. I'm John Teasdale (author) happy to answer any questions you have about the write-up.
- hibikir 10y agoHow many people with industry experience did you talk to about this before you kickstarted? The hobby game industry is very accessible: Go to the right convention and you get to talk shop with people with decades of experience printing and marketing games. Just two weeks ago I was talking to industry bigwigs about the changes that came to US publishing as part of Asmodee's purchasing spree of very different game studios. The kind of shop talk that describes the different choices you need when making a Fantasy Flight game, a Catan game or the first printing of Codenames are exactly the kind of thing you guys needed to know in advance. Also, why did you decide to kickstart yourselves, as opposed to talk to a publisher?
- JPTeasdale 10y agoEmbarrassingly few. Justin and I have a background in team-building, and didn't have any connections in the tabletop space. We also didn't know what questions to ask, even if we knew who to ask them to. Everyone we have talked to since has been very nice. GenCon especially was a huge eye-opener for us. As for why we Kickstarted, the answer is pretty much the same. We had no reputation in the industry and wouldn't know who to talk to. However, it works out for us. We like being our own bosses. We'll stick with Kickstarter in the future, especially now that we know more about the pitfalls. Sorry about the delay. I have a new account and am getting comment-throttled. I'll get to everything as I can.
- walshemj 10y agoTo follow up on hibikir's comment word of mouth is key and have been to a few games cons in the UK and you do see people trying out alpha versions of games. Ill put this story round my contacts.
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- ignostic 10y agoI do a lot of marketing, and I smiled seeing what you spent money on. I've been most of those places with bigger budgets and similar results. When I'm working with good companies it usually turns into something more like product management with some relevant search or contextual advertising. > We fell into a trap. We thought marketing meant we had to come at people sideways to get them to give us money. Turn’s [sic] out, the game’s just good and people want to play it. One small suggestion: you're not doing a great job on the up/cross sale. I went to your site and added the game to the cart. But after reading about the expansion I WANTED the expansion. Make it easier for people to add them on. Every large ecommerce store does this. It's helpful to your users, increases RPS, and (when done right) relevant enough to not be annoying. Make sure to find a non-popup solution that won't get blocked by ad blockers. I'll be buying the product and an expansion based on the Amazon reviews: good luck making some money!
- sopooneo 10y agoMind telling what RPS stands for? I'm Googling, but can't find anything relevant.
- kevan 10y agoI believe it's Revenue Per Sale.
- 467568985476 10y agoThe advertising industry seems to rival the military in its fondness for acronyms.
- ot 10y agoThe advertising industry is very good at advertising the advertising industry
- ChristianGeek 10y agoCan I buy a vowel?
- IshKebab 10y agoIt's got a 6.8 rating Board Game Geek which is actually pretty good. Anything above 7 is a solidly good game in my experience. Nice article too.
- XaspR8d 10y agoYou could be referring to either ranking system here, so I just want to clarify for people not familiar with BGG: A 7.0 average rating is fairly good, though it's hard to factor out bias with a low number of rankings (this game has 46 ATM). There are about 4500 BGG listings with AR > 7.0 and at least 45 ratings. A 7.0 geek rating (which has artificial dampening and vote filtering) is very good. There are only ~415 games with a 7.0 or higher, and you need something like 200 votes to be given a geek rating at all. That said, I mean no argument against the game. I haven't played it and it looks 10x better than the average Kickstarted tabletop game. I applaud the work they've put into it and if I weren't actively avoiding politics in my game group, I'd look into it. :P
- bostonvaulter2 10y agoWhere can you see the geek rating?
- Symbiote 10y agoHow about sending some free copies to board game cafés? Only if they want them, obviously.
- JustinRYoung 10y agoHi, I'm Justin. I co-created the game with John. Both of us used to travel the country for work and would drop off copies at any cafe we'd see!
- netrap 10y agoInteresting insight into selling via Amazon.. I didn't know about the long-term storage fees and whatnot. I guess also getting the game into some retail shops might help? How much would it cost to get those games back from Amazon to some other storage?
- JPTeasdale 10y agoJust ran it. For 5,000 games: Destroy: $750 Remove: $2,500 + costs to store it somewhere else. Also, 5,000 games is a lot of games. Like >15 pallets.
- relics443 10y agoI started reading this article thinking, "nice try guys, not getting anything from me". I'm about to order one, and sent a link to about 10 friends. Good job!
- JPTeasdale 10y agoThanks!
- imchillyb 10y agoPurchased! Making board games great again!
- shortstuffsushi 10y agoI don't see this mentioned in the article, but I think the author makes the assumption that his Chinese company would have been more reliable / more experienced and would not have made these sorts of mistakes (which could be accurate, don't know the two companies). Imagine the setbacks his company had, except then add the delay of cross ocean (air or ship) shipping. Unless things had gone perfectly with the Chinese company, they may still have gotten a faster turn around having it in the US. He mentions in a comment here that they're thinking about doing a second batch overseas, I'm curious to see the turnaround on that.
- jhchen 10y agoThe author is making an assumption but it is not uninformed. In the comparison list he wrote "I had printed games in China before, and have a good relationship with the company we used." I'm assuming things went reasonably well if relationships are still good.
- shortstuffsushi 10y agoIndeed, and I don't mean it to come off that way. I'm sure in that time he experienced some distribution hiccups as well, so weighing that against his experience here, he must still be finding that the Chinese company will provide a better outcome (since he's still talking about printing with them in the future).
- JPTeasdale 10y agoThe first game I made, I used AdMagic. A US based company that prints in China. They were a pleasure to work with, and have a lot of experience with Kickstarter companies, but questions went from me -> them -> factory -> them -> me. The loop took at least 24 hours. Since we were in the Christmas Crunch, this was a consideration. Also, after we sent the check, I found out AdMagic also has US centers. I've been kicking myself for a year over this one.
- ninjakeyboard 10y agoI bet getting that article on the top of HN should help!
- JPTeasdale 10y agoIt's been a helluva day, I'm going to update the article in a few days to account for this.
- lxmorj 10y agoI run a bootstrapped e-commerce fulfillment center that doesn't charge for storage. We also ship for GameBoxMonthly.com - might be a good way to move a decent percentage of your existing stock. Happy to intro to the GBM team and/or chat about working together. Hit me up: alex@monthlyboxer.com
- zenincognito 10y agoI get alerted that monthlyboxer.com is hosting malware via trendmicro. Should get that checked.
- lxmorj 10y agoCool thanks, will look into it! Our site is a static site hosted on Strikingly and doesn't power anything so hopefully it's nothing major!
- paulcole 10y ago>Tried: Amazon Sponsored Products Result: Actually works. We spend about $2.70 on ads per sale of the base game. You're throwing money away. I searched "presidential debate game" on Amazon and you're the #1 (non-paid) result. Why are you paying for clicks on a search for which you're the only relevant result?
- withdavidli 10y agoComes up for "debate game" search. Likely it comes up sponsored because of that term. How many people actually search presidential debate game?
- canes123456 10y agoYou are thinking too much about how you can make a bit more one a sale when all you should care about is getting one more sale. Look at google adwords. Most companies show an ads for there company name when they are the number one organic search. It is worth it to block anyone else from buying an ad over you and not worth the trouble to add negative keywords for all the ones you rank well with organically.
- JPTeasdale 10y agoWhen you do a promotion on amazon, they also list your game under in that 'Sponsored Products Similar to This One section' . That's where most of the clicks come from.
- flashman 10y agoMakes sense - most visitors are going to be looking at some other game, not doing a keyword search, so go where the eyeballs are.
- labster 10y agoI wish I could have supported this, but I play board games so as to avoid thinking about current U.S. politics. Diplomacy is set in WWI which is distant enough to provide an escape, and even Arkham Horror is moderately more cheerful than the political news today.
- iampherocity 10y agoI've listened to Justin all the way through this from the start on the other side, it's interesting seeing this from your perspective. Thanks for sharing.
- walshemj 10y agoOne tip would be get it in front of the guys at the d6 generation and some of the other mini/ board game podcasters. If you get over to games expo in the UK I will have to buy you a beer
- acedinlowball 10y agoI will be buying a copy of this game to support a fellow HN-er. Cheers, mate! I hope you become very rich.
- JPTeasdale 10y agoHaha, thank you!
- appleiigs 10y agoThere seems to be many problems you faced that could have been avoided just be asking questions :(. For example, asking "do you have experience shipping to Amazon fulfillment centers?". Or talking to the several folk in industry and the CEO ahead of time. I also have an issue with the Big Lesson of "order at most two times what you've already sold". The lesson shouldn't be a rule of thumb. The lesson should be to find methods to gauge interest better, not just "2X maximum". Anyway, thanks for sharing. I obviously thought it was an interesting read and it got my brain thinking.
- JPTeasdale 10y agoYep. You're 100% right. At the time, we didn't know the questions we needed to ask or who to ask them to.
- ccc111 10y agoany comments on your greed? if you just made the kick starter quantity we wouldn't read this crap.
- ccc111 10y agoany comments on your greed? if you just made the kick starter amount we wouldn't have to read this, however now the publicity of your failure will bring you more sales...
- JPTeasdale 10y agoWe definitely over-reached. You could also call it greed, naiveté, or ignorance. However, I don't think we failed. There were a lot of hard lessons, but it's been over a year of work and we have a small buisiness company that's actually making money by selling a physical thing. I'm really proud of that.
- santoshalper 10y agoThat was nice of you to reply to the troll, but probably not worth your time.
- adapteva 10y agoThanks for sharing your painful lesson. I feel your pain brother...I am still working on KS debt created 4 years ago:-( Don't EVER let the haters get you down. If you you are shipping products that people enjoy, you did not fail! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-supercomputer-for-everyone https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-s...
- sctb 10y agoIf you post a comment that violates the guidelines by being uncivil and the community rightly flags it to death, the thing not to do is repost it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- uptown 10y agoThe first thing on your site -essentially the sales pitch - is a quote comparing it to Cards Against Humanity. While I've heard of CAH, I've never played it - so your product game concept is lost on me.
- JPTeasdale 10y agoThat's a good point, I can switch the FastCompany quote with the boing boing one.
- mmanfrin 10y agoCounterpoint: A lot of people have played CAH and it is arguably the most popular board/card/party game of the 21st century.
- bschwindHN 10y agoAnd CAH was typically described as "an offensive Apples to Apples", so yeah, I think you can describe card games by referencing other card games.
- lz400 10y agoVery interesting and well written post. I own a lot of boardgames and follow the hobby in BGG, YouTube, etc. There are a bunch of famous game reviewers in YT that bring sales if they like a game but to be honest I think they won't like your game as it's yet another clone of Cards Against Humanity, which is loathed among the board game community. That's the same reason I won't buy your game as I've no interest in CAH but I wish you the best of luck.
- JustinRYoung 10y agoAgreed. We've already been pooped on by the Dice Tower.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- JustinRYoung 10y agoAgreed. We've already been pooped on by the Dice Tower.
- odbol_ 10y agoManufacturing in China vs the U.S.: for my company's Kickstarter project, the U.S. was about 5x more expensive. (It's a bit different for electronics). However, after flying me and my co-founder to China, living there for a month to work out all the kinks in the process, then the incredible cost of shipping and customs taxes (has to rush ship for Christmas of course), I'm thinking the U.S.would have been a better choice (at the small volumes of 1000 per batch we were doing). Now, if you are making 50,000 or a million of something, then China is definitely the way to go. But for small batches I recommend shopping around U.S. factories... They're pretty desperate for it at this point.
- vishbar 10y agoI have what is probably a silly question. When you have an idea or something you want to mass-produce, what do you actually do? Is there some website that you can upload your design to, then receive quotes from factories that agree to manufacture N units at M dollars/unit? Or do you usually go through an agent? Sorry if that seems dumb. I just have literally no experience in this area; if someone handed me a design and said "Manufacture 1,000 of these" I'd just stand around dumbfounded.
- odbol_ 10y agoWe used Berkeley Sourcing Group. They have an office in China as well as California. So we gave them all the designs, then they did the work of finding factories to do everything and coordinating them all together all the way up to final assembly and packaging. In the end we used about 8 different factories to make all the parts: electronic, injection molding, textiles, packaging, silk screening, etc. I don't know how we could have done it without the BSG team honestly.
- pretz 10y ago> On September 9th, 2015 we received $127,827.01 from Kickstarter. This sounds like a lot of money, until we say that this week, November 22nd 2016, we have finally gotten out of debt. That’s 440 days of work after creating the product and running the Kickstarter before we made $1. As someone who's spent their professional career working for venture-backed tech companies that hadn't yet made a profit, that sounds damn good. Many many companies never get that far.
- Heliosmaster 10y agoDon't you ship to Europe? :(
- muse900 10y agoNot specifically direct to this post but something relevant. We had that discussion with a colleague yesterday while we are thinking of starting a company ourselfs. The only thing I actually told him that if we start off something I dont want it to focus on investments or anything crazy and I'd like to go very humble with everything. Create a small business with a product and let it grow in a normal pace. Atm we are both working for 2 entrepreneurs that started a small company and slowly slowly grew it up to a medium company that returns over 50m a year. Its a very stable environment and they don't go into heavy risks when it comes to spending. I see a lot of people nowadays that are very proficient in tech doing startups. Startups are everywhere. The main thing we see though is that most of them fail at it. I mainly think its because they are not experienced enough on how life works and they think they gonna make the next uber etc. NO! Thats a big NO! People that created uber are like people that win the lottery. They were lucky enough to get investments they way they did etc and kept at it. Thats all about it. For me its not a success story about a company that started small and ended up big. Its just the lucky draw that investors picked up and threw money at. People around tech industry need to realise that. Start a company, have a product, and go slowly with it. Stick with it and yes in 10-20 years time you'll be at some good amount of money. Don't expect it to happen in a year or even 5 years or else you are stressing your company to fail. I feel like this is the issue with the tech industry entrepreneurs atm. They want to have it all fast, and thats why they fail. Also you see people celebrating investments... I love the show "silicon valley" because it shows you in reality what this industry is about. When you get an investment you shouldn't be the happiest person in the world, you gonna get people demanding stuff etc which will definitely put you in a difficult position especially if the company and the product is very young as the investors might wanna take a different path and lead you into taking it as well.
- bambax 10y ago> We wanted space in the box so expansion cards would fit. The printing company recommended a cheap cardboard insert. The empty cardboard insert created a crumple zone that caused hundreds of games to arrive damaged. It also means you're paying extra for manufacturing, transporting, storing and then shipping... empty space. The size of the box seems huge if the game is just a deck of cards (which it seems to be from the demo video? There doesn't seem to be a board or anything like that?) Is there a way to instead offer different versions of the game, that are simply different sets of cards, that can be played independently (and therefore do not need to be stored together by the end users).