Kickstarter Campaign Postmortem for ATE!!!

INTRO - Not Your Dad’s W/W Postmortem

Active Time Event!!! is a d66 of Science Fantasy backgrounds flavored in theme and mechanic to evoke classic science fantasy aesthetics of works such as Chrono Trigger and Moebius’ illustration with explicitly Queer characters as heroes. I am proud of it. Everytime I hold the book in my hands, I’m a little at a loss for words. I’d always told myself when I was younger that I’d never resort to self publishing, yet here I am. “If you want to achieve what you’ve never achieved, you must attempt something you haven’t yet done.” From where I’m sitting, this Kickstarter campaign is proving that true. I’m going to try to keep the over-philosophical wankery to a minimum through this as I plan to do a post mortem of the work itself later. I’d like this to be more of a breakdown of the numbers and strategies involved with properly running a Kickstarter campaign (with utterly zero experience or connections.) I hope it can be in some small way, akin to what this post by Uncanny Spheres: “Zinequest 3 Post-Mortem: The Drain” was for me, but for YOU dear reader! Just the gentlest kick in the pants, and followed by a hand reached down to pull the next person up. If you want to skip straight to the data breakdown, scroll to Part 3!

I wanted to save attempting to write this until I was fully done, but at time of writing I only have two packages left to send out tomorrow. The labels are printed and paid for, the packages are gonna be assembled tonight. 

I think that counts. 

$825, huh. Such a meager number all things considered, and yet it completely funded a run of these books and put a very small amount of change in my pocket that went to bills. 

So this is living the dream, huh? 

I remember being really proud when I used that money to pay for whatever it was: water or power or the phone. I don’t remember which. Strange how memory can convey a feeling with no other relevant vectors of data. Strange how this game dev thing is panning out. You never know from where support will come. All you can really do is nurture your surroundings. Plant seeds in your community for the sake of it, and then be blown the fuck away when something that loves you grows. In the same breath I’ll say- I once read a post on the r/rpg subreddit responding in a thread about OP’s Low DTRPG Sales in which the poster likened indie/self publishing to being a wheelbarrow. It wouldn’t go, if you personally didn’t push it. When I read that, I rubbed the deep calluses on my hands developed from decades of playing the drums. I should have replied with: “make sure you buy a nice set of gloves!” 

PART 1: Pushing that Fucking Wheelbarrow

POV: Lookit this boomerass meme I found

I’ve been publishing materials for TTRPGs for about a year and a half now. I’ve been properly GMing for about 6, but I’ve been making games for far longer- arguably since I was a child. This is my favorite thing I’ve ever done, and I find a lot of meaning doing it. That being said, the beginning was MODEST. I wrote and published a little 5E supplement as well as a 20pg entry to Pocketquest in 2023. Everything else worth mentioning is somehow tied to the Kickstarter project that I just completed. Before the Kickstarter campaign I made just under $500 total revenue between digital sales and physical sales at conventions.

With no connections in the industry, and few friends with any real ability to support my work beyond pity purchasing the zines I was making, it was going REAL slow. I don’t say this to discourage you. As a daytime educator, I just feel it’s paramount that I be realistic and transparent. Most people I show my work to have very kind things to say about it. Those same people don’t buy anything generally. This is a niche industry and art form still, despite what Critical Role and Stranger Things would have you believe, but it is in a phase of rapid growth- maybe the most rapid the art form has seen. It can be real confusing operating in this industry. 

So with this Kickstarter project I doubled the revenue I’ve made selling my work and then some. Nearly half of the backers are strangers to me. These are people who found the campaign in some way- I can only guess how through data pulled from analytics. The lion’s share, the other half, were people I consider friends. Faces who I’ve seen around my table at home and at convention/local tables I’ve run games at. Both are equally important. 

I blame Uncanny Spheres for infecting me with the insidious idea of Kickstarting my zine! This is something I’d wanted to do for a while, but due to self esteem issues was never convinced that I would be successful. I remember reading somewhere (I tried looking just now, but couldn’t find the post) that 95% of zinequest projects, whose funding goal is under a certain threshold of money, get funded. This was what it took to convince me. Unfortunately, I’m the kind of guy who will just grind away in his office on some nebulous project that’s far too big for one person to complete in a reasonable time frame. I make stupidly ambitious and large projects. Don’t do this. Start small! Work your way up to bigger projects as you succeed. What I was doing- what I’m still doing really, is a recipe for burnout. 

If it wasn’t already painfully obvious, this is a one-man show (or one enby show whatever- gender isn’t real you buffoon). For each product: I do the game design, writing, illustration, layouts, promotion, finances, and blah blah blah. Despite all these things, I really only see myself as an artist- the first four things I listed, not the rest. Promo/Finances/Marketing, all of this was and is always an afterthought to me. I put nearly zero effort into that stuff when it isn’t absolutely required. This is a mistake! Do as I say and not as I do! 

Get help. Really. Even taking a single one of those tasks off your plate will make it significantly easier to find success, and more importantly, be in a fresh state of mind when you do find it. I’ve tried posting about my works in a few places, but with little research on where the proper channels are. You have to find the Discords and the real forums. Shouting into the void on your tiny social media page won’t accomplish much, and you’ll just get yelled at if you post your game on a bunch of subreddits without meeting their minimum posting requirements or whatever. 

Thanks for the feedback, drloser. 

So I was working on a big project that to this day still hasn’t made it out the door, when I made the decision to jump in on Zinequest. I had a bunch of stuff designed for a Troika! setting, and I quickly decided what the Minimum Viable Product was: 48 pages of Science Fantasy JRPG nonsense. Even at that low of a page count, I had a massive load of illustrations to do. That’s what I did just about every day after I came home from my day job- for about four months, and I was still grossly underprepared and late to the party. There’s a ridiculous amount of work that (SHOULD) go into a Kickstarter campaign itself before Day 1 of the actual campaign. And that doesn’t count any of the work to make the actual content of the product itself. I’ll show you what I mean. 

I’m talking about this little guy here. It’s the badge Kickstarter applies to campaign pages that exceed the expectations when submitted. This is only chosen by Kickstarter itself, and it improves the rate at which your project appears in the average browser’s algorithm. I didn’t get this for Active Time Event!!!, but I’m gonna try damn hard to get it on the next project. Every single decision made and every bit of effort put in BEFORE you start your campaign helps it reach further and further out. Does this actually make a massive difference in the amount of backers? Probably not, but every single backer counts. My campaign reached about 125% funding, reaching the one stretch goal I hit, and I had only 31 backers. Every backer counts. So how do you get one of these badges really? What does it take? It takes a genuinely badass looking Kickstarter page: something that makes it crystal clear to the viewer that you put in a ridiculous amount of work. 

PART 2: The Kickstarter Dashboard and How to Drive It

When making a Kickstarter page, you’ll be greeted with something akin to the following:

There’s a lot to unpack here, so let’s take it step by step.

1. The Title - The name of your project and the briefest explanation of what it is.
2. The banner - This is maybe the most important facet of your kickstarter page. It’s the first thing your potential backers will see, and is probably the thing that made those potential backers click on your page as it’s what actually populates all search feeds on Kickstarter.
3. The bio - This is the text that will populate search feeds alongside the banner and will be the first thing read once a potential backer lands on your page.
4. Info Selection - This lets you move through the different pages of a Kickstarter. There’s a lot of information that appears on a Kickstarter Campaign as it unfolds. Kickstarter itself, divides these into different avenues of info.
5. Rewards - The selection of what your backers will actually pay for. In my case it was a simple set of of packages: PDF Tier, Zine Tier , All In Tier (PDF+Zine+Sticker), Custom Dice Vault Tier (with All In), and the Tony Tier (joke tier I’ll explain later)
6. The Story - This is the meat of the actual product pitch there’s little required past some amount of text, but a good campaign has a mix of the following
   1. Tons of Ad Copy
   2. Product sample (probably sample pages/prototype images)
   3. Variety of Product Reward write ups
   4. Influencer content (podcasts, actual plays, reviews)
   5. Info about the artists involved (that’s you!) 

That’s six different things you need to keep track of just when you land on the dashboard page. Before you even begin thinking about the pre launch page, you’ll need a head start on each of these. The more impressive these facets are before the big day, the bigger a groundswell you’ll have from the jump. This may seem like a no brainer, but as an artist my energy typically goes into making art, not collecting conventionally wise marketing strategies.

Part 3: The Data! 

For this portion of the postmortem, I’m going to editorialize the 30 days of the campaign as they unfolded with graphs pulled from Kicktraq.com You can find info on a lot of projects there.

From what I understand, there is a general shape the interest in any given campaign takes. There’s the initial ground swell, followed by a trickle of backers, the dreaded mid campaign slump, and the final 48 hour push. Here’s what that looked like for me.

Most of the initial 9 backers on Day 1 were my friends and players. I run games locally often, and this is where most of my playtests come from. I found that TTRPG folks are generally receptive to the idea of a playtest if they trust your GMing. The people you know on a personal basis in the TTRPG community are much more likely to support your work than the random viewer online. The little tail on the end there I suspect came from my promotion of the campaign. After I hit all the relevant channels, I didn’t post much. You should be able to tell where I’m going with this. As stupid and annoying as it sounds, posting good quality content relevant to your campaign works. The data proves it. Each incline on this chart corresponds to some direct promotion that I did.

[Sidebar: this projection was hilariously off base the whole campaign. It kept projecting I was going to hit higher than $1000. Lol, my guy. Lmao even.)

As I was doing research on how to succeed at kickstarter as my campaign was unfolding (this is a no-no, I should have done this step at this point many times) I saw someone claim that to combat the mid campaign slump, you should wait to announce the sexiest thing from your project. The little bump near the middle correlates with the time that I unveiled the Dice Vault reward tier. Only one was purchased, but you can see the extra bit of algorithmic oomph resulted in a few extra sales. This was the point at which my campaign hit its goal. I made sure that the stretch goal was announced by this point to give the last few folks to trickle in and have something to raise money for. Here’s a breakdown of the reward tiers.

I’m going to reward by reward and offer my thoughts.

1. No reward chosen: I suspect these are bots of some kind. One of these was some kind of kickstarter fund that just distributes $1 to seemingly random campaigns. I have no insight on this one.
2. $5 PDF Only - It’s good to have a cheap minimum tier for the folks who can’t or won’t fund the higher impact tiers. $5 was the absolute minimum I was willing to sell the work for. It was a lot of work!
3. $15 Zine Only - This is what the actual goal of the campaign was: funding a run of books. Using DTRPG’s in-house printers I was able to print 48 page softback, perfect bound books for under $3. If you’re just starting out, this is a good way to get yourself acclimated with the needs of printing.
4. $20 All In Tier - This is it. The money maker. Uncanny Spheres recommends you don’t fund small page count books if you’re trying to make money. I think this applies here because the highest “standard” tier you offer will generate the most money by far. Just over half of the project’s funding came from this reward alone. Give fans of your work big funding opportunities. The worst that can happen is that nobody picks that particular tier. This is a unique benefit to selling via crowdfunding.
5. $60 Dice Vault Tier - This was thrown in extra last minute to combat the mid campaign slump, and the algorithm responded. Even though this only resulted in one Dice Vault sale, there was a bump in traffic for the next few days resulting in 5 or so backers.
6. The Tony Tier - The ugly truth is that joke tiers fucking work. I had this idea because one of my longest running players said he would cover whatever money was left to hit the funding/stretch goal at the end of the campaign. On the last day, I opened a tier just for him with the exact dollar amount needed, and he kept his word. I recommend checking out the story behind Run The Jewels’ joke remix record Meow The Jewels, itself a massive joke tier that raised 60K for the project. Kickstarter is the Shark Tank for basement grognards like myself. Swing for the fences!

Near half of the backers got to my page through me. I was pleasantly surprised at how many stumbled on my page through Kickstarter’s website.

I mean, Kickstarter itself brought in over $300 in funding, that’s over half of the original funding goal. I was very grateful when I realized. Kickstarter’s whole deal works for a reason.

Lastly for the data section, I’d like to speak about pre-launch pages and followers. These are the people who either liked your project enough to want to be reminded of it at the beginning and near the end, OR they are the folks who were on the fence.

I remember reading somewhere that the ideal minimum goal for converted followers was 33%. I got a few of these near the end of the campaign. Make sure you have something extra dope lined up for that 48 hour mark. You want the folks who come back to your page to land on something convincing. 

Part 4: Rolling Under to Attempt Getting Better

I’m currently working on my Zinequest 2025 entry. It’s going to be Issue #1 of a series of zines inspired by my playgroup’s whacky playstyle. I have a list of ideas on how to improve, but haven’t explored any of them yet (you’ll have to wait for the next project’s post mortem I guess!). Here they are in no particular order:

1. Fine tune a list of strategies to use in the next project
   1. Schedule the entire campaign ahead of time- only interact with the campaign when I have to
      1. Featured posts about the work
      2. Art assets
   2. Enlisting some fucking help to run the campaign
   3. Pre-Launch in advance
   4. Design assets specifically for Kickstarter’s dashboard and for the venues of marketing
   5. Muster a marketing budget/make a proper marketing campaign with deadlines 
   6. More interesting and varied reward tiers
   7. Retailer tier? 
   8. ????
   9. Profit! 

Part 5: Conclusion & Thanks

No matter how good you are at this, you’re going to need help. I mean that’s the crux of this whole thing. Crowdfunding. TTRPGs are a cooperative hobby; the same is true of making them. The more you give to the community freely, the more they’ll support you. It’s so simple it’s braindead, but in a society that is driven by the data, guided by the data, and funded by the data, it can be easy to forget how much one-to-one interaction affects the success of your work. Run your games for the community. That’s my #1 advice. Get out to your FLGS or Local Library/Bookstore whatever, and run games. Seriously. 

Beyond that: make games and release them. Kickstarter is a really safe way to try to get a project off the ground. If you fail, the money goes back to the people who pledged it. The only other possibility is that you succeed and get money. Who doesn’t like succeeding and getting money?! Start small, and plan your release to coincide with a game jam or other big event. It may seem like the competition is heavier, but that’s just an illusion. I’m a “rising tides raise all ships” kinda guy. You should be, too. Foster the scene and it will pay you dividends. 

Extra lastly: thank you to the following folks who helped out in some way and deserve a shoutout. In no particular order:

• My wonderful wife Mona- my favorite player at my tables, and my favorite person in the world. Without her, I would have been a nervous neurotic wreck for those 30 days. Love you, babe <3
• All my playtesters- Mona, & Moth, & Wayne, & Kyle, & Colin, & Alec, & Keoni, and Jesse & many more! &&&&&&&&&&& Knuckles.
• Uncanny Spheres Zinequest 3 Post-Mortem: The Drain
  • The whole reason I attempted this.
• Kismet Games
  • Offering the most based advice during the campaign.
• Ugli Games
  • Being the first mutually interested game dev since wayyyy back.
• Mystic Punks
  • Getting behind a local project solely out of the good of their greasy little hearts.
• Wilderwhim Discord
  • This is my personal discord in which you’ll find some very kind and supportive people. 
• Melsonian Arts Council
  • Honorable mention shouting out ATE!!! on their main page. I was elated when I knew that the Council would stop denying me the rank of Jedi Master.

And you for reading this, champ! Check out my shit if you got something out of this article. 

Ciao~

W/W