We launched a Kickstarter campaign for a board game two days ago, and after an overwhelming launch, I found myself in a unique situation, where I had the time to write down my feelings. And I feel privileged for that — with only two days’ distance, I’m already seeing it through different eyes, so I am grateful I have this written reminder of how it was. So here it goes, live from the launch day:
It’s 2:45 in the morning, and I’m wide awake. Well — maybe not wide awake, as I am really tired, but my mind is locked in that state where it keeps buzzing and analysing, and it wouldn’t let me go to sleep.
Because we’ve just launched or Kickstarter project about — 13 hours ago? That number took me forever to calculate, and for some reason, I wanted to check it on the calendar. That’s how exhausted I am — my mind is way past doing any complex mathematical thinking, it’s wandering through vast layers of different realities uncontrolled by the analytical part. It’s actually in a perfect state to write — it’s in one of those states similar to when you wake up when I think you’re closest to subconsciousness that you can get in a conscious state.
So that’s why I’m writing. Because there’s no way I’m going to sleep! I don’t want to leave our Kickstarter projects for a few hours because I’m afraid it’ll crumble and disappear before I wake up.
Because we’ve just had an amazing launch. The project was funded in less than 6 hours (the funding goal was 6k EUR, and it’s a light board game), and we’ve just passed the first stretch goal at 10k.
And for me, this is huge. It’s the first time that I’m stepping out of the employee mentality, and that I’m creating something that’s truly mine/ours. So I think I like this quiet alone time with the project, where I occasionally refresh the page to check if everything is still there and then continue typing. It gives me time to look back at what has just come to pass.
We thought we were well prepared for the launch. We attended the Crowdfunding Boot Camp, where we learned so much about preparing a Kickstarter campaign, we witnessed two of the other projects from the group launch successfully (one of them is towards the end of their second campaign), we had the product finished, and we did our homework getting the shipping prices and quotes from manufacturers. The one thing we knew we were behind was the photo and video material. It took so much more time than we estimated, and I hope we won’t be doing that again ourselves for the next project. We were making the final edits the evening before the launch, but I guess that’s normal, judging from how people with experience in crowdfunding just nodded when I told them that.
And we probably should have decided earlier about which email services we’ll be using, and whether we want to work with a marketing agency or not, but other things were going smoothly. I thought the week before launch was stressful, but we had it under control. We took the time to go for a fast-paced walk every day, and our eating habits were normal. I was under the impression that we have to make it to launch, and then everything will be great and I will do a 30-day yoga program during our 30-day campaign.
Boy, was that wrong! The day of the launch felt like putting out fires. First, the video wouldn’t upload to Kickstarter, and it took several tries and a new export in lower quality to get it to work. And there were so many little things that I had to do — my fiancé was at work, and the rest of the team had other obligations, so I was home alone for the last stretch. Then, the email service provider locked me out of sending emails after I uploaded a mailing list. I have no idea why that happened, as the email list is legit, and it consists of people who are interested in our game and gave us permission to email them. And lastly, we were expecting a release of a video preview from one of the major reviewers, and it wasn’t published. So I checked the email correspondence again and saw that their last email confirming the date had a wrong date in it. And we didn’t catch it. Oops. I immediately wrote to them and they were super helpful and launched the video right away.
Have you ever watched people slackline, walk along a suspended length of flat webbing? In my experience, you can do it two ways — first, you are perfectly in balance at any given time, and you move slow and in control. Second is you’re kind of in balance, propelling forward and hoping you stay on the line long enough so that you make it to the other side. Well, until the new year, preparing Kickstarter felt like the first way. During the last week, it’s definitely the second. Which makes me wonder, if we were actually quite well prepared, and we felt like that, how do other people do it without having all of the info we had.
And then there’s the actual launch. I think nothing can prepare you for it, except the real thing. When you click on that rectangular button on the screen and the project goes live.
I don’t remember the last time I felt under so much pressure, and I’ve worked on pretty complex projects before. I had a pretty structured to-do list, and I abandoned it shortly after launch. The number of responses that started to come in was just overwhelming. My phone kept buzzing, there were comments on Kickstarter, Facebook and Instagram were beeping… And I just focused on the things that seemed the most urgent, which was getting the launch email notification out. Then, I would turn my focus to Kickstarter comments, and thankfully that was the point when my fiancé came home, and he took half of the workload.
In the next hours, we updated some graphics, answered a ton of comments, made the first update to announce the project is funded, revealed two stretch goals, and went through our list of friends and colleagues that we made a while ago that included people we know personally and we wanted to tell them about the launch ourselves. In the process, we completely forgot about dinner, and have my mom and my sister to thank that we ate at all. (They brought cake to celebrate, which was very kind of them, but I don’t see how you would have enough time for celebrating on the launch day. Maybe if you had a bigger team.)
And my take-away lessons? That it’s a good idea to have several people on communication channels, and different people on the technical to-do list. Because trying to manage it all at once is too much. That once the project goes live, it has a life of its own. It’s not yours anymore, there’s other people involved in it. And that in an instant, you’re not in your local time zone anymore, you’re interacting with people all over the globe at the same time, some are at work, some are going to bed, and some are just waking up. That you sometimes need to be fast in writing replies. And that it would probably be a good idea to have a team around the world, so you would have all the time zones covered, and one team member would be on the project the whole time. Because I think you can leave it alone for a few hours, unsuspecting, and come back to mayhem.
And also that the board game community is awesome. And the crowdfunding community seems to be awesome too — so far, we’ve had some really meaningful and positive interactions with people we’ve just met. And that I have some really awesome friends and colleagues, who breathed with this project today as much as we did, rooting for us, and were with us every second of the launch, and that even congratulated us before we noticed that the project funded. And that I also have some people whom I didn’t expect would care or be interested in the project, who really surprised me with how much they really care. So a big thank you to all of you who have been part of this journey with us! And a note to my younger self, to care more. Because you don’t know how much that means until you are trying to create something yourself.
So here I am, still wide awake, and the new day is almost ready to start. It’s 4:22. I think I’ll squeeze in some hours of sleep before I dive into today’s to-do list, though I feel more awake than I was before. And I know things will slow down after the first few days, but we’ll really need to figure out a system that will allow us to get enough sleep, or we have a big problem for the next month. And maybe I’ll even find a way to do that yoga program 😊
So there you have it — this is how the launch day felt for me. A first-person account of somebody who’s not yet had the time to sleep, process, and reset. And I hope it can allow you to get a glimpse into this unique time.
Cheers to successful launches!
Nika
If anyone is interested in our Kickstarter campaign, you can find it here: https://link.snowboardgames.si/1AQb2b If you like it, we’d be thrilled if you support it or tell your friends about it!
And if you are wondering who the other Crowdfunding Boot Camp campaign is, here’s the link: https://link.snowboardgames.si/KHVZq4 The creator is an amazing artist and an awesome person, and her first-hand advice about the campaign-related questions we have has saved us quite a few problems and hours of research.
