Austin is well known as the creative heart of Texas. We feature a Kickstarter every week in order to help support innovation here in Austin. Those of you who’ve been inspired by everything from The Doctor Who Review Project to Stabil-i-Case may be pondering your own crowdfunded project. In order to help you make the most of Kickstarter, we talked to David Alan Burrow, the mastermind behind Cracked Monocle’s highly successful Tephra Kickstarter.
Tephra asked for $1,000 in order to create print editions of their original Steampunk role playing game. In one month, they earned $22,821.
“I hate having to tell people to do their groundwork, but becoming an overnight success took us about two years,” said Burrow.
The eight main staff and dozen volunteers on Team Tephra used a mix of social media and good old fashioned friendliness to get the word out about the product. They play tested the game at Dragon’s Lair Comics in Austin (recently expanded to San Antonio) in order to introduce local gamers to Tephra. Since this is a role-playing game, they also went to the other places gamers conglomerate - science fiction conventions. Burrow said he wanted to make sure anyone attending a convention in Austin, Dallas, Houston or San Antonio had a chance to play the game, meet team Tephra, and hopefully come away with a good impression of both the people and the product.
“You have to be social,” said Burrow. “Get out and meet people. Get them excited. When you run a Kickstarter, you’re asking strangers to be passionate about your creation. If your friends don’t believe in you, why should some random donor? We built a community around Tephra. They were ready for our Kickstarter.”
On the social media side of things, Burrow said Team Tephra kept up a constant trickle of excited comments about new features, great people they met at conventions, and things they couldn’t wait to unveil. “I wouldn’t call it a social media strategy,” said Burrow. “We were just talking about something we love. People can tell.”
People they entertained at the weekly Dragon’s Lair game nights and met at conventions tapped into that excitement and reposted. Rather than asking people to repost, Burrow said it was far better to create a post people wanted to share by expressing excitement and giving people a sense of anticipation.
Before Tephra’s Kickstarter went live, the team sat down and had a series of discussions about backer rewards. Since the goal of the Kickstarter was to finance professional printing of the book, they started with a core reward of one copy of Tephra for $30.
Ask For Enough
Burrow cautioned against putting too much effort into rewards under $40. “I learned the vast majority of Kickstarter donors will donate $40-100. I’ve seen a lot of awesome Kickstarters fail because their primary reward is in the $10-20 range. That wasn’t enough for them to get their seed money.” If you don’t reach your minimum goal on Kickstarter (in Tephra’s case, $1,000) then the donors are never billed and the campaign isn’t funded.
Instead, Burrow recommended focusing energy on $40-70 funding levels. Start with your core product, then add on a T-Shirt. From there, add some custom items fans can’t get elsewhere. Since Tephra is a game, their next level was a custom dice bag, but he said a CD or MP3 download of unreleased songs would work well for a band, while postcards or small framable prints would work well for an artist.
Once you get past $100, you’re into hardcore fan territory. At that level he said it’s important to make sure you’re rewarding donors for being part of the community and giving them bragging rights among other fans.
“The one that caught me the most off guard was our $150 reward. Our reward was everything previous plus we’ll turn you or a character of your choice into an adversary in the Tephra world. We made $6,000 of our total on that. People loved it. We had businesses asking if they could be an adversary,” said Burrow.
Watching people’s excitement over that reward level made him realize just how much people on Kickstarter are looking for a personalized experience. Having custom rewards drastically increases sales. “People love having their names on things. They get really excited,” said Burrow.
Kickstarter Timing
Most Kickstarters make the majority of their money in the first 48 and last 48 hours. The rest of the month is a slow slog. In order to keep the excitement level high, Burrow issued 10 updates in 30 days.
“People will judge you on everything you put out there, so my updates were about telling people this was really cool, explaining why I was so excited, what effect it was having on my life, and how they could get involved. Sometimes I’d just update that I couldn’t sleep right now because I just checked my kickstarter and you guys are wonderful. Keep it personal. Make people feel involved,” said Burrow.
Burrow said he hoped to do well, but he hadn’t really anticipated making over $10,000. At that point, in order to keep enthusiasm high, he and the team started making quirkier offers. If they passed $13,000, they promised to make a dance video. When that went well, the team brainstormed new ideas to keep donors involved.
“If we reached $17,000 we said we’d make a banner with the names of everyone who donated. We couldn’t believe that before I was able to make an update we passed that goal. My lag time hurt us, which was funny,” said Burrow.
Based on what he learned, Burrow said if he ran another Kickstarter he would plan more for success. He recommended other Kickstarters have a plan for upping the ante in order to keep people involved and excited. If you can get X number of people to donate Y dollars, then awesome thing Z will be the result.
“Don’t publicly tell anyone. Keep it a surprise. Something to anticipate. But know if you make X over your goal, you’re going to do Y. Have stages set up for each level of success. People like having those new goals to shoot for. It gives them something to repost on their Facebook, and if it’s something that improves their own reward, even better.”
He cautioned against simply announcing the unofficial goalposts. Posting a $10,000 ambition when the official goal is only $1,000 can be off-putting. On top of that, the purpose of the new update goals is to reward people for donating and keep them excited. If they know about the unofficial goals from the start, you lose that.
“I see Kickstarters saying our goal is $2K and if we get $10,000 we’ll do this or $20,000 we’ll do that and all I can think is that they’re so cocky. Most of the ones who post like that barely make their main goals.”
In addition to making friends both in real life and online, building a community around your product, and planning reward levels, Burrow recommended people find a friend who understands SEO and get them to help with the writing. Most donors will be existing fans, but a lot of donors go to Kickstarter to find new and interesting things they want to become part of.
Most people say a well-produced video is the key to a successful Kickstarter, but Burrow disagreed. He said the people on Team Tephra were all good writers, but none of them had good video production skills. Rather than put out a bad, uninspiring video, they decided to focus on good art, good text, good rewards, lots of updates and passionate fans.
In addition to their original goal of printing the books, Tephra’s Kickstarter allowed Cracked Monocle to produce customized expansions (based in part on the way people participated in their Kickstarter), posters and an expanded real life presence at conventions outside of Texas.
Six months after the successful Kickstarter, Tephra is for sale at game shops in Austin, Dallas and San Antonio as well as online. You can also play Tephra for free at Dragon’s Lair Comics 7 pm every Monday.
