How we turned $140k on Kickstarter into $40k in debt. And how we broke even.

This is Part 3 of “Making The Contender: Conception to Completion”. Here are links to Part 1 (how we made the game) and Part 2 (how we ran the Kickstarter).

There are two big questions that every successful Kickstarter creator has to ask. We got them wrong.

I’m John Teasdale. My friends and I created The Contender: The game of Presidential Debate. 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.

It did not have to be like this.

Here are the two big questions, our answers at the time, and what we learned as a result.

Question 1: Where to manufacture?

What do I do with all this money!?

In games the big options are USA and China. Our tradeoff list looked like this:

USA

• We get to put big old ‘Made in the USA’ large on the box.