How to Run a Kickstarter.
And other things I don’t know how to do.
It’s three days into the Kickstarter campaign for HotterKeys. The first campaign I’ve ever been responsible for. It’s terrifying and I want to set myself on fire. But only a little. A small amount of fire, enough that the outside is crispy, but the insides are still tasty. Now that I think about it, I might just be hungry and craving some crispy food bits.
Turns out, running a Kickstarter campaign is not easy. The original intention of this campaign was to validate our product before we had to build our product. So far it seems what we’ve learned is that we haven’t necessarily saved time in the long run. Instead we’ve discovered that time is focused on marketing and sales rather than development. It’s not good, or bad. It’s just different than I was expecting.
I thought we’d shoot a quick video, post this thing, get it funded, and then get to the fun of building it in no time. This has not been the case. It’s day four and I’m switching between tabs, writing emails, Tweeting, Facebooking, and Buffering like it’s nobodies business. It certainly isn’t my business. I draw shapes and color. I can do that. Easy peasy. “Hey Mark, I need a color for this logo.” BOOM you got it. Not a problem.
If there’s one thing I can recommend to anyone working on a campaign like this, it’s to prepare as many assets as you can before the campaign launches. It’s pretty hard to do business development, social media work, (both of which I would say I’m mediocre at) and follow that up with some design work throughout the process.
It isn’t the worst thing ever though. It’s pretty fun and interesting to see how this thing is playing out. It’s been phenomenal to see the support from friends and family. It’s great to see people we don’t know excited about our silly game, and it’s been really fun talking about Final Fantasy VII with the @Uhaul_cares twitter account. I wouldn’t change it, if I could. It’s an adventure, and whether we get funded or not, we’ve already learned a lot.
Oh yeah, and just incase you missed my subtle link above and want a sticker or the game we’re working go here: http://kck.st/1B9QNpi
