[S/Lay w/Me Kickstart] Mortem

[Ron Edwards]

The good news is that I didn't get crickets. The project showed the classic pattern: high pledges initially, low to nothing in the middle, and a renewed surge at the end. Backers' enthusiasm was high.

It could be that this simply is about not enough backers out there. The people who cared did pledge, but perhaps there aren't very many of them, and beyond them, the fashion-excitement buzz explosion didn't receive the signals it needs. If this is so, then I should choose between inflating the buzz to meet the goal, or decreasing the goal to meet the reality. The point of the former is to catch people who don't care but will pledge because Bob has pledged and is excited about it. However, this time, there was no Sorcerer cachet in my favor either to generate buzz or to induce excitement about "how much can it make." I'm good with this if it's totally grass-roots, but the ways to push for it "from the top" are either out of my own skill-set or repugnant to me at a deep reactive level.

I think it might be showing us a very successful kickstart for a $2000 or $3000 goal. The $6000 was set almost entirely to meet Jasper's professional fee, but now I'm thinking that I might have posed it as a matching-type arrangement: "You help me pay half his fee and I'll get the rest." I do think it might have had a shot at $3000; when a project clearly gets close to the goal, people are motivated to upgrade their pledges, and I did have a hell of a lot of backers who could have doubled the whole take with minimal upgrades.

I'm sorry to see that Greg Stolze's so-called ransom model, crowdfunding for free/public access products, seems to have little traction here. Although maybe it does but I missed the importance of Greg typically shooting for lower goals and hitting them big, consistent with my idea above.

I don't know whether the unusual rewards/pledge structure caused enough trouble to worry about. It was definitely hampered a bit by the Kickstart format which demands articulated rewards at each tier, so that people somehow thought they'd personally "get the app" from reading them alone and couldn't tell why there were multiple tiers. If the tiers were totally blank in content like I'd planned, forcing people to the text to see the rewards, I think it would have worked better. Also, those who pledged seemed to get it without any problem. There's no way to tell whether any number of people would have pledged if they hadn't been stumped a little. If so, then to me, the hump seems pretty low, but maybe any hump is enough to be a problem.

Whether the whole game is too esoteric and niche-y for this purpose, I'm not sure - as I said earlier, it's my single strongest seller so it can't be written off as obscure. However, and this applies to the rewards too, one of my strongest promotional devices was impossible. In the past, when confronted by kneejerk reactions, I could put the "thing which was obviously no good" into people's hands and they'd be forced to change their minds. The Lover figure would probably be top of that list in this case - put it in their hands and I bet they'd squee. Here, though, I couldn't do that.

The one thing which disappoints me is that people didn't try out the functioning app play so it could function as its own promotion.

So, my big conclusion is that I don't think I can overcome the Sears & Roebuck problem by myself, which is pretty much what Jason Paul McCartan warned me about. I did have to try, though. Even the extent to which it worked is encouraging; it's not like the whole thing funded $75 total and stopped.

[Paul Czege]

"I'm sorry to see that Greg Stolze's so-called ransom model, crowdfunding for free/public access products, seems to have little traction here."

You were planning to make the app available for free to anyone who wanted to use it?

Paul

[Ron Edwards]

Yes, that's what it says in the Kickstart. I didn't want to say "gets the app" in the reward tiers; Kickstarter made me put it there. It gave the wrong message that one pledges to get the app, whereas I wanted to say that my goal (the app) didn't need to be important to the backer. I now think that this phrasing in the tiers heightened the incomprehension-hump, no matter how clearly I or others spelled it out in the video, the body text of the project, my posts at G+, or comments on those posts.

[Dan Maruschak]

Part of what made this kickstarter seem odd to me is that it was presenting this software development project as the creative endeavor that was looking for backing, but simultaneously trying to treat software development as a black box where you put money in one end and good software comes out the other (as someone who has worked in developing interactive software I don't believe that's a realistic view). The allegedly "done, but ugly" version of the app (at least what I looked at via the "training tool") didn't look like "done" interactive software to me, i.e. it didn't seem to be a case of simply needing to swap out placeholder art, etc. However, I also had issues understanding what I was looking at, since it seemed to presuppose some knowledge of how the game worked which I didn't have, so I gave up trying to figure it out pretty quickly.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I think some of your idiosyncratic approaches to this kickstarter created some problems. For example, you seem unhappy that the kickstarter people wanted "the app" to be part of the rewards, but that seems like a reasonable expectation if the app itself is "the project" since it makes the project looks a lot like a video game or other software project. If you had been willing to reframe the project as "a new edition of S/Lay w/Me" you probably could have explained that the app itself was just a piece of infrastructure that you felt was necessary for the game to reach its full potential (similar to a company saying "we need this specialized machine to effectively mass produce the widget we've created" -- nobody expects the machine itself to be delivered to the backers). A lot of the talk and explanations around this kickstarter seemed to focus on your nonstandard approaches, or your issues with trying to fit square pegs into round holes, and I don't think a lot of "this is what my creative vision looks like" came through.

Personally I don't think I'm interested in the subject matter of the game, so I personally was an unlikely backer. I did feel like you had a valid critique of some of the other approaches to online play (e.g. too focused on grid-and-minis toolboxes, and/or IRC-style die rollers) but successfully diagnosing a problem isn't necessarily the same as having a good solution, so I didn't end up feeling motivated to contribute in a "support the experiment" manner, either.

[Paul Czege]

Ah, it does say that. "Once funded, the app becomes available and free to the whole world." Yes, I do think the language in the reward tiers created confusion. It did for me. The reward tiers didn't feel like "Hey, you're helping make this app free for everyone." So yeah, the language of the reward tiers is definitely part of the problem, but partly it's also the minimum $25 contribution. If the goal is to make the app free for everyone, why can't I throw just $5 or $10 at it to have my name in the next edition of the book as someone who made the app possible, or for a "thank you" postcard of the cover art mailed to me, or something like that?

Paul

[Callan S.]

IIRC the page said 'you get the app' - perhaps if it had said 'The whole world gets the app!' it might have forfilled the KS mumbo and made clear this is a 'giveth to the world' sort of thing. You might even miss some giveth to the world folk if they thought it was a 'get something just for me' (and it wasn't something they wanted just for them). Also, sometimes there's only so many fish in the sea. Granted, places like KS try and make it always look boundless. But there's not necessarily anything one could do if you just ran out of fish.

[Ron Edwards]

Well, there's the page text and there's the tiers text. I knew from a lot of prior hassles that people typically only read the tiers (and I've tried to start doing more than that myself, as a backer). The page is very clear at multiple points. My plan was to keep the tiers blank except for "one reward item," "two reward items," and so on, which would force the reader to the list of rewards in the page. By putting any "you get" talk into the tiers created a stopping point for a lot of readers, I think. I had to use that phrasing because Kickstarter insisted.

[Eero Tuovinen]

I know that I mentioned this before the kickstart, but by my understanding you could've opted to not have multiple reward tiers at all - after all, you were giving out one item per $25 anyway, so you could have figured out how many items each customer got from the amount they paid, instead of looking at which tier they funded. That might have been a bit clearer communications-wise.

Then again, I am somewhat doubtful of whether this communication issue is that central to the overall success of the funding drive; perhaps it had some minor influence, but I would imagine that the overall magnitude of interest out there in the penetrated audience still came through here. Perhaps a e.g. 10% swing might be achieved by phrasing things differently and other such minor changes, but to me it seems that gaining more significant shift would require either more market penetration (more people who'd consider participating in the current deal), or changing the deal (a different game, different rewards, different price point). Just my gut impression, of course.

[Ron Edwards]

Some things aren't going to be known. I can say pretty confidently that your suggestion wouldn't have been permitted by Kickstarter - they want tiers and they want product in those tiers.

What I'm sticking with is the observation that if it had been a $2000 goal, it would have funded. And possibly it could have made $3000 given that getting $1000 in the first day or so might have generated "close to the goal" excitement. Whatever else we discuss about clarity or weirdness or whatever takes second place to the issue of the goal's total value.

[Ron Edwards]

Nowhere near as much fun watching the final countdown this time.

[Troy_Costisick]

Heya Ron,

One of the things I felt about your Kickstart page was that the video didn't do an optimal job of getting people excited about your app.  The first thing you talk about in your video is the music.  Then you list out all rewards for the Kickstart, how much they cost, and what the process is to get them.  All that is really cool, but first I'd like to see you introduce yourself and introduce what your kickstarter is all about.  You don't get to what the fundraising is actually for until about 45 seconds in.  It should come first IMHO.  The video is only 88 seconds long.  45 seconds is quite a while to wait to find out what this is all about.  And even when you do discuss what the kickstarter is for, you don't go into a lot of detail about how rad it will make playing S/Lay w/Me.

Additionally, if there is anyone I know who can be passionate about RPGs it's you.  Without a doubt you're an excellent advocate for our hobby.  But the video is very subdued.  It's hard to tell if you're excited about this project, even though I know for a fact you are.  I only know that, though, because I've read what you've written here in these forums.  Unfortunately, it seemed to me that a lot of your excitement didn't come through.  If I were just clicking on this link from the Discover #RPG page on Kickstarter, I wouldn't all that inclined to back based on what I saw from that video.

And on the topic of people unfamiliar with you clicking on your kickstarter, I would have mentioned that as part of the rewards for backing the app at $25 you could choose to get a PDF of the game.  So even if someone who was exploring all the RPG kickstarters out there didn't know how to play S/Lay w/Me, you could learn all while enhancing the experience for everyone.  That would be an excellent selling point for your Kickstart, but it wasn't mentioned in the video and wasn't pointed out explicitly anywhere else for that matter.

The video is a big deal for me if I don't know much about a project.  When I consider backing a new project, it's usualy the first thing I do once I load up the page.  In this Kickstart's case, the video underwhelmed me.  Not saying this to be mean, just trying to give helpful feedback.

Peace,

-Troy

[Jesse Burneko]

Hey Ron,

So, I probably should have said some of this before you launched the Kickstarter but when I looked at the preview page a) I missed that rewards were digital and that physical copies involved a separate and secondary paying for shipping process and b) didn't do the personal emotional/financial math until I went to actually consider contributing.

So here's my experience: I went to the page intending to contribute.  I understood the $25 per item idea just fine.  I was mostly interested in the spiffy new version, both figurines and the poster.  So that's a $100.  For purely digital stuff.  There's a way to get physical stuff but it involves a separate shipping billing that looks like it might be $10-$15 on top of that $100.

For comparison I participated in the Deadlands Noir Kickstarter at the stupid high level of $150 and for that I got TWO hardcover books, 5 metal miniatures, a set of dice, a set of poker chips, a GM screen and adventure, a set of poster maps, two decks of cards, and a fun little P.I. Badge.  All of that except the P.I. Badge is game usable.  It was almost like getting a boxed set.

Now I fully understand that you're smaller scale.  Also that you don't want to run into problems where you fund the project but are stuck dishing out expenses for other stuff not covered by the funding.  I have NO IDEA how in the red or black the Deadlands Noir kickstarter turned out.  I just know that for one Kickstarter I shelled out $150 and got this fun care package about a year later and here I was looking at about $110 for significantly less.

My financial situation is also not as good as it was back then, so I had to seriously think about it.  So my next thought was to just drop down to $25 and get the revised .pdf.  But then $25 for a revised .pdf of a game I already one in form, in print seemed excessive.

I know that I could have contributed ANY amount and said, "screw the rewards" but with the high funding goal that seemed like throwing pebbles in a river.  So I just threw up my arms and gave up.  I like S/lay w/ Me and I like the idea of digitally assisted play (I've been wanting something like this for Capes, for YEARS) but I just couldn't find a way to participate that felt satisfying on my end.

Hope things go better in the future.

Jesse

[Troy_Costisick]

For comparison I participated in the Deadlands Noir Kickstarter at the stupid high level of $150 and for that I got TWO hardcover books, 5 metal miniatures, a set of dice, a set of poker chips, a GM screen and adventure, a set of poster maps, two decks of cards, and a fun little P.I. Badge.  All of that except the P.I. Badge is game usable.  It was almost like getting a boxed set.

I'd be interested to know what their profit margin on that is.

[Ron Edwards]

Yeesh, the weeks got away from me. I meant to post the following right away.

Here's an imprecise but not inaccurate way to look at Kickstarter results: divide the money gained by the number of backers who receive physical products. In this case, you divide $117,648 by 772 - you get $152.39. That's your pure-unit gross take, right there. Now to consider it in terms of unit cost.

Let's be real. Look at all that stuff they had to lay out, get art for, print, package, and mail. Are you going to tell me that they made money off of doing this? That such an exercise is anything but spinning the hamster wheel of preorder-send-order really hot and hard?

I'm not even talking about the various debatable intangibles like man-hour cost for managing all the crap you have to manage and running around finding the right people or places to do things right, or figuring out shipping costs or standing in line at the post office. I'm talking about straight-up on-paper costs. If they included a convention appearance to show off the new stuff, all those costs count too (trying not to think about the T&T kickstart where they had to go to the convention with bookmarks and other cute promo but no books yet ...).

Jesse, doesn't this Sears & Roebuck approach to kickstart backing strike you as a little bit entitled? And very likely to run a company into the ground if anything jumps the wrong way on them at any point in the process?