CROWDFUNDING: Tips from Ryan Smith

#kickstarter #crowdfunding 

Ryan Smith (AKA GameSmith) recently hit big in the world of Kickstarter with his party game Moral Dilemma. It failed to fund on its first run, getting just 69% of its goal. Ryan retooled and submitted again, and soon smashed through his target, ending up with 5562% of his goal. I got in touch to get some KS tips and asked how he had made such a difference between the two campaigns.

"We are asking ourselves the exact same question every day. If someone had told me one month ago that we would fund past $5000 I would have called them crazy!

We definitely learned a lot between campaigns. While these things may sound simple, it took us a over a month to figure it all out:

- setting a really low funding goal - figure out the absolute minimum needed to fund, and then take away the amount you would be willing to invest out of pocket. For us, we figured we could make a print on demand version of our game if we got $1000. Overfunding does two things: a) makes the game look super popular and b) gives people the impression that they are buying something rather than investing in something. Lots of people don't like risk, perceived or otherwise.

- cross promote with other campaigns - this is free advertising and it works better than any other form of advertising money can buy. Simply ask other creators if they want to cross promote, and you'll be surprised just how many of them will say yes. Check out our latest update for an example of how we did this.

- give away something simple but fun (like a T-shirt) via a Facebook contest. People go bananas for T-shirts, and will get all of their friends to come "like" their contest entry. This only makes the game appear in more and more news feeds. Again, free and way better than using Facebook's own built in ad manager. Trust me!

- Get a whole bunch of people to back you on Day 1. Friends, family, previous backers, etc.. Funding on day 1 is really, really key. You get bumped to the top of 'most popular' for a few days, which only facilitates the snowball effect.

- If you fail, and this is probably the biggest lesson of all, don't give up. Tell everyone that you're going to go away for a bit and jazz everything up. Make a new video. And then email all of those backers to tell them you are back on Day-1. 

 Thanks Ryan! All the tips above apply to whatever crowdfunding project you're planning, be it a game, book, or full-on feature film!