Gay Sauna the Board Game

I still stand by Part 1 of this series: I launched my Kickstarter too early. Yet one thing I have discovered during my campaign, and specifically during my offline promotional activities is: Not everyone is “Kickstarter friendly”.

I don’t believe this is an existing term, but I’ve deemed it very real that many people are just unwilling to participate on this platform due to a variety of reasons, not all of which are easily surmountable.

Firstly, most folks have never heard of Kickstarter and don’t really understand what it does, what running a Kickstarter campaign means or what even crowdfunding is. Common misconceptions include it being a charity request, a way to steal money, borrowing from friends or free cash for entrepreneurs. While I have tried to fix some of these (I even wrote about it), it’s very difficult to educate about the huge concept of crowdfunding whilst maintaining the request for backing my own project.

Secondly, if there is a long time to market, as with my campaign for Gay Sauna the Board Game, then trying to convince people to buy something now and then wait for 9 months to get it is a pretty tough sell. In fact, it’s proven almost impossible. While I have managed to achieve a few backers and pledges through in-person promotions and sales, the high value of being stood in front of them driving their enthusiasm is then very diluted by requiring them to support a project online that then may not produce a game they can play until Spring 2020.

In the run up to my campaign launch, I had set aside a considerable amount of time for in-person appearances and events that ultimately had very little return to them. Combined with a targeted online campaign that really was focused on the more general gay market meant while my product and brand reach was considerable, this wasn’t converting into pledges.

What’s clear to me now is that trying specifically to find those that might be familiar with crowdfunding and Kickstarter is a much better way to get new pledges. And while in person promotion is great for the brand, game sales in this format will be much easier to realise when I’ve got the games in stock to be able to fulfil orders quickly and not exposing customers to the lengthy crowdfunding wait times.

There are a lot of factors that contributed towards me not reaching my Kickstarter goal, but for sure there is one of them that tops all the rest and was by far the single most important thing that prevented bigger success – I wasn’t ready!

Not being ready means to me that I just didn’t have so many things in place at the moment that I pushed the Go Live button that meant every thing I did from that moment on was just way more difficult and much less effective than it should have been.

It wasn’t just that I had not done some things, but I also failed to apply a lot of the things I had learned and was continuously learning as I went. I set the date when I would go live quite some weeks before and rather than continuously evaluate whether it was still viable to continue, I got caught up in so many of the details. I made a lot of concessions in order to reach this date that lowered the overall quality and quantity of the deliverables that when I look back should have been big warning signs to me that things were not at all going to plan.

Many of my discussions with those close to me at the time were focused around the benefits of the timing of the launch (which took place just prior to Gay Pride in Amsterdam) and I completely forgot about all of the checklists and preparation I had done to ensure I would know when I was ready.

My experience especially during the first few days of the campaign clearly showed me that the readiness of a project creator is by far more important than the specific timing of when a project is launched, and while things like time and day of the week play a part, if there are things missing from a campaign, you lose potential backers. They won’t come back later even if you manage to get the message to them that you’ve covered the gaps that were there before – you get one chance to make a first impression. When it’s a Kickstarter campaign, you can’t underestimate how important that first impression is.

With the launch of the Kickstarter Campaign in mere days, it was about time to fully update the website and start including more of the exciting content from the game.

I’ve created the Library on the site to give everyone a little bit more insight into the game setting, especially for those new to Gay Saunas.

There’s now a brand new Visitors section that lists all of the characters that are ready to start playing in Gay Sauna the Board Game, with each character getting its own details page.

There’s also a new rules section that gives an introduction to how the game is played at a high level – of course there will be more detailed rules included in the game.

I’ve also given the whole site a bit of a facelift and fixed a huge number of outstanding issues. Overall I’m very happy with it and hope I’m able to provide all the information folks need to want to back my project.