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Comment by Mz | Hacker News Reader

Kickstarter is a magical fantasy land where people get excited about your stuff in a way that doesn’t translate into your small business.

I don't really get Kickstarter. The above sums up a lot of my concerns about it and why I have yet to look into it in a serious way.

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I think it depends on what you're making through it. For board/card/tabletop games, it's quite possibly the most popular way to get initial funding to make your game. But a game is not a business, it's the start of a product — a massive pre-order system if all goes well. Many that get into the game self-publishing game aren't doing it to make money, they're doing it to make a thing and get it into people's hands. Kickstarter is a nice way to raise money and have a central micro-social-network of sorts for your game.

Social media will do its thing, but most of the games that I've kickstarted are ones that I've seen at conventions, I've tried them myself or watched a demo live, found myself interested, signed up for a newsletter at the booth, then got an email about the kickstarter. And lucky me, I'm batting 1.000 with actually getting a game from the things I back.

(Source: I've been working on a tabletop game for a couple years now, and have been doing a lot of board-game-based research on kickstarter.)

It depends on the type of project. I've backed a number of projects for books by people who do it multiple times and where they clearly assume that most of their income will be the campaign, and that the ongoing sales will be slow, and that rely heavily on cross-promotion with others in the same niche. I think you basically need to set your aims so that it's worth doing for you from Kickstarter alone, and where any breakaway success afterwards is icing on the cake rather than necessary to make it worth your while.

As I said, I just don't get it. (That isn't a criticism of them, it is an admission of my limitations.) I will likely continue looking into it, but, for the moment, other avenues seem to fit my goals more readily.

I do very much appreciate your reply, as well as any other constructive replies here.

Why? It is a great way to gauge interest in your product. As long you as you don't go crazy like these guys, and start projecting 5x growth, you will be fine.

Exactly, we're very happy with Kickstarter.

I view Kickstarter contributions as a form of gambling: even if the Kickstarter reaches its goal, the odds are heavily stacked against you that something will actually get produced and shipped, but if it does then it's pretty sweet.

The trick, as a backer, is to keep your expectations low and not get too emotionally attached to whatever you are backing.

The problem is that many Kickstarter campaigns are now offering a non-existing product as the main reward that people are paying for. Under the Kickstarter Terms of Service, they are obligated to deliver all rewards upon the successful funding of the campaign.

that's pretty much the whole point. and has been since the first kickstarter project i backed in, let's see... december 2011.

The risk is extremely variable though depending on what products you're backing. For simpler items so far I've had extremely good luck with things eventually coming. Only once have aI not received something and I think that was USPSs fault (I wasn't getting half my mail at the time because the apartment box still had the old name in it).

I have backed many things over the years, constantly with lower and lower expectations.

The only 2 products that really surpassed expectations for me were Pebble and Divinity: Original Sin. Everything else has basically been somewhere between a flop and a trainwreck.

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