JPTeasdale

We just passed 5k in sales on our store today with 2,868 visitors! This is by far our best single day post-Kickstarter and is actually higher than the average funding / day we had through our entire campaign! Thanks so much everyone who shared this!

I guess all you have to do is spend all your money, work for a year to get it back, and then write about it.

Next week, I'll make another post with all the graphs/numbers from this, crazy-ass day, and how long it took to return to normal. I can't imagine it will rank again, so you can follow @JohnTeasdale_ or @ContenderGame if you don't want to miss it.

That's a good point, I can switch the FastCompany quote with the boing boing one.

Oh, I'm not trying to make the case that it's impossible. Just that it seems a lot easier than it is. Most people coming out of a Kickstarter wont have several thousand dollars to figure out how to say "This hoodie, created by a mom, is over 1,000,000 on Kickstarter".

Amazon has worse margins than our online store already. The way I see it. We can drop the price, but we still have to market it. It'd be just as much work to market a $5 as it would a $30 game.

Funny you mention that! We have a hidden stocking stuffer deal $40 all in for 3 games. If you mined the comments then you get it too: http://thecontender.us/products/contender-holiday-secret-sur...

Haha, you got it!

We definitely over-reached. You could also call it greed, naiveté, or ignorance. However, I don't think we failed. There were a lot of hard lessons, but it's been over a year of work and we have a small buisiness company that's actually making money by selling a physical thing. I'm really proud of that.

Will do.

Yep. You're 100% right. At the time, we didn't know the questions we needed to ask or who to ask them to.

It's been a helluva day, I'm going to update the article in a few days to account for this.

Haha, thank you!

Will do!

Thanks!

Exactly, we're very happy with Kickstarter.

This was my impression as well. But, from our graphs, you can see we didn't have much to work with in terms of advertising budget.

Thanks for the tip. I will look at that.

Hmm. I wonder if people would tune into a GIANT POLITICAL BONFIRE.

Thanks!

Just ran it. For 5,000 games:

Destroy: $750 Remove: $2,500 + costs to store it somewhere else.

Also, 5,000 games is a lot of games. Like >15 pallets.

It's reach, really. Even if we drop the price, the only people who'd will know about that are the people on our mailing list.

Getting picked up on HN really came out of the blue. It's the most people who we've been in front of since the Kickstarter campaign. You can't bank on that.

Yeah, I know there is a way to do it. I assume most people who are also just coming out of a Kickstarter will have a similar lack of experience with online marketing. I could be more clear about the purpose being to temper expectations.

Oh yeah. I've def click on other people's Facebook ads. It's not a skill that I had and we didn't have the bankroll for me to get good at it.

When you do a promotion on amazon, they also list your game under in that 'Sponsored Products Similar to This One section' . That's where most of the clicks come from.

To be fair to @bbctol, I did add that in after I saw we were #1.

The first game I made, I used AdMagic. A US based company that prints in China. They were a pleasure to work with, and have a lot of experience with Kickstarter companies, but questions went from me -> them -> factory -> them -> me. The loop took at least 24 hours. Since we were in the Christmas Crunch, this was a consideration.

Also, after we sent the check, I found out AdMagic also has US centers. I've been kicking myself for a year over this one.

Indeed! And this is what we should have done. However, for producing in the US, the difference in PPU between 5k and 20k units was substantial. We got greedy and thought we'd continue to burn through the units.

I am not. I'm @JohnTeasdale_ <- yes, I was that late to twitter.

Embarrassingly few. Justin and I have a background in team-building, and didn't have any connections in the tabletop space. We also didn't know what questions to ask, even if we knew who to ask them to. Everyone we have talked to since has been very nice. GenCon especially was a huge eye-opener for us.

As for why we Kickstarted, the answer is pretty much the same. We had no reputation in the industry and wouldn't know who to talk to. However, it works out for us. We like being our own bosses. We'll stick with Kickstarter in the future, especially now that we know more about the pitfalls.

Sorry about the delay. I have a new account and am getting comment-throttled. I'll get to everything as I can.

Even giving them away cost's ~$6 per unit to ship them somewhere. We're looking into donating a bunch to schools / libraries / other non-profits.

It's real. I asked all my digital marketing friends for advice too. I made ~20 iterations, tried different pictures, headlines, targeting schemes to no avail.

There are def ways to make it work, but it's not an easy thing. If I were to try again, I'd make an audio-less video.