Hello everyone and happy new year. Today we have January 2nd and I have a special guest today. It is my co-designer and friend Christian Kudahl. Hi Christian and welcome to the show.
Today we’re going to be looking back at the year 2022, and reflecting on our very first Kickstarter campaign for the game, Mindbug.
For those who may not know, Mindbug was a project that was funded on Kickstarter in 2021.
For us, the Kickstarter campaign was a huge success, raising almost $400,000 from more than 10.000 backers all over the world. This was way more than we anticipated and it allowed me to fully realize the vision I had for Nerdlab Games and turn this from a Hobby Podcast into a Games Publishing Company. We spent the entire year 2022 designing, producing, and fulfilling Mindbug.
Unfortunately, this also led to a shift in priorities and I no longer had as much time for the podcast. It always makes me sad because without the podcast the game wouldn’t have happened in the first place and I’m incredibly grateful for all the support from you throughout the journey.
Anyway, that’s one of the reasons why we wanted to review 2022 and talk about the lessons learned from the Kickstarter campaign here on the podcast.
Let’s start with a few things that went well:
- The campaign started very strong with a lot of backers in the first minutes and hours. I think this had some reasons.
- 1. You, the podcast audience who supported us from the very first second
- 2. Our Newsletter List
- 3. The influencers posting their updates about the game
- 4. Low barrier of entry (compared to many other Kickstarter campaigns the price of 15 € for the first pledge level was very low.
- 5. And of course that being a Richard Garfield Game helped a lot
- ⇒ As a result we made it to the Kickstarter front page and got featured by them.
- Interaction with the backers during the campaign
- Competitions
- Proposals for Creature Types
- Votings on artworks etc. was very very good
- Running those competitions and votings on BGG helped us to get into the hotness list there which was also very helpful.
