It’s the perfect worldwide showcase to promote your device or idea.

Why and how did you choose Kickstarter over other crowdfunding options available?

Kickstarter is developing the most powerful community; it is multicultural, curious, and respectful about your project.

How big was your budget before you launched your crowdfunding campaign?

We have to create a great video and great images of our product. We don’t communicate about it but we started with less than 10.000€

How far along was your project before you felt ready to launch a crowdfunding campaign? In hindsight, would you have preferred to be farther along, or to have crowdfunded earlier?

You have to begin the preparation about 4-5 months before.

Can you explain how you prepared for and managed your campaign?

We built a strong team and made sure everyone had strong, unique, and different qualities to be ready for all the challenges we expected.

What tools did you use to market your campaign? Do you feel like you did so successfully, and if not, what could you have done differently?

Facebook Ads are a really great key to market the campaign when it’s live. You also have to showcase your product at a real event. For example we attended the Hello Tomorrow Start-Up Village in June; it’s just the perfect way to demonstrate the real qualities of your product, and to meet your very first backers.

In retrospect what were your best assets for running this successful campaign? On the other hand, what would you do differently?

One of our best assets was that we had a strong community before the launch. We more than 7,500 fans on Facebook before the campaign launch, who were our very first ambassadors who promoted our project.

What was your biggest challenge during your campaign?

Our best challenge is to keep in touch with our backers, we have to be close with them but not spend too much time responding to every email or comment.

What’s the most valuable advice you could share with aspiring crowdfunders?

Take your time before launching, develop a strong community and create the perfect crowdfunding page, do not forget that video is 50% of your campaign success.

This post is part of the Crowdfunding Crash Course series. You can find the full list of interviews and summaries here.

Axess came as a response to the fact that I couldn’t find a great front pocket wallet on the market. I started experiencing back pain when sitting on my bulky wallet two summers ago and that sparked the idea that eventually became Axess Front Wallets.

Why did you feel that the crowdfunding model was the best way to promote the product?

To be frank, it was due to the financial realities of the project; the materials are super expensive with a high minimum order quantity so I couldn’t go ahead with Axess without the Kickstarter. Kickstarter is also a great marketing platform with exposure to some 30 million monthly visitors, in addition to giving you those crucial early backers. It’s absolutely great, thanks Kickstarter! :)

Why and how did you choose Kickstarter over other crowdfunding options available?

I was actually going to go with Indiegogo when I started planning Axess, but then Kickstarter allowed Swedes to launch projects back in October last year, so it became a no-brainer; the Kickstarter platform, due to its limited allowed countries, and higher bar is a much more powerful crowdfunding platform. There’s more trust in a Kickstarter than in the alternatives, and they have much more traffic and paying customers.

How big was your budget before you launched your crowdfunding campaign?

I have spent quite a lot developing my product, but the marketing budget is just around $1,000 usd.

How far along was your project before you felt ready to launch a crowdfunding campaign? In hindsight, would you have preferred to be farther along, or to have crowdfunded earlier?

I was very far along, I had developed 18 unique models, and I had several great blog mentions and over 400 early subscribers on my landing page. I think I launched in just the right moment.

Can you explain how you prepared for and managed your campaign?

I had a landing page which I promoted on Reddit and then later on via getting featured in big fashion blogs, and I gathered 400+ emails in a couple of months. I created Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts and let everybody I knew know that something was stirring north of the wall!

What tools did you use to market your campaign? Do you feel like you did so successfully, and if not, what could you have done differently?

I used Unbounce to build a landing page which works really well (albeit being a bit pricy). I got help from a consultant from P&G I met accidentally on Reddit /r/advancedentrepeneur who actually built the landing page for free. For my Reddit promos I used an Imgur account, that’s a must. My biggest mistake was to not include social sharing buttons anywhere on my landing page

In retrospect what were your best assets for running this successful campaign? On the other hand, what would you do differently?

My own promotions on reddit and via email to blogs was the key, just straight forward emails to people, my own simple promotions were the biggest asset, (as well as the P&G consultant who built my landing page)

What was your biggest challenge during your campaign?

Taking all the product photos and making all the GIF-animations without breaking my back. (Gin and the Joe Rogan podcasts helps a lot during long photo days in the home studio),

What’s the most valuable advice you could share with aspiring crowdfunders?

Try not to take any shortcuts when developing the product or service, try to find an opening in the market (don’t attack something head on, go for a smaller piece of a more specialized part of the market). Read business literature, I recommend all of Al Ries books and Jim Collins books, those really put me in the right direction.

This post is part of the #CrowdfundingCrashCourse series. You can find the entire series of interviews and summary posts here.

Why did you feel that the crowdfunding model was the best way to promote the product?

We feel that the crowdfunding model provides the opportunity to test your product demand with a large group of early adopters who at the same time will (potentially) provide the funding to get your idea to market. It was never really a question as to whether or not we would go the way of crowdfunding, it was just a matter of when.

Why and how did you choose Kickstarter over other crowdfunding options available?

We chose Kickstarter over the other platforms mostly because of word of mouth. We know a few other people who had run successful campaigns on Kickstarter and due to their experiences we felt more comfortable following their lead. In addition, the Kickstarter platform is extremely user friendly and they make it as simple as possible to get your campaign up and running. They also have a huge community and market aggressively to the community on your behalf and to keep them engaged.

How big was your budget before you launched your crowdfunding campaign?

Budget??? What budget? Seriously, we were fortunate to know some very generous people such as Frederic King, our videographer, who worked pro bono. We used our own social and email networks to get to our initial goal of $25,000. We spent about $200 on Facebook advertising and another $200 with crowdfunding networks. We were advised by other successful campaigners to avoid buying into all the PR companies that approach you, unless somebody you know recommends them.

How far along was your project before you felt ready to launch a crowdfunding campaign? In hindsight, would you have preferred to be farther along, or to have crowdfunded earlier?

The SolarPuff, our first product has been on the drawing board for a few years with patents pending. We launched Solight Design about 18 months ago. We started manufacturing the SolarPuff in Q3, 2014 and completed our website in Dec, 2014 with a soft launch in January. We sold over 1000 units in 2 months. We presented to MoMA in Q3 and got positive feedback and knew now was the time to take it to the public. The fastest and most economical way was through Kickstarter, besides, we needed funding to purchase more inventory. I think we launched at just the right time in our business cycle.

Can you explain how you prepared for and managed your campaign?

We prepared by organizing our email lists and upping our social media outreach. We worked with our videographer and edited until we were happy with it. We fine tuned our “story” over and over again. A big part was coming up with the reward packages to make them authentic to our mission and to promote the product. We had given ourselves an April 22nd campaign launch date and spent the prior 2 months working on all the pieces.

What tools did you use to market your campaign? Do you feel like you did so successfully, and if not, what could you have done differently?

Our marketing campaign was not extravagant. We purchased advertising on Facebook to “boost” our posts, we paid two crowdfunding outreach companies for PR, one of which also included us in their web blog. The best and biggest boost to our campaign came from Kickstarter themselves (unpaid). Once they promoted us as “Projects We Love”, it was a game changer. In 24 hours we raised over $125K. That really put us on the map and after that a number of media outlets contacted us and helped to get us to $447K. “It take a village.”

In retrospect what were your best assets for running this successful campaign? On the other hand, what would you do differently?

Our best asset is the product itself and our social mission. The SolarPuff is beautifully designed and purposely appeals to everybody - those that want it and those that need it. And staying true to our mission, when the Nepal earthquake happened we integrated providing the SolarPuff to the relief efforts. I think many people connected with our appeal and were happy to be able to do something to help the Nepali people.

Hindsight is 20/20 of course. What we’d do differently is plan for an overwhelming success and have more product on hand, however it is a catch 22. We went on Kickstarter to get funding for more inventory and now we need even more inventory to fulfill our orders.

We would have been more saavy about “stretch goals”. We didn’t quite understand the value and importance of them to the backers. We really didn’t offer any stretch goals except seeds which were a bust (a story for another time).

What was your biggest challenge during your campaign?

The biggest challenge is staying organized. We had a lot of people asking a lot of questions and getting back to all of them (and we did) was very time consuming. We also had a lot of people making special requests with regard to their pledges (send two to Nepal instead of buy one, give one; ship to a vacation home, wanting to mix and match reward tiers, etc). You need to keep notes on each of these and that too requires time and organization. Now the hardest part is collecting each backers (close to 7000) shipping info and confirming their pledges is another organizational challenge.

So in closing, I will tell you that it was a wonderful, exciting and validating experience. Every hour brought us to a new level. Every backer validated that the SolarPuff is a great product. The comments from most of our backers were so supportive that it would make the most jaded person optimistic.

I think every person with a good product and a good idea should go the crowdfunding route. We were very lucky to have gone wildly over our goal. As the philosopher Seneca, said, “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”

This post is part of the #CrowdfundingCrashCourse series. You can find the entire series of interviews and summary posts here.

Relic Expedition is a jungle adventure game where players act as Indiana Jones like explorers trying to find a set of ancient relics hidden in the jungle. The board starts small, with only a few of the tiles revealed. As players explore the jungle, new tiles are revealed and the board grows in unpredictable ways. For 2-4 players, it plays in about an hour.

Lanterns: The Harvest Festival is a tile-placement game set in imperial China. Players act as artisans decorating the palace lake with floating lanterns. On your turn, you place a tile, which gives every player (even your opponents!) a lantern card based on the orientation of the tile. Players dedicate these lantern cards in various sets to become the most honored artisan before the festival begins. Also for 2-4 players, this plays in about 30 minutes.

Why did you feel that the crowdfunding model was the best way to promote tabletop games?

When we finished designing and developing Relic Expedition, we had a really fun game on our hands that we knew a lot of people would love. We could have submitted it to other publishers, but I think there were two main reasons that we did not. (1) We wanted full creative control over the final product, and (2) we wanted to gain the experience of crowdfunding a physical product. I think crowdfunding made sense for us because we didn't have the upfront cash or the audience, and Kickstarter gave us a way to find a bit of both.

Crowdfunding isn't right for every tabletop game, and it's not a magic bullet: it turned out to be a lot more work than I would have expected. We plan to continue to use crowdfunding for our projects for the foreseeable future, but I suspect that at some point — or at least for some projects — it won't make sense.

You’ve used Kickstarter for both campaigns; why and how did you choose it over other crowdfunding options available?

There is such a strong board game community on Kickstarter. A few people I know have tried other platforms, and they just haven't had anywhere near the success they've had on Kickstarter. If you want to use crowdfunding to raise money for a tabletop game, I don't think there is any other good option right now.

How big was your budget before you launched each campaign?

With each game, we have spent about $4,000 on artwork, review copies, video work, and marketing before the campaign began. We started Foxtrot Games with $10,000 set aside to develop Relic Expedition. We thought the extra $6,000 would give us enough of a buffer in case things didn't go exactly as planned. But as first-time creators, there was a lot about production and fulfillment that we didn't really understand or appreciate until we went through it.

A lot of little things happened along the way (a miscommunication here, a mistake we didn't catch there, a few inaccurate estimates everywhere) that all added up to the project costing more than we had planned. We ended up needing about $15,000 more than we had raised, our initial seed money plus $5,000 or so more. We did have almost 1000 extra copies of the game, and we were fortunate enough to sell a good portion of those in retail to earn back some of our initial seed money.

After Relic Expedition, we had a much better idea of what we needed to do to make a board game that could be profitable. That project had almost twice as many backers, and we are on track to make back a lot of the money we lost with Relic Expedition. On top of that, we have inventory to sell and a much better plan for selling it than we did the first time. We haven't mailed rewards to backers yet, so there is definitely still room for unexpected costs ... but we are in much better shape than we were at this same point in our first project.

How far along were your projects before you felt ready to launch the crowdfunding campaigns? In hindsight, would you have preferred to be farther along, or to have crowdfunded earlier?

The game mechanics were complete for both games before we launched; I think that's essential. With board games on Kickstarter, people aren't backing an idea: they are backing the manufacturing of a game that is finished. This isn't true for every category on Kickstarter, but it's definitely true for board games.

When we launched Relic Expedition, we were not as far along as we should have been. We should have had the box cover done, and we did that with Lanterns: that's a really important piece to sell the game and to set the tone of the project. We should have had more game artwork done so that we could have sent prototypes to reviewers earlier and recorded a game play video earlier: we did both of those things with Lanterns, and they helped quite a bit.

It's interesting now to look back (two years later) at the game play video we recorded during the first week of the Relic Expedition campaign: I only showed three colors of relics because that's all we had done! We finished the first version of all the artwork for the base game during the campaign, but we still had a lot to work to do after the campaign. We had to design the rulebook and the box. We also had to rework some of the pieces: we went through four different versions of the backpack trays before they worked like we wanted, and we changed the colors of the relics once after getting a color proof. We really should have had a lot of that done earlier.

It's not bad to have work to do after the campaign. With Lanterns, we intentionally left some things until after the campaign, things like creating the production files and designing the back of the box. If you don't reach your goal, you would hate to have wasted money on files that you don't need.

How did running the two campaigns differ from one another? Did you learn anything from crowdfunding Relic Expedition that you successfully applied to the Lanterns campaign?

The Relic Expedition campaign funded on Day 30 of 35. After the initial rush, we had a lot of agony trying to figure out how to improve the campaign page and how to get the word out. We spent a lot of time and money on the game itself, but we should also have done so much more to prepare the campaign and promote it in advance.

It's hard as a first-time creator to know what you need to do. For example, we didn't have a video teaching people how to play the game when we launched. We scrambled to make one during the first week; that and everything else we did under the gun during that first campaign took quite a toll on us. We did a much better job preparing and promoting our second campaign in advance, and we funded on Day 6 of 30. That made the campaign so much more enjoyable. I often jokingly tell people asking for advice, "Reach your goal as quickly as you can." It really makes a lot of difference in the trajectory of the campaign — and on you emotionally as a project creator.

What sorts of tools did you use to market your campaigns? Do you feel like you did so successfully, and if not, what could you have done differently?

We did a much better job with marketing and promotion for Lanterns, and we did most of that work before the campaign started. We had started to gather a mailing list when we released Relic Expedition, and we announced to that list that Lanterns would be our next project about three months before the campaign. We shared different pieces of artwork on Twitter and Facebook as they were completed. I also wrote some blog posts about the preparation work I was doing, and a couple of them got shared quite a bit before the campaign. I attended Gen Con and ran some playtests and demos.

Those events went incredibly well: I met some people who became very avid fans of the game and our company, and I also got the confirmation I needed that the game was ready. I mailed about 25 prototype copies to reviewers about 6 weeks before the campaign, and many of them published positive reviews. Those reviews helped promote the campaign to their audience, yes, but more importantly they gave people who found the campaign through other means an idea of whether or not the game was right for them.

During both campaigns, we advertised on BoardGameGeek (BGG). With Lanterns, I waited until we had reached our goal to run those ads. I felt that BGG users would be more likely to back Lanterns after it had already reached its goal. I know that seems backwards, but there's a lot of uncertainty when you back a campaign that hasn't funded. If you pledge, have you spent the money? Maybe. You only get charged if the campaign funds, which may or may not happen. If you pledge, you can’t really spend that money elsewhere. Or if you pledge you might forget that you backed the project (thinking it wouldn’t really fund anyways) and then decide to spend your money elsewhere. It’s just not worth the uncertainty for a lot of people. Once a project has reached its goal, it’s much more straightforward and certain: you pledge, you give the money, and you get a game.

Can you explain how you managed the Lanterns campaign?

Even with all the preparation, running a campaign is still a crazy time. I know project creators who plan everything with a detailed timeline, and I know project creators who fly by the seat of their pants. I lean towards the planning side, but I think it'd be foolish to try to plan everything. It kind of feels like running through a timed obstacle course. A lot happens during the campaign, and you have to be flexible and adapt as it happens.

I took the first day and the last day of the campaign off of work. You get a lot of visibility to a campaign when you first launch, and I wanted to be sure I could answer questions and comments quickly. I planned the dates for the campaign so that I wouldn't be out of town for the first weekend or the last weekend. I had worked to schedule as many reviews and interviews as I could before the campaign, but in those first few days I got a lot of requests from people I didn't know to do more of them. I had 12 review copies on hand that I could send out at a moment's notice, and I ended up mailing out most of them. I checked Facebook, Twitter, and BoardGameGeek quite a bit, responding to questions and sharing updates and comments as they came in.

Sending out regular updates is important. You want to keep the campaign in people's minds and keep them excited, which makes them more likely to share the campaign with others. But you also don't want to annoy them, so updates need to be meaningful. I averaged about two updates a week. Before launching, I had written the text for the first update. It provided a list with links and other information for backers to share the project with others, and I posted that a few hours after launching.

Beyond that first update, I would write the other updates at least the night before and then send them out during the day. I had brainstormed ideas for content that could be used for updates. If there wasn't any news to share, I wanted to be able to share some interesting backstory about the project. The Relic Expedition campaign needed more of those kind of updates because it didn't fund as quickly. With Lanterns, we also had some artwork that backers could vote on, so the news around that process gave me regular content for updates. In fact, I had written the text for an update about one of the components in Lanterns (the favor tokens), but I didn't end up needing that to fill an update during the campaign. So I saved that for after the campaign while we were waiting for the games to cross the ocean and get through the port delays.

What were your biggest challenges during your campaigns?

There's a lot you can do during the campaign to promote it: it could be a full-time job for multiple people. If you have the time, that's great. But if you don't, you have to be really smart about how you spend the time you have. Promoting the project before the campaign works well to get other people excited about it so that they will promote it during the campaign. I spent some extra time beforehand to put things in place to make other things like mailing out review copies take less time: I had extras printed and someone else at the ready to mail them out if I needed them. Again, it feels like running through a timed obstacle course: the better you prepare, the more you can accomplish in that time.

What’s the most valuable advice you could share with aspiring crowdfunders?

You absolutely must share your project as early and as often as you can to get feedback. I know the temptation to have everything perfect before you show your game or your Kickstarter page to anyone. The longer you wait to get feedback from people, the more you will have invested in it and the less you will be able to change. The first few days of a campaign are the most important, and you really want your page as good as it can be right from the start. We made a lot of mistakes on our Kickstarter page for Relic Expedition, and we got some good feedback after we launched; but it would have been much better for us if we had addressed some of those issues before we launched.

I'll give you one example. For both games, I wrote a script for the video and created a really rough storyboard to send to the person creating the video. With Relic Expedition, I didn't want anyone to see this: it was too rough and didn't represent the high quality bar we wanted to set. With Lanterns, however, I realized that feedback was so important. I posted the rough storyboard on YouTube and shared it on Twitter and Facebook so that I could get people's feedback. A few people gave us feedback, and I was able to incorporate that into the final video. We got a lot of feedback on every aspect of the Lanterns campaign from a lot of people, and I knew the campaign page was in good shape when we launched it.

This post is part of the #CrowdfundingCrashCourse series. You can find the entire series of interviews and summary posts here.