I ran two Kickstarters in what feels like a lifetime ago, but I'm still on the Kickstarter creator mailing list. In a recent email, Kickstarter announced that Nicole Amato, their Games Outreach Lead, would be at Gen Con and was available for meetings. Nicole is an accomplished game designer and writer, who co-ran the publisher Cardboard Fortress Games. Since I was already going to Gen Con, I booked a Thursday meeting with Nicole to discuss my ambivalence about running a third Kickstarter. This time it would be for my new card game, ALL-CARDS. Nicole and I found a quiet spot on a carpeted hallway deep in the florescent lit bowels of the Indianapolis Convention Center for what I imagine was the most existential meeting of their show.

This interview as edited for length and clarity.

Thank you so much for taking the time to meet with me here at Gen Con, Nicole. So, my newsletter, Equip Story, is about making games for game's sake, like art for art's sake. 

I love that. 

Thank you. For years, I would do personal projects, including ones I Kickstarted. My goal was always to make the most money, or get the most acclaim, to justify putting so much work into my projects and their campaigns. I still like the idea of my games reaching players. This game, ALL-CARDS, which I just gave to you... with the little polish, I thought it might work for Zine Quest next year.            

I was thinking about Zine Quest when you gave it to me, actually. 

So I was wondering: Is there a way to make the Kickstarter process fun? 

Fun? Oh god, what an interesting question. I thought you were going to say streamlined. You threw me a curveball with fun. 

Here's the thing. I do want my projects to reach a wider audience, but more important to me is process. I want the process to feel good. I've done two Kickstarters, and both of them… you know. It's a thing. It’s a challenge. Making art is challenging, too, but for some reason, making art is fun. It feeds a part of my soul. The Kickstarter always felt like more of like a necessity to me. Like, this is what you have to do for the game to be seen. 

You can create that thing. You can make that thing. You can print that thing out. But if you want to get it into people's hands… 

It's funny, because I was talking to somebody just the other day. They were like, “Oh, we're building our Kickstarter page right now.” They said something about, “The video was the most fun thing to make, because I'm a videographer,” and I was like, "You're literally the first person who's ever said to me that you're having fun, because almost across the board, people are like, I have to make the video. What do I even do for it? Do I make a script?" 

The difficult thing about Kickstarter – and I told people this even before I worked at Kickstarter; I started making board games in 2013 – is that you've got two paths you can take. You make the game, playtest the game, and then you come to a crossroads where you either crowdfund or go to a publisher. 

Those are the two main things you can do. There are lots of other things you can do, too. You can put it up on itch and just be like, “good luck.” 

Yeah, I could put it up on my on a personal site or whatever and say, “Here it is.” I'm done. 

You can put it on DriveThru or GameCrafter and have it be print on demand. 

People would ask me, “You’re a success on Kickstarter. How did you do it?” This is the secret for me. The partner that I had, he did all the art. He was into building the page. He liked doing that. He loved thinking, “How can I build the page in a way that makes the most sense at the top of the page? Do you want to lead with what the game's about, or do you want to lead with something catchy? What is going to capture the most people?” 

The marketing.

Yeah, the marketing. I think how to make the Kickstarter process fun is to find a partner, and I know this is a privilege. Find someone working on the game with you who's like, “Oh, building the page? That sounds fun." 

What about the added pressure of the campaign? To be successful, I have to generate a certain amount of income in a short amount of time. That’s not super fun. The capitalism of it all. 

You're going directly to the market instead of to a publisher. At a publisher, they do all the advertising and all that work for you. Otherwise, you have to make the Kickstarter page. You have to do the pledges. You have to speak to a manufacturer. You have to speak to the people that print it and learn all about Chinese New Year. 

I ran a press with my wife for eight years and yeah, we definitely had our issues with the Chinese calendar making us miss our ship date. And then there's fulfillment.

The wild thing for me is that we ran our first Kickstarter in 2015. It was like 2015-2016, something like that. And it's so much different now. 

How is it different now? It's been many years for me.

First of all, tons of new features. We just released the pledge manager. They have late pledges now. There's an improved story editor. For shipping, you can actually set it up so you can have something on the side that says “shipping.” Then you click the link and it just tells you how much the shipping costs. So the site itself has changed a lot and has become more intuitive. 

The Kickstarter ecosystem has built up, too. I can hire somebody to do my advertising. I can hire someone to do my fulfillment. I can hire somebody to literally make my campaign. There are people you can hire that will just make your campaign. Just do the whole thing for you. 

So many people say to me, “I want to run a Kickstarter, but I don't want to do all that work.” Yeah, I mean, legitimately, it is a lot of work. I remember having to bag books, put the labels on the envelopes, take a ton of books to the post office, and you just live at the post office. 

Yeah, we lived at the post office, too. They knew our names. You know you're spending a lot of time at the post office when the clerks are like, “Hey, Geoffrey! Hey, Amanda! How’s your publishing business?”

I see the potential for a Kickstarter to not feel like work. I just don't know how to get there mentally. It’s not really its purpose to be fun. Its purpose is to fund the arts, which is important. That’s an important role in like society. But there’s that goal. If there was a way to do the Kickstarter, but whether it makes its goal or not, I came away with something valuable. An experience. An entertaining story. More than a sum of money or no money at all.

One thing that I tell people when they're really afraid of the goal is to do some math. It's complicated math, but a conversion rate of 20% of followers to backers is pretty average. Sorry if this is…

No, I lived in this conversion math for a long time when I was on Substack. I totally get it.

If you take the pledge that you think is going to be the average pledge level, then multiply that by 20% of your pre-launch followers by that number, do you get to your goal? Then you're great! I'm thumbs upping. It’s obviously not 100% foolproof, but that's like a pretty good indicator that you're probably gonna fund on the first day. So what some people have actually been doing, which I think is amazing, is instead of launching on a certain day no matter what, they're like, “I'm going to wait until my follower count gets to where I need it to be.” I love it so much. It's using the averages and all the data that we have from 16 years of doing this to your advantage to take out as much stress as possible. 

I guess it's not so much that I'm concerned I won't be successful. It's more like the purpose of this. The fun of this. It's fun to make a movie with your friends. You spend the weekends doing it. Then you get hired to make your first horror movie and it's a job. There are studio notes, production delays, and tight budgets to consider.  

One of the places where the most fun is, and you already know about this, is stuff like Zine Quest, Make 100, and Witchstarter. People use Kickstarter for different reasons, right? There are people who’ve made an entire career out of this. They publish a game a year. Other people work a full-time job, and maybe once or twice a year, they put out a print and play. I think the core of the fun is in stuff like Zine Quest and Make 100 where you just make something cool and weird and it's gonna be small. It's gonna be rad. I feel like those are very similar to game jams. 

I can see where those Kickstarter events would be fun. Like tabling at a convention. It's hard work, but you get to see what your fellow artists came up with and how you fit in with your peers. Like a social experience. 

And also, once you've done one or two Kickstarters, you get into a pattern. You can be like, okay, this is the outline. This is how the outline's gonna be for every one of my campaigns. 

You can even import pledge levels and tiers and add-ons from old campaigns. So you're not like, “Oh my God, I gotta type in every single thing, every single time.”

I don't want to keep you too long. I'm sure you have a busy day full of other people who reached out. Nicole, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it. 

This was great.

🎲 Your Turn: Have you ever run a crowdfunding campaign? Did you find it fun? Stressful? Both? Do you think marketing art can be as fun or meaningful as making it? What's a crowdfunding campaign you enjoyed as a backer? I want to hear from you! Reply to this email directly or tell the whole world your thoughts by clicking the orange button below to leave a comment.