Facebook ads for a tabletop games Kickstarter

Their first Kickstarter was marketed by touring conventions and raised $14,000 against a $36,000 goal. The second funded in the first hour and reached 777%.

James, Tabletop games. Recorded January 2023.

James runs a small independent games studio in Redmond, Washington. Their latest project is a 3D printed modular gaming table — you print the pieces, assemble it, and customise it. It came out of the pandemic, when people gave up their gaming space to work from home.

Their first Kickstarter, six or seven years earlier, is the useful comparison. The marketing plan was conventions: four or five of the big ones across the United States, travelling, meeting people, building what they believed was a strong mailing list of about 1,300. The campaign had a goal around $36,000 and delivered roughly $14,000.

They spent two years building the new product and decided to approach the launch differently, starting list building two months out. Neither he nor his partner was an expert in paid social, so they began by boosting a few posts. The return was poor, which is the standard outcome — boosted posts optimise for engagement, not sign-ups.

Over about two and a half months the focus was cost per lead. They targeted 3,000 leads and finished with around 2,500 on the mailing list plus over 1,000 people set to be notified on Kickstarter, roughly 3,500 in total.

The number that predicted the outcome was not the list size but its quality. Open rate on the new newsletter was 42 percent, against about 21 percent for the convention-built list. Twice the engagement from a list built by advertising to people who wanted the specific product, rather than collected from people who walked past a booth.

The campaign funded in the first hour and reached 777 percent of goal. Conventions built a list of people who had met them. Advertising built a list of people who wanted the thing.

In James’s words