And the Kickstarter Campaign is done (or all but done – there are 3 and a half hours to go). It’s been a rollercoaster.

On the up-side, we have 88 backers, which is amazing! The number has flucuated a bit, with people joining at the last minute and other people cancelling their pledges (absolutely their prerogative), and of course we didn’t end up as one of those Holy Grail projects that catches the attention of the internet and wipes the floor with their asking price. Not unexpected, although we would have liked to manage it, obviously!

The down-side has been all the things we didn’t know going into this. The spam from shady marketing firms and wannabe influencers is a big one – we had no idea that we’d be targeted within minutes of launching the campaign, and ocnsistently through the last month while it’s been active. The uncertainty is another factor; even now, we don’t know for sure if the campaign has succeeded or not, as Kickstarter’s Trust & Safety team have reached out to us about a couple of pledges that have set off their ‘potential fraud’ alerts, so we may have to cancel the ones that Kickstarter points out to us as being not okay.

Due to that uncertainty, we also don’t yet know if the pre-order & fulfillment store that we’ve set up on BackerKit will go live or not. Technically, if a Kickstarter campaign fails ot reach its goal, the project can’t have a fulfillment centre or a pre-order store on BackerKit. We haven’t found any other good pre-order options either. DriveThruRPG are great for fulfillment, but you can’t offer pre-orders or coupons there until you have a product loaded on their site. The solution we’ve come up with is getting backers to add themselves to our mailing list and email us with a code that we shared on a Kickstarter backer-only update, so we can add them to our internal “send coupons to these people” list. We’ll send out discount coupons for DriveThruRPG when the campaing setting goes live.

Meantime, we are signing off this post and taking the rest of the long weekend (it is a long weekend this weekend in WA!) off.