Malevolence: The Sword of Ahkranox - How to Run a Successful Kickstarter

Alex Norton has given a 90 minute lecture last year on how he made his pledge on Kickstarter for Malevolence: The Sword of Ahkranox a success, raising over 500% of it's original pledge. There is a video of 90 minuntes covering this lecture, which might be a bit long, so he summarized it in an editorial for Gamasutra.
He makes some valid points on running a successful kickstarter not addressing the point that he only asked for $6000 to start with, which made raising a lot more maybe a bit easier compared to those who are asking $30.000 to start with.

After doing significant research on other, more successful, crowd-funded projects, I came to the following conclusions:

- Communication is key! Talk to your pledgers and potential customers. Answer their questions when they have them and keep them engaged.

- It all comes down to how you sell your product, and how you sell yourself and your team as people.

- Be aware of your target audience and gear every little thing you do towards them and only them.

- Market your campaign. Send links to blogs, reviewers, journals, magazines and spread it across social networks. Get traffic to it.

- Be willing to put in the hours that it takes to make regular updates, answer all questions and keep the customer engaged at all times.

On top of this, I decided to change my tactics to include the following:

- Show the customer that the project is being made by people. Good quality, friendly, nice people. If they like you, they'll be more inclined to like what you're selling.

- Don't just show them why your product is special. Show them why it's special to YOU, and why it should be special to THEM.

- When you're selling your product, you should also be selling the people making it. It makes the customer feel a part of something, rather than a simple ‘browse and buy' scenario.

- Write lots of updates. At LEAST 3 per week. Show them you're working at it. Show them how dedicated you are. Try and use video where possible. People respond to video. Get your best speaker onto it.

- Talk to the pledgers, not just as someone who answers questions, but really engage them in conversation. Show them you're real.

And you can check out the 90 minute low quality shakey-cam video too.


More information.

A recently failed KS that could have learned from this: Inherit the Earth 2.

Considering that this guy did so well after initially failing miserably with an absolutely terrible indiegogo (iirc) campaign, he is very likely to have advice worth hearing.

Originally Posted by rjshae
A recently failed KS that could have learned from this: Inherit the Earth 2.

That one looks absolutely dismal. The only way I'd contribute to a game like that is if someone stole my credit card.

The first game of inherit the earth was cool.

Malevolence in the beta form I have is fun, but I'm really looking forward to magic and everything getting done.