Crowdfunding 101 with Robert M. Atkins

Source: GeniusDen archive transcript checked against the recording. Administrative opening and closing material is omitted; the presentation wording is otherwise preserved with light readability edits.

Robert M. Atkins: So I put a really detailed, very long PowerPoint. And each slide has hyperlinks to what exactly I'm talking about. So if I miss it or if you want to dive into it deep, it's available with a hyperlink. You can go and do exactly what you're going to hear me talk about and repeat over and over and over again is research. I never start a project without diving into the research. Because if you do, you're going to be like, well, we did and we fell. If you don't know what you're doing, you're going to fall short. Before I begin, I want to introduce someone really special. It's Richard Luong. He's been my art director and working with me hand in hand for 10 years now. He is without a doubt probably the number one reason this thing was so successful.

And I'm going to hear you talk about presentation and marketing. These are all things. If you strip away Kickstarter and crowdfunding, you're going to hear me talk about the principles of things that we as business owners and entrepreneurs need to apply to whatever business we're doing. So it's not just about crowdfunding. It's not just about Kickstarter. It's actually about how you should think about your business, how you should think about social media, how you should think about the perception of what you're trying to sell.

So who am I? I've been in Dallas since 1993. I've started six companies, had three successful exits. I've been a creative director. I've done design work, business brand development, 30 in-house titles, primarily in interactive entertainment. Everything from the original Duke Nukem 3D to the board game you see in the back. I've done a lot of marketing, creative direction on third-party titles as well. I've been a producer. I've contributed to a lot of hit franchises that have made billions of dollars. I wish I was a billionaire, but they've made billions of dollars for some people. I'm also a professor at SMU Guildhall, trying to give back, trying to teach the young professionals of tomorrow whatever I can to help them get off of the ground. The thing that I've done with crowdfunding with guys like Richard is raised over $3 million helping people.

I don't do this for, this is not my business. I'm not interested in being hired or whatever. I don't mind talking to you and giving advice and trying to help you because I want to see entrepreneurs be successful. I have an interest in seeing people follow their dream, trying to create things. I have no interest in just creating a business model out of this. I'm going to give you my secrets, the things that we learned through trial and error tonight, and maybe they'll help you be successful in whatever you're trying to do.

So, right now, there's over a thousand different crowdfunding platforms out there. There's hundreds of millions of individuals funding projects and billions raised annually. This is the new way to raise money without giving equity to your company. This is a way to build prototypes of your products to get them out there. This is a way to market your products early.

Who here knows Lovecraft, H.P. Lovecraft? So H.P. Lovecraft is, you know, right up there with Edgar Allan Poe when it comes to, you know, the types of horror movies that we see. Thank you. The types of horror movies that we see today. And this guy was a very cynical guy. He was, this is a quote of his, the world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind. The problem with Lovecraft is he wasn't very successful in his day. He wrote, he was a prolific writer, he wrote a lot of stuff, but he didn't really, you know, he didn't make a whole lot of money. And he lived at the world as a very negative place. So, I'm going to talk about the fact of this guy and why, you know, people embrace him.

And that's part of what this is all about. It's about embracing passions. Just like the people who are passionate about H.P. Lovecraft, there are a lot of people who are passionate about other things. And these are some of the sites that are really popular, that are really the big ones to go to. Everything projects, Indiegogo, that's a really big one. Possible, GoFundMe, Human projects, there's a, the idea of Human projects. Things that are like, hey, I lost my dog or my dog is dying or my grandma needs a new trailer or whatever the case may be. People are trying to raise money to do things that are, that are more human. They're not trying to build a product, they're not trying to like sell something. They're trying to help people. Life, Indiegogo Life is a really big one. And that is important because unlike the rest of these crowdfunding platforms, the Life program doesn't take anything off the top. They don't take any kind of money. Your project is all about giving and helping raise people to improve their lives.

There's a film and video project called Tube Start. That's a, if someone was talking about film development earlier, that's a really good place to start. There's music called PledgeMusic.com. All about music. You know, if you're in a band and you want to figure out how to, you know, get your, get your band out there and raise money for your next album, that's a good place to go. There's agricultural things. People were talking about agriculture earlier. The point is, there's so many ways and so many people out there that are starting to see crowdfunding as being the way to raise money. And it's, it's, there's verticals for just about every single thing, each of the thousand different platforms. There's even a real estate where you can, for $5,000 baseline, you can go invest in real estate projects and they tell you exactly what the return rate's going to be on that investment. So it's a way to invest in things, not just get a product.

And there, Rocket Hub is a great passion on personal projects, charity projects. And that's the thing that really, which I think a lot of what crowdfunding and what happened was, there's, there's events that have happened in our lives. And one in particular was the Haiti or, I remember that distinctly. And it was around the time that Kickstarter started and we saw in what, in North America alone, there was tens of millions of dollars almost overnight donated. And so we as people, even if you go to church, if you go, if you, if you're part of your community, you see people constantly giving. People want to give, people want to support, and people want to be part of something. And so these platforms started coming together to try to, try to, like, give people the opportunity to help support, not just a charity or not just an organization, but actual products.

So, the thing about crowdfunding at its heart is designing products in a new way and connecting people and passions and raising funding without giving their equity. This is at the heart of what crowdfunding is. So, Indiegogo Life, they, you tell a story around your community and raise funds. That's, that's kind of like your little lingo. And I'm going to talk a little bit about that because that, if you don't do those things, you're going to fail.

So, because I know, I know Kickstarter. That's the one I've worked with. That's the one I know the best. A lot of what I'm going to talk to you tonight is about Kickstarter. And, and it doesn't mean that what I talk about on Kickstarter is it still applies to all the other platforms. It may not apply to, say, a passion project as much as it does a product. But it does, it does, it does apply and you can, and you can use the tools that I'm going to give you tonight. So, right now on Kickstarter, this number is probably outdated because I put this about three months ago, 83,000 successfully funded projects. There's eight million total backers and there's been over a billion and a half total dollars pledged. That's incredible. That's an incredible amount of money. That's an incredible number of users.

And this is important because two years ago, part of the problem was how do we educate people about crowdfunding? So the conversation with me is like, how many click throughs do we get to the point where they're actually donating something? Well, that's too many. So now, you know, we've lost half the people. People are starting to know what crowdfunding means. They're starting to understand what it is. They're starting to be engaged with it. So it's not, it's a barrier of entry that it used to have.

So, some of my favorite examples is the Pebble watch. This year, right before Apple launched their watch, they had 78,000 backers. They raised $20 million for this product. And when this thing launched earlier this year, up to the point where this, before this thing launched, Apple had barely started to advertise on television. The moment this thing started to trend, this thing was trending toward like $170 million, Apple started advertising like crazy. They're trying to go ahead and they're grabbing our market share right before we launched. So they really started pumping money. So you can be, you can really change the market with crowdfunding on a big scale.

But what most people don't realize in 2012, Pebble had released their first iteration of their watch, raised $10 million. So this is, you'll hear me talk about this. If you're prototyping a product or you're trying to build something that's longevity, you know you're going to do multiple iterations, this is a good way to do it. Oculus Rift, for those who, for 20, 30 years you've heard about VR, virtual reality, you're going to become part of a reality. Oculus Rift raised over $2 million. Two years later, a 22-year-old sold this company to Facebook for over $2 billion. And we've just seen one iteration of the technology actually find its way to the consumer with the VR, which I bought. It's awesome. But it's not even, didn't even have a functioning store yet. So it's one of those things where in our lives, this is a product, it's an example of how you can raise money directly to your consumers. And even before you, you know, go to retail fully, you can turn around and sell your company. So there's, there's, there's paths to, there's paths to, uh, entrepreneurship that have, that have, that have, most people never even thought to travel.

Who here owns a 3D printer? Who here has heard of 3D printer? Awesome. Um, this is a stupid question. This, this product this year is one of like, I don't know, 300, how many different, there's, there's over 300 projects that are 3D printer related on Kickstarter. And this is, this is one of those, you know, in the high in range, but $2.9 million raised, 16,000 backers. This is a prototype. These people, this product is probably one iteration of the product. Once again, it's, it's, it's places in technology like with 3D printing, find their foothold in crowdfunding. Another way to play. And I call these the better mousetrap products. So if you have an idea for, you know, it doesn't have to be like, oh, they're doing it to everything. They can just simply be making something better. You know, and there's a lot of those examples. 8.6 million for a better way to play games. This thing fell, this thing, super successful. I don't know if anyone was actually using this thing besides the way to go again. We have one as well.

Better way to read, right? So we love this guy. And he does a wonderful job at promoting. And he does a wonderful job at trying to do something that has purpose. 5.4 million dollars. Trying to make it a better way for people to read. Pull this cooler. Who's heard of this? So we live in Texas. Texas happens to be 10% of their audience bought this thing. You know, I've had, you know, floating down the river with a bunch of friends and a bunch of my redneck friends figured out how to put speakers in their cooler. We had this going about five, six years ago. We didn't think about kickstarting it. But they raised 13 million for this. It's got a solar panel. It's got, you know, you can charge your phone. You can make margaritas. It's a wonderful example of this. He didn't invent a cooler. He just made a better version of the cooler.

Neil Young has just released Pono. And basically it's uncompressed music. So the music that we normally are listening to is completely compressed compared to what they're doing. I think it's three times less compression. So it actually sounds like . So, you know, it's really good sounding music. If you're a music fan, it's something that I'm interested in getting. It's a $300 product. You're going to have to buy all your music again. It's another way to sell music. And if you really care about the music industry, you understand that that's a selling industry that's going to go away if we're not careful. And so supporting the artist itself and buying things directly from them is one of those things that actually changes a lot of things. It's not just about uncompressed music. It's about helping the industry.

If you like beer, which I like beer, sometimes it's about fresh beer. It's a product of 1.6 million. It's just a better, it's just basically a better way to create a growler that looks cool as well. There's a lot of these types of verticals and segments of the market out there that are all about, you know, bringing a product to someone who's into space. Like a beer glass. There's a company that made an awesome beer glass and they raised like $600,000 for a beer glass.

It's just nuts, the kind of stuff that's on there. Exploding Kittens. Who's going into Exploding Kittens? 8.8 million. And this game is simply Kittens with Uno. But they raised, they had 200,000 backers. And that's not just, it didn't just go viral. It wasn't like, oh my God, this thing's viral. Everyone was sharing. Who here heard of this before I had this slide up? Like two, two, three people in here. It's because they had a following, the oatmeal. They had a passionate group of fans and people that already were following. So they had a really massive audience even before they launched this product. So your influencers are really important.

Exploding Kittens are funny. Why not? I'm telling you, man. Where are you at? Where's he at? He doesn't bother you. I'm telling you, man. Cat videos. It's how to sell your product. So locally, these are, this is one of the influencers that influenced us when it came to this. These guys just make toys. They've had three campaigns and they've raised over $7 million. It's a [unclear] company. And that's all they do is make toys. And they sell butt loads of these toys. That's a technical term. These guys have raised a lot, a lot of money for selling toys. Something they're passionate about. And something that they do as good as anyone else. But they basically continue to build on their success. Three campaigns, $7 million. Selling plastic.

So here's one of my favorite currently live. So if you want, anyone wants to tweet about this right now. This is a perfect opportunity to tweet Richard Luong's book. I don't know where it's at. Richard, it's $48,000. Is that where you're at right now?

Richard Luong: I think I'm like $600 away.

Robert M. Atkins: So he's $600 away from this goal of $50,000. Woo! He's 20 days to go. And Richard is a great example. Because the things that we learned with the other campaigns, he's applied in spades to what he's doing here. When this thing finishes, it will be probably in the top 10% of art books that's ever launched in crowdfunding. So it's, I would, my guess is it's going to probably be about $80,000, $90,000 when it finally, finally gets. What do you think? Is that your guess? What's it trending for? Okay. So it's, and I brought him here tonight. I asked him here because he can, he can verify things that I'm seeing. He's running a live campaign right now. And this is success. He hasn't reached his goal yet, but that's, you're really, he told me if he got 400 backers, he would be able to fund everything. And everything that he wanted to do. So he's, he's in, he's in the red, he's in the black red. So

this is, this is the, the product that Richard, Sandy Peterson and I did. It's right back there. That's half of what we actually ended up doing. 1.4 million. And, you know, we learned a lot here. And the biggest thing that we learned and the most important lessons we learned came from the fact that we failed. Our first product, we completely failed. We didn't even raise 20% of our goal. We raised 25K of the $300,000 goal. And we completely lost everything that we tried to do. It just seemed like it didn't work. We didn't, we were learning. We didn't know we were, you know, we're about to all go get jobs after this was over. And that's, that's saying something. I don't want a job. I want to work for myself. So what, so, you know, are we alone here? You know, what did,

what did we learn? So we learned from the mistakes. We had the right team, wrong product. We had the right design. We had no audience. The campaign was not polished. Our backer levels were incorrect. Our goals were too expensive. Our messaging was wrong. We rushed the release. And I've heard a lot of people tell them, I'm like, so what's your product? What's going on? I'm, I'm releasing it next week. My campaign. I'm like, well, where's your audience? All these questions I started asking. It's clear that we were not ready because we rushed. We had no PR campaign. We had no social media campaign. And our prototype, our prototype was not ready. So those are the things that we learned when we fell. But we're not alone,

right? These guys, 8.8 million. How did they go from a failure of not even raising $125,000 to a year later being one of the most successful in all of the crowd family? It's the same. It looks the same. Is orange really that much better than red and gray? Is that the big difference? So why, why did these guys raise so much money a second time? And I'm gonna, I'm gonna give you some of that secret sauce.

So, like I mentioned, we had the right team. We had passion. We had an IP. We had the H.P. Lovecraft IP, which is—having an IP, having something that people can relate to, something that they know, so you're not trying to settle on it already, is really important. So, the big thing also was we had print-ready product design. That means everything that we showed our consumer, our audience, looked like it was ready for production. So if you have a prototype, it needs to look like it's ready. If you have print materials, it needs to look like they're done. Very important.

So, polished branding. We had, our product was incredibly polished. Richard's art, my branding expertise, we made it look like it was the best-looking thing on the net, as far as we could do. We polished our campaign. We made sure that our messaging was correct. We made sure that we had our stretch goals in there. We had everything in line. And how did we do this? Well, we studied. We did our research. Polished prototype. We mentioned that. And we polished our marketing strategy. We made sure that we had a PR and media campaign. We had our social media. We made our U.S. and international campaign. It wasn't just a U.S. product. And we were ready to expect change. You always have to understand if change can happen.

So, that's our secret sauce. So, how do we apply the secret sauce? So, market research. The thing that we did was we went back to the drawing board. We were trying to make a video game the first time. Now, we're going to make a board game. And that's right when there were a lot of really cool board games that were coming out. So, we started studying them. We were like, what is the most successful in our space? What did they do right? How did they message it? How did their video, how were their videos presented? How did they respond to their consumers? What does their website look like? We just started studying every day what they were doing right. We went to KickTrack. Richard found KickTrack. I think you were the one who turned me on to Kicktraq. We looked at Kicktraq. We studied their algorithmic information that we had at our disposal. And we said, okay, on this day, they had a lot more users buying into their product. What does that mean? Oh, guess what? They actually made a comment in their session. Or they got some news site to start to promote them. So, okay, we need certain things. We need a certain rhythm to our product campaign that other successful products were doing. So, we mirrored ourselves after other successful products.

The big thing was we had to show the product. We failed at showing the product in the first iteration of the Thule Awards. We failed miserably. We had some art. We just didn't have a lot. It looked like we weren't a real product. This time we went out and we found artists to sculpt our characters. We had Richard doing amazing illustrations. We had to build a prototype that looked like we had a finished product. We had to show it being played. We had to show people using it. We had to show people smiling when they use it. We had to show people engaging it. So, building our campaign took all these steps. We had to have a marketing and PR strategy.

So, research. We researched like campaigns. We structured the messaging and tone and visuals. We had our updates ready. This is where a lot of people fail on their campaigns. They don't have their updates ready. They don't realize updates are super important. They need to have them in the can. So, if you have a lot of your messaging and a lot of your updates ready to go, you're not scrambling trying to figure out what you're going to say or how you're going to grow or how you're going to get your messaging out there. You have to have these materials ready in an order by which they need to be released.

So, our updates were ready. And our stretch goals and add-outs. So this is the tool we use: Kicktraq. It's an awesome tool. Basically, you can go on there and you can see the top ten. You can do searches. You can find categories. You can see if you have a product idea in mind. You can go find other products that are like yours. And you need to study them. You need to find out why they're successful by looking at their information. There's no shortcuts to that. It takes time.

So, this is the other thing that we did. The other thing that we did was we documented our process of development. So, these are photographs that we were taking from the studio in the UK. And they would send us early prototypes of Richard's illustrations. And they would give us these pieces. And we were constantly feeding our social media outlets with this information. So, we were getting people pumped. We were getting them excited. We were like, they were building this anticipation. I call it priming the pump. So, we're priming the pump.

So, everything. Everything that you're doing. Tweeting. Document every single step that you're taking. Document every single crazy little thumbnail. Whatever it is. We need to constantly be communicating to people about your product. And it's soon to be launched.

So, conceptual design. We put prototypes to scale. It's really important too. You want to build your product and make it look like the final product. And you want to document the process. Times. You can't get set off. People get too busy working. They don't do this step. And they really miss out because they're scrambling to try to build content to try to get people excited. So,

the pre-launch checklist. The branding is part of that. So, we really started to put together a story. Richard did these illustrations and our stories about these crazy old beings that kill everything on Earth. Well, we wanted to tell our story and try to get people excited. This was a known universe. We didn't invent this universe. But we had to get the fans of this content excited. So, we did imagery. We did things that they could look at and go, Oh my God! I gotta share this with all my friends! This is gonna be so cool! And so, these images were specifically created with the fans of this content in mind. So that we could illustrate to them with one or two, five images total, I think, that were done like this. That we understood the content. We understood what we were creating. And we were going to deliver everything that they would expect. And really important.

So, we were adding known IP. Established a distinctive art style, which Richard did. And that's why he has an art book that's kicking butt now. It's because he delivered what the fans wanted. And we planned the company in pre-launch. This was a start of a company. A lot of people already have your companies. And you just want to launch a product. We were launching a company in this timeframe as well. This was not just a product. This was us coming. There's three of us starting a company. So, there's that on top of it. In the three-month time period, actually the reboot was four or five months. The reboot was four or five months. And we had to do all that at the same time. So, there was a lot going on. So, that means you have to be. Everybody had to hold a piece of the rug or whatever you want to call it. And we were all carrying our part. Sam was on design. And everyone knew him through his past products

as well. So, building the campaign. This is where studying other people's campaigns is really important. You really want, like, we studied, I don't know, like two or three different campaigns that we really liked. And we looked at their wording. We looked at how they set their goals up. We looked at it right back. When we did this, early bird was the big thing. You can have an early bird. So, we were putting early birds in there. Basically, it's a reduced version, a reduced price version for people who have early access or early buy-in. And that way you can, the reason you want to do that is you get a lot of people bought in. It takes you past that 20% mark of raise so that people say, this is going to be successful. So, they don't want to jump on board. So, there's a lot of these types of things that you're looking at and go, why did they do that? They'll go research it. Why did they do early birds? Well, there's a reason why they do early birds. But

the big thing is, just like with any business, is the story. You want to get people emotionally connected to your products. This is, outside of Kickstarter anything, you want to get people to buy-in. You want to connect to that audience. The video was really, like, for us, we wanted that, there's a lot of high-end videos. Oculus Rift was one of the very first Kickstarter videos. It was super high-end, super high-techy, felt super polished. And people were like, oh, my God, this is it. This is real. These guys have so much money and power behind them. This is going to happen.

We were trying the opposite approach. We were trying to blend old-school and new-school together. Because it used to be, when Kickstarter first started, people were like, hi, I'm Jim, and I'm building something. And please help me do this, so I can leave my mom's basement. That was kind of the way that the videos were done. And we sort of wanted to have that kind of rough, like, hey, we're not, we're not this. Because we had guys who were known, some known names. Sandy's had a huge known name. So we didn't want people to think, well, if he's so well-known, why didn't he just fund the whole thing himself? You know? So we wanted to see him, like, a little low-end, a little, you know, just accessible. And so there's, your tone is really important. Your video tone is really important. So we want to show people using the product.

So we have, we sent Sandy to trade shows when all we had was paper. No characters, none of the beautiful stuff you see back there. And we had pictures of him playing with people and explaining them. So he was going to trade shows way early to talk to people about what he was doing. So he's engaging the audience. And using the product, showing them, smiling, and having fun. The rewards and exclusives. Exclusives: who here funds stuff because they get exclusive stuff? Okay, it's a big thing. If you don't have an exclusive or something that you can't get otherwise, then you're doing half the battle. You have to, you have to have something that people can only get if they fund your product. Or fund your campaign. Whether it be a hat, a t-shirt, a sticker. Or, you know, whatever. Special thanks are in the gaming space now. In digital space, it's an item that you can only get if you funded this campaign. It's really important. People want to feel special that they've done this. It's a badge. That's part of the gamification process. Great art, product shots, stretch goals, and add-ons. And

the thing that Richard and I, we stressed on because we had never done this. This is completely new to us. This is a space we had never worked in. Can't stress this enough. We would freak out about the math. We would sit there, and I remember sitting there with a pad of paper going, okay, it costs this much money to create a model. It costs this much money to paint artists. It costs this much money to create a mold, a tool, the tool for that. It's going to cost us, you know, this much money to ship. All these things, we don't know how money. We would literally, we would have to ballpark what we think it was going to cost us. And we would always, you know, guess high so that in case, you know, something would come back.

So our stretch goals, you don't want to offer a stretch goal where there's not enough distance between that price point because people will want to value, but you could end up hurting yourself. That product, when I box it up, you can see how heavy that thing is. It's probably about 20 pounds. It is a very, very expensive product to ship. Most people don't take that into consideration, especially when you're talking about shipping international. And at the time, now, they like, it's not as a guessful.

Kickstarter basically has the ability to basically change the shipping cost on things on the fly to make it a little less painful for the person who's presenting the campaign. You just could be able to be his guest, and if you didn't put enough fluff in there, guess what? You're just paying for the shipping. So it's very much a painful thing.

Anyone want to add anything to this?

Audience member: No, I got it.

Robert M. Atkins: Yeah. Anything you've learned recently doing this?

Audience member: I mean, just with Kickstarter now, they give you the option to charge shipping after the campaign ends. So you can't wait to, you don't have to give those estimates up front. And then end up screwing yourself with having to pay shipping. So that's, for example, that's what I'm doing with my campaign. That's actually something else, too. A lot of these campaigns that you see that raise the million dollars or however much shipping is actually factored into that amount. So, like, if they raise, let's say, a million bucks, it might not cost them $200,000 to ship all those pieces or $100,000 to ship it. That's something that I'm not factoring into my Kickstarter. Yeah.

Robert M. Atkins: It's very expensive to ship your product. If you have a tangible good, you have to do the math. It is something we did every single time we opened a stretch goal. We sat down. We did the math. Pre-launch, checklist, marketing, PR strategy. I can't stress these things enough. This is a big part of what I did for this thing.

We pump, right? So we engaged the influencers and evangelists. Sandy was really involved with the Lovecraftian universe. So he knew all that he loved. He knew that H.P. Lovecraft, historical society guys. He had actually funded a movie about one of H.P. Lovecraft's stories. He gets invited all over the world to go to visit their events. So we took the time to send him to all these places to be there, to play the game with people, to connect. And what he did was he also reached out to people who run the blogs that cover the subject. You run them through their websites. So if your product, whatever your product is, product X, there are people out there who are experts in that space. You have to engage those experts. You have to get them excited about what you're doing. You have to get them talking about it. You cannot have enough of that. And you want to spread it out. You want to have it where it's coming every day, every other day. Not all at once.

You want to net. Social media, Facebook, Twitter. We grew our Facebook from 300 likes to probably close to 2,500, I guess, by the time we ended our campaign. That was just me and Richard and Christine and a few people just trying to make it happen. We didn't use a service. We didn't pay anybody. I don't recommend doing that unless you have a big budget for that kind of stuff. Twitter is probably your best way to promote it. Facebook has algorithms that shut you down. Every time I connect, I publish a Kickstarter link on Facebook, I'm going, well, they've got the algorithm cut down to recognize Kickstarter and they're going to just make it down to 1% of my audience. I mean, it's literally to that point where they just want you to pay for everything.

Trade shows, festivals, press lined up in queue. This is really important. We didn't even send out a press release. We didn't have the money to send out a press release. We were like, it's like, how many thousands of dollars do it? We're not going to do that. It's too much for us. We didn't even launch a press release. We went directly to the influencers themselves, and we had them lined up in queue, ready with the interviews, ready for the podcast, all coming out leading up to the campaign. Our media support videos and art were dumping. We didn't sit there and scramble to create art and media stuff. We had it in the bag. We had it ready to go. We had our videos shot. We did some follow-up videos, but we were prepared to have a strategy where we were releasing content going up to the launch of our campaign. And we had engagement in the forums.

You cannot wait until the day you've already launched to get engagement forums. If there are people out there, and there are forums out there, in our case, like BoardGameGeek.com, which happens to be here in Dallas, they have forums that talk about this stuff all day long. And you have to be early in or you're going to be looked as an outsider just trying to sell on something new. So you want to give people early access to this.

And I mentioned people playing. Seeing people playing and engaging your products with other people, talking about your products, not just yourselves. It's really important. So this is a lot of work. Social media. We talked a lot about this. The shows. The thing I'll say about Facebook that does work is every time we posted something, every time we put something out there, we were asking for likes and shares. And it's even better when you put it in the art, because they can't filter that. They don't see the like or the share and the imagery as much as they do the stuff you've written. And so we were always engaging our followers and people that were part of us to share and continue to push things around. So we branded all our images as well. So make sure if you have any imagery, you're branding it with your webpage, you're branding it with your product. You have to constantly brand, brand, brand. You just can't get around it.

One of the things that Richard's really good at is running contests. That was one of the things that we found really successful when it comes to likes and shares and giving people is throwing contests and telling them, hey, the more shares, everyone who shares this will be entered into a contest to win something. You know, so you get an opportunity to engage with people and it starts spreading work because they're trying to get a freebie. It works. It sounds crazy. It's spamming social media.

One of the things that we did, and this is, I feel dirty, but it worked, was, like I said, we had probably 1,000 likes on Facebook for Cthulhu Wars. But Cthulhu on Facebook had over 100,000. So every time I posted a cool image of Richard's or something that we were doing, this is pre-launch, we would go, multiple people, Christine taught me how to do this, and we would get other people engaged. Take that link or take that image and go post it in the most commented image on Cthulhu at Facebook. So we were spamming the comments. We were spamming, we were spamming, we were spamming other, other like spaces in the verticals in the good Google world. And I liked all of them. So I was able to post on their things. But I also connected directly to the people who ran those Facebook pages. And I would send them stuff all the time. Very rarely did I get a thing back. But it works. You spam, spam, spam. It sounds terrible. It sounds dirty. But I don't care. It's like that's my product. It's my livelihood. I'm going to do whatever it takes to get it out there.

Not ever. Not whatever it takes. And you can't do it. I know it's something you're thinking. You cannot do this alone. You have to have a strike team. You have to have a group of people who are willing to do it with you. Because Facebook, a couple of times they banned you. They were like, oh, you can't do that anymore. You're taking advantage of mailing people. Messaging people directly is not. They don't like that when it's the same as that message being sent every single time. So you have a lot of people doing it so you're not the only one.

The other thing that we thought was. So we know what we're making. So we have this Cthulhu character. So what we did was we started doing funny imagery. We found that funny imagery works. Funny videos work. Anyone who knows what solar freaking roadways are about. They know that worked. You can do funny stuff. [unclear] Or Richard did this man sees Cthulhu a potato chip. And we piggybacked it onto stuff like the Huffington Post. That would post stuff about the Cthulhu character found in the ocean. Like this thing. It's an octopus. But it looks weird. So we were creating these weird images. And these got the most traction. This built our audience the most. Before we, this is all pre-launched. So we would put this out there. And people shared this thing hundreds of times. They would put it out there. And we would see our traction growing. Even though it had very little to do with our product. It was brand new with our product. And we were going after the goofy and funny. And it works, ladies and gentlemen. So,

campaign launch. Part. Okay. So, we flipped the switch. In less than an hour, we had reached our goal. In less than an hour, we had $40,000 toward our goal. In less than an hour, I don't know. What was the final hour mark? It was probably close to $100,000. We made like $100,000 in less than 60 minutes. That's a lot of money for anybody. I don't care who you are. I was freaking out. I was so excited. I was supposed to go on vacation. I couldn't even leave my computer. I'm like leaving. I'm driving down a highway. I'm calling Richard. Oh my God. Where are we at now? Where are we at now? We made over close to $400,000 in the first like four days. It was crazy. Our average, our average was insane. It's because we did all those things I just talked about before we ever launched.

Okay? If you do those things right, and you prime the pump, and you get the people engaged, they know you're coming. I get so many people who send me their Kickstarter and then go, Hey man, can you help me? Sure, absolutely. It's one week left in their campaign. My question is always the same. Why am I just finding out about this? How did I not know already? And that's because they didn't do that work up front. So if you want to launch a Kickstarter and you haven't done everything I just talked about, you're not ready.

Okay? But when we flipped the switch and the money started pouring in, guess what? We were not ready for this step because we had only failed. So we knew what, we guessed why we failed. We tried to fix that, but we weren't ready for this. So this is, this is, this is it. A lot of the stuff you're about to learn about is what happens when you're successful.

Audience member: And you, so it's a bit false. Excuse me. Did you change, did you change anything while you got the feedback to what you set out as far as the game or iterate any of it? So

Robert M. Atkins: the game was completely different. We did a board game the second time and the first time it was a video game. So it was a completely different product. And that was the other thing. I didn't, I didn't specifically say, but the reason, when I called Sandy, I met this guy Sandy and we were working on some other stuff. And I, and I was looking at Kickstarter and I was, I was like, man, board games seem to really be taking up, like traction. There's, there's something about old school gaming that's coming back. And I called Sandy in because he had worked in old board games years ago, and then he stopped doing that.

So I was looking at the tea leaves. And that's part of it. If you're just trying to look at Kickstarter and go, man, there's money to be out. There's, it's a wild west. Let's figure this out. Where am I going to put my, you know, where am I going to build? You really can study the space. And that's really what it was all about is I didn't even see any history. He created the game called Cthulhu, you know, 20, 30 years earlier. We saw board games. And it was like, I convinced him to make a board game. And he said, no, I'm going to make a video. So I said, okay, I'll help you. Let's make a video. And it fell. So

I called him back up again. I go, are you ready to make the board game? And he said, absolutely, I'm ready to make the board game. So then we rebooted. So we completely rebooted. Same, same team, different product.

So, here's what we learned during the launch. Prime the pump, flip the switch, update some media, backer engagement, cross-promotion, rinse and repeat daily. This is where people don't do it. That part right there, if you just figure these things out and you supply them, you will be successful.

So, Kicktraq. We studied this thing like crazy. This is a typical, this is a typical, uh, arc you see with, with crowdfunding. It's really, it's really crazy on the early days. And then it, then it kind of like $5,000 was our least amount that we raised in a day, which we were really freaking out about that. And then the last days, we raised more money at the end. Our last day was $159,000. On the last day, our first day was about $155,000 as well. So, that's typical. First and last day will probably be around the same. Our average daily backer was $320. I'm sorry, our average backer is $320. And that was not by accident. I'll give you exactly how we did that.

That's a lot of money per person. That's a lot of, that's a lot of money in individuals donating to something that they're not going to see finished product for 52 years. Or even ever. They may never get out of it. It's a risk. We studied other campaigns. This was not by accident.

So, updates. Bless you. Since, since we launched, we've had 177 total updates and almost 20,000 comments. That's massive. That's a lot of engagement. That's a lot of people talking. We only had 4,000 backers. But we had 20,000 comments. That's pretty good. So, some key things when you do your updates. And, and I had a friend of mine, John Mueller, [unclear] which I helped him raise some money. He told me, the quote was, updates equal money. So, when you're updating yourselves, people will want the engagement. So, updates equal money. You always have to do the humble things. Share your things. Share the press. It's better to have someone else talking about you than you always talking about yourself. So, we're constantly sharing the press. That's why when you go to people's campaigns, you see all the press icons and stuff. I don't know how they do that. We never had it in New York Times or anything.

Even though, I did, this one technique does work. Whenever you, if you have a favorite, a favorite news site, or a favorite, a favorite writer, right there, they have their, their names. You can click on their names and you can email them directly. I was doing that. So, any time someone was writing about crowdfunding or writing about games, I would click on that individual's name and I would reach out to them. That works. It didn't give me a whole lot of press, but I got a dialogue. They knew who I was.

We share our product details and videos. We constantly update the videos. Videos are huge. People wanted to know how the game played. They didn't want to just look at the pictures. They wanted to see the gameplay. They want to see your product. We had to do all this work during our campaign because we didn't know. We didn't know better. So, if you're going to launch your campaign, get the, get your video done, but also get you, all your update videos done. It's really important. Fix the product. If we're using the product, we continue to update that.

We, we address questions and emails. We got hundreds of questions, hundreds of emails from our backers. You have, that sounds, that's a lot. My inbox right now says 1,600 unanswered emails. I don't know what an email is. Okay, so, your Kickstarter's going to be the same. I don't know, how many, how many emails have you gotten with your campaign? What'd you say?

Audience member: I don't know, like a hundred.

Robert M. Atkins: A hundred emails. And, you can imagine like, now you have to. So, we formulated our answers. A lot of times, the same exact questions. We created a spreadsheet that said, okay, here's our standard answers for questions. We also got a lot of people who were wanting to do business with us. So, now we have business relations that people reaching out to us through email. We had our back, our, one of our backers was the owner of Fantasy Flight, which is one of the massive distributors of board games in the world, flew our lead designer to go play the game on site. We had an offer for worldwide distribution of our product before we ever finished our campaign. Because, they wanted to be, so

you will get business offers during your campaign. If people see your product, they want, they want to come in, they want to buy it, they want, they want to distribute it, they want to be part of it. If people get things right, we get these types, we're doing these types of offers.

So, you have to address those questions. You have to, this becomes a full time job. This became our full time job. So, people are going to leave comments, and they're going to leave people who are trolls. We call them trolls in the gaming world. Who knows what a troll is? So, a troll is someone who [unclear], a bunch of negative energy in the forum to get people asking questions. Well, you have to address them. You have to come in, and be gracious, and answer their questions. Sometimes, they just want answers. They just want attention. So, we gave it to them, and they were like, they loved this one. They thought we would have. Richard was constantly commenting about the art, and he built his professional career on top of what he had already done. He, he suddenly became a name. People identified him with this, this, this subject matter.

So, you can actually build a career outside of even a campaign. If you do it right, you engage people, you start to grow your own brand. So, background engagement was massively important to us. Showing pictures of the product. So,

social media, we talked about that. Recruiting friends and family. You'll find out how few friends and family you really have, you ask them to back the crowdfunding. I don't think, and you can see it. You can see the email addresses and names of the people who backed your product. I don't think anyone on my Facebook actually backed my product. Maybe two or three people. That's sad.

That's sad. It really is. I have over five friends, and I should at least watch. And, yeah, it was really painful. Um, but the thing that's really important, and whenever I coach people, I, I tell them, you just gotta pester people. People are busy. They don't know what's going on. They're, they're outside of their, their sphere, their radar. You have to always be, you know, sweetly, nudging, pushing, and, and over and over and over again, to the point where they're like, they're gonna back you just to, make you go away. Or, at least share. That's the other thing. Constantly asking for those shares.

Uh, so, daily. It's one of those daily things you just have to do. It's a grind. You have to have a team. Get your team ready. Have them in place. Make sure that you understand what you're trying to accomplish, and have, have the specific places that you want them to attack. This is the stuff you do when you don't have a bunch of money to hire people to do it. Okay? It can work for us. It can work. It's just, it's just work to do it.

Um, always the shares and likes. Branding everything. We talked about that. Drilling down specific forums. Really engaging the people deep. If you can get this thing on Reddit front page, it'll make all the difference in the world. And that's just one of those things. It just doesn't happen overnight. You have to really be targeted and do some of the goofy stuff that I showed you with, with Rocky Cat being torn apart. Um,

you have to really study your traffic analytics. This is really important. So, on, on, Kickstarter has, has some really good analytics tools. They basically show you where, who watched your video, how many people watched your video, how many people backed your video, where they stopped watching your video, where they came from. So, you want to like, so if you even consider like advertising, you want to understand like, these, these people are coming from here. Cause I can see what the page is that they're actually coming to us. And so, that's where you want to spend your attention. So, if you got a lot of traction on a particular site, on a particular page, whatever, you want to see about doing that again. Cause, guess what? Just because you got a lot of traction that day, doesn't mean you miss probably 90% of their audience, that normally visits them in a month. You got to get in front of the same audience multiple times. So, you got to continue to push in these spaces. So, study your traffic, study your analytics.

So, backer engagement, I can't stress this enough. I know I've said it three times now, five times, it's because it's incredibly important. You can't be the only one talking about it. You can't be the only one pushing it. You have to have people engaged. We took a lot of photographs of Sandy. He's that guy in the suspenders up there. He's not the most handsome guy in the world, but he's very charismatic about talking about his products. And people love him. They want, they want a picture with him. They want to post, continue to post all these things on social media, get your Twitter going, get, continue to feed people. Because the more people that other people see having fun, they're like, human nature is, I want to be part of that too. Right? So, same old marketing stuff, we just continue to do it constantly.

And that's the only way. And, there are people out there, I've seen large campaigns; they've done three updates the entire month. And I was like, hey man, that's why you're failing. That's why you're stumbling along. You know, you have to be constantly engaging. I can't say it enough. I know I've tried.

Um, the feedback loop. So, whenever people complained about something, we addressed it right away. We told them what was going on. Like, one of the things that we were doing was, we had gamified our, the way we were trying to raise users. So, we had maxed out all of our stretch goals so incredibly fast. They were $50,000 apart, some $100,000 apart. And we were just blowing through them so, so fast that we stopped trying to put stretch goals at a dollar amount. We said, okay, we'll open a stretch goal if we get this number of backers or this massive dollar amount. So, we put them $150,000 apart. But we said, if we got 500 more backers, we'd be willing to open it. So, one or the other. We've gamified our, our goals.

So, what that does, incentivizes the backers that were already engaged, to share more. Because they want to see that goal open, but they don't want to pay more money on it. But they, so they, they're trying to share your message with other people. So, you can open up goals, through the number of backers that you get, not just a dollar amount. Keep that in mind. It's a helpful, it's a helpful thing that we did.

So, questions, we talked about that.

Or, we continue to make our product better. Throughout this process, because we were engaged, our game, ours is a game. Because we're play testing constantly, we're constantly iterating on our product. So, the iteration process, just like with any product development, you iteratively design your product. We're iteratively designing, making our product better. So, this process of engaging other people, was helping us to make a better product in the process. Which is really important. And, we've talked about that. We openly talked about the changes that we were making. We openly talked about, how this process is helping us, you know, make a better product. It's, that's how you, that's how you get this engagement.

The exclusive stuff, I cannot over stress that. You have to have something exclusive. I hope it's more than just a sticker. Which, that's fine as well. But, you want to do something that people get, that's really, that's special. That they feel really good about.

Sharing the news and interviews. We did a lot of interviews. I, I stay away from the interview process. Sandy and Richard, they did some. We were pushing our, pushing our talent to the forefront. If you have a really talented group of people, who are the face of your product. Who are the ones that are, that are messaging people. You really want to make them a star. You really want to get them out there. You want to get them in front of the press. You want to get them, you want to get them talking. You want to build their brand. It's really important. And there's a contest. You cannot have a contest to get people engaged.

Richard runs a contest probably, he had a contest to try to get 10,000 back, or likes on Facebook. And he gave away a free copy of the game. That's really good odds. The game is a $300 game probably on eBay, a $200 video game. And if he can get, you know, 500 shares, that's 500 people. That's a really good odds to win something. You know? So people, people can figure that out. But they want to, that the odds are really good. It's in their favor. So they'll do it.

A cross promotion. Cannot stress this enough. People underestimate this. This is old school, but it works. My friend, John, his campaign was looking like he was going to fall short. He made a good looking product. He built it on an engine from a really successful product. He had really good people. He had a good looking demo. He had a lot of things going for him. But it wasn't until he did cross promotion that he started seeing the success of his Kickstarter happen. And what this means in the Kickstarter world, is that you get someone else who has a light audience, that's already established name, to talk about your product within the Kickstarter community.

So if I have a product like, like Cthulhu, and you start talking about Richard's book, hey, if you really like the product here, we have 400, we have 4,000 qualified buyers who already have shown interest in Cthulhu. Why wouldn't they want to hear about a Cthulhu art book? That's the kind of, that's the kind of targeting cross promotion you need. So you've got to find people who are friends, who are like products, who you cross promote with. And just like John told me, that when he saw cross, he did, he saw updates equal money, he saw cross promotion equal double it. So his per day amount doubled what he saw when he cross promoted with other products. So the product tie-ins is another one that's really important.

And we're pushing, and it's just like a community. That's the great thing about crowdfunding. It becomes a community. Over 40% of our crowd, of our backers came from the Kickstarter community. And that's what you're going to find with the analytics. But most of your backers, or 40% of your backers, are going to come from that community that you launched it on. So you really want to engage other pockets of those buyers, other pockets of those, of those backers in that community, and push them towards your product.

So if you don't already have friends who brought launch Kickstarters, or you're not already actively backing other Kickstarters, you're not already engaging in the comments of other Kickstarters, you're doing yourself a disservice, because you're not becoming part of a community that will recognize you as an active member, and want to help you.

And the other thing that people miss out on a lot of times, it happens all the time, is after your campaign, or during your campaign, once you reach your goal, you want to make sure your site's up, and launched, and working, hopefully beforehand, and you want to push people toward your site, because now you can actually start taking funding directly. If you, we didn't do that, but you can do that, I've seen it happen, where people start pushing people away from Kickstarter, or crowdfunding, directly to their site, is that they can start taking donations directly, so that they're not overhead, their overhead is cut down. You have to have it ready, you have to, you have to be able to do that, it's one more click, it's one more, pushing someone, it's a little harder, but, you know, you should, you should do that.

That's actually one of Richard's campaigns he ran. One, a signed copy. Did you grab me a signed copy tonight?

So, post campaign, raised a lot of money, what do we do now, besides write ourselves big fat checks, high five each other, whatever, whatever it is. you want to continue that engagement. We saw, over the next few months, we opened up a, we opened up a relationship with Fundafull, which was a third party, site that allows you to continue your campaign, for a small dollar, a dollar backer, they would allow you to continue, they would, they would help you fulfill, they would create your survey, they would, uh, continue to take orders, uh, for your survey. We, we, we raised, close to $400,000, over the next three months, beyond, the Kickstarter.

You can't cut it off. Because, guess what, just because you've reached 4,000 people, doesn't mean there's not 400,000 people who haven't heard about it. So, you want to keep the money train rolling, because this is, in our case, this is our first product, that's the first iteration, it's, it's pre-ordering something. So, we want to grow more pre-orders. And so, we, we, we continue to go to those, uh, we continue to travel, we continue to go to those train shows, we continue to raise money, and promote, and we were able to, uh, continue to grow our, our pre-order numbers. So, continue to that campaign, we, we,

we didn't cut off the exclusives. We said, hey, we're sorry you missed it. We're gonna offer it, we're gonna continue to offer it. It really costs us anything to do that. You know, maybe, we didn't have that many people on the Kickstarter complaining that, oh, my buddy got it too, that's not fair. Well, people aren't like that. People want, they want other fans to get it too, you know, so they're continuing to share. So, the thing is, you want to keep this going.

This is really important. And, uh, don't forget what you've learned. Now, keep applying it. Like, if you don't, if you, if you're successful at something, and you don't apply the lessons that you've learned, then that's, that's gotta be one of the definitions of failure. I wanna vote. Because, life's really hard. You learn a hard lesson, you better apply it. You learn something that works, apply it. And keep doing it. And that's unfortunate because, uh, the group that runs this company now, they, they just canceled their kid, their, their latest Kickstarter after, after one week. Not to pick on them, but they didn't have the presentation, they didn't do the exact same things that we did. They have an audience, they have a built-in audience, yet they're not, they didn't even reach $20,000. And

there's your reasons, because they didn't apply all these things. You get lazy, you think you know it, you think your audience is gonna buy whatever the next product is that you show toward them. I'm sorry, it's not how it works. You have to keep, you have to keep doing all these really hard things.

So, I remember I talked about Lovecraft, it seemed like five hours ago. But, so, Lovecraft, he, like I said, he wasn't very successful. Right now, there's over a hundred Lovecraft themed projects on Kickstarter along, 70% success rate. The average success rate on Kickstarter is less than 30, around 30%. This guy has a 70%. It's a very passionate group of people. There's over 20,000 pledges, over 3 million raised, probably a lot of that's ours, but, there's beers, and games, and toys, and statues, and music, and children's books, all kinds of wacky stuff, including statues. So, you can plug into passionate verticals, that allow you to, to take, and, and do really cool stuff to an audience that's out there. So, do your research, not only on how to do it, but who your, who your audience is.

So, okay Rob, you had Cthulhu, you had Sammy, you had also Richard's art. How does this apply to like, the little guy? Well, this is a guy I met, Derek Wayne Johnson. He, he's a, he's a filmmaker, and he does independent films, nothing high budgets, all indie stuff. And, he's got a huge Twitter following, but he really, you know, he, he launched this thing, I didn't find out for a week into it. And, it's about a really cool project. The guy, John J. Austin, he was the director of The Karate Kid, of Rocky, he's done, he's won Academy Awards, he's, so he's doing this documentary, and he launches this $20,000 goal project. And, he's got like, he's got nothing, he's got no traction, he's like two weeks into it. I, I write him a pretty nasty little message, with a lot of examples of what we did. I said, you have to do these things, you have to start, you have to go find the audience, that are fans of this guy's work, and you have to reach them, you have to find people who are part of his work, like the Rockies of the world, and you have to reach them. Rocky has hundreds of thousands, Rocky on Facebook, hundreds of thousands of people on there.

I, so what I did was one night, when I wrote this, this message, I started, exactly what I'm telling him in this message. I went out to, the Rockies, and the, and the Karate kids, and, and all these, those people that are fans of this guy's work, and I started spamming, I started like reaching out to him, I reached out to the influencers in that space. And I, and, it, it was just two hours of my time, but I just wanted to see if, you know, the stuff that we applied, a year earlier, was gonna work. So, here's what I, here's what I messaged him. It was like, on the 27th, or something. And, he had gone, down to nothing. Like, these days, there was like, zero money making. And all of a sudden, you know, I jumped his butt, and I said, you have to get going man, or you're gonna fail. And, even though he didn't raise like, millions of dollars, he was successful enough to make this documentary. And you're gonna see this documentary, it's almost done, it's already edited. If you could see instant jump, by just doing the small things that I was doing, and what, I spent literally two hours of my time doing this.

Think about all these other fans, or all these other people, if you would have engaged them early, he would have had a much more successful campaign. So, this is a very unusual arc, because he started doing the work here, instead of at the beginning, or even way before. So, this is, what I'm talking about, does apply to different things. So, you want to promote like, Mr. Don King, that guy will find anything, but, the biggest thing he does, he promotes people. And that's a lot of what Kickstarter is about, it's about promoting people.

So, I got one more thing for you. If I was to give this talk, a year and a half ago, I would probably talk about how, Kickstarter is just about tangible goods. It's about a hoodie, it's about a, it's about a beer thing, it's about, you know, a watch, it's about, sometimes it's about technology, but it's changing. Our, we're investing in oil rights, we're investing in real estate, we're investing in agriculture, we're investing in humanity. We're doing all these things that are completely different than, and people want to engage the thing that they're passionate about, and they want to help.

But, what about digital content? There's some of you in here that have digital ideas, and, I'm an entrepreneur in a digital space, I mean, video games fairer. What about that? I would have told you, it's the wrong direction to go in, because you're not going to be able to raise money in this space. It's risky. To make a video game takes hundreds, or not hundreds, it takes tens of millions, to do a bracket, if it's a big game. You can make a game over $20,000. It's going to be a small, more iOS game, and it has potential, but it's not, it's got massive. But,

this is the perfect example of where we're going. These guys, Star Citizen, they raised $2.1 million. I'll tell you right now, $2.1 million in the video game world, it's like a, that's a burn rate for a big studio for two months. You're not going to make much. You know, maybe you can do a small studio for two years, it's like, you know, 10 people or something. It's just, programmers, they had a following, they had a lot of the right components, they advertised it right, they had a history. 2.1 million, not nearly enough.

But what they did, was they turned around, they took that, that money, and they created a model, for how to engage their users. Talk about the engagement. They made an engaging, they made their whole model, be about engaging people, getting them to buy, and spend more money. They've raised over 84 million, in a year and a half. And this product has not come out. This is pre-ordered. They have over, they have 900,000 backers, and they're buying everything, from a starship, that's a digital starship, that's $150, that only 100 of them exist. So they're selling digital goods. We've heard of this model before, right? It's nothing new. But they're doing it right. That's a lot of money. I can make a lot of video games, for 84 million. That's a whole lot of money. And guess what? They didn't give up a single dime or a single percent, of their company to do that.

Wow. That's all engaging backers. So engagement, engagement, engagement. It's really key. And in the model. So studying, if you're a video developer, and you want to raise 84 million, study their model. It's all about studying other people, and what they've done successfully. Not rocket science.

All this information is there. It's in the PowerPoint. It's really about doing the research. Doing the research. All these are tools to help you get there. You've got to research. You've got to understand what you're doing.

Audience member: I'm Guy. My question is, do you have any comments on [unclear platform comparison]?

Robert M. Atkins: Say that question again?

Audience member: [unclear platform] is a new platform for cloud services.

Robert M. Atkins: I'm not familiar.

Audience member: You're not familiar?

Robert M. Atkins: The one thing that I've learned, so there's a thousand different platforms. I would, there's Krowdster, which is in that last slide I showed you. They actually have an analytic tool. You put in what you're doing, who your audience is, what you're trying to, what you're trying to raise it for, and they will actually give you the platform that it recommends highly, according to the information you put in there, because it may tell you, hey, Indiegogo is the way to go. The thing that I've learned about Kickstarter, most people, we finish a product, we start a company, it's a different model. There's also the marketing aspect of what Kickstarter crowdfunding does. You can literally just try to create an iteration of your product that may not be the ultimate retail version, you just want a prototype. You can fund your prototype, you can build an audience, that audience will be your friends, followers, and the next iteration, the next iteration, all these better and better and better until you finally have what you need to go to retail with. It may take two years to do that, but you've built a massive audience, and you've done your iterative process through the funding of people through crowdfunding.

Audience member: Yes. My name is Omar, and my question is that, if we are taking our own audience and followers who are following us before this Kickstarter campaign, why do we need the Kickstarter? We could have created our own fundraising system on our own website and raise the money on that. What difference does it make to Well,

Robert M. Atkins: certainly you can sell directly to your audience, right? I mean, and you won't get 8% taken out. I didn't mention, there's a lot of little nuances to this process. Kickstarter takes 5%, Amazon who does the math and does the accounting for you are going to take another 3%, possibly up to 8%, it's gone, right? Why not sell direct? And I would say, once again, it's that marketing. People, like, why not do it this way? 8% is still cheaper than a marketing budget and you've reached even more people. And if those people are truly your audience, truly the people who want to engage with you, they're going to share your campaign. They're going to share stuff. And the secret is to sell to them, the backers, cheaper than they can get it anywhere else.

So what we did was we listed our retail price for every single thing that we have, every single goal, every single item. We showed a retail price. This is a $50 retail. We're going to give you $35. This is a $200 retail. We're going to give it to you for $150. And so they're getting the deal, you know, at that point. And then we incentivize people to share and to show more people. And we said, hey, share this deal with other people. So we're essentially, you know, we're still making money. We still made, you know, our product only costs us, you know, $100 to make and ship. We're still making $50. Or we're still making $100. We're still, we still have money that helps us build more product or that helps us get the next version of our product out there. Engaging people where we're going to have a fan for life. So they're going to continue to want to support us, at the same time share the great deal they're getting. So that's a big part. Exclusives and a deal. You cannot sell, you can't sell a $300 retail product, or you can't sell a retail product on here at a retail price. It has to be cheaper than you can get anywhere else.

Robert M. Atkins: Repeat that.

Audience member: The whole idea of crowdfunding is you're collecting money before you actually run production. So, I mean, you can't do that if you're selling straight to retail. You have to do all the work first and then sell the product as soon as it came. So that's the difference.

Robert M. Atkins: You're getting your overhead cover for the production line.

Audience member: Hi, Max. Hi. So, before the campaign starts, what would you say the average optimal time to be in a pre-launch would be? So, like, the hard leg work that you have to do before you actually go live, what would you say the best time period would be before then? If it's, and look,

Robert M. Atkins: you can read about this all day long online. If it's less than three months, when you have all the pieces ready, like if I already have my prototype or my design or my messaging, if I don't already have my campaigns and PR and marketing and all that and engagement or people know I'm coming, you're not going to be as successful. I mean, I know people who reach their goal. I mean, that's, our goal is $40,000. That wasn't, that was not a real, that's not what we really needed. What we really needed was $275,000. And then when we opened up our stretch goals, we really needed $400,000. Just the cost and shipping. And we knew that, and your fans, a lot of our fans knew that. They didn't realize how heavy our products were going to be. But they wanted to make sure we had everything we needed. And we set our price point so high that it was the Mercedes of the space. So we knew that whenever we—that's why we have a $340 average backer amount. They were buying into an expensive product, a quality product. So it was, you know, a lot of people, they get $40,000 and they can't even cover shipping. They're in trouble.

Audience member: Great answer. That actually puts people in one question. Is that okay? What would you say if you were going to like undershoot, if you needed $100,000, what would you realistically set your Kickstarter goal for if you wanted to make it

Robert M. Atkins: instead of... Well, that was one of our, we put down a realistic goal the first time. $300,000. That's how much we needed to make a video game. That was a realistic goal for our team. That's how much money we were going to live on. We wanted to go fringe. Just like straight up, cost a living. And it didn't come close. See, there is an art form to, you know, trying to come, like, it's like dark arts. I mean, it was like, we know this is a lie. And our goal, but our conversation was, we'll just cancel the campaign. If we don't get close, we'll just cancel it. So we won't take anybody's money. We weren't going to take someone's money and not deliver. So the goal is, we will just cancel it. So even though we would have had a success, that was our, we were going to get a loan. That was like another option. I was like, well, if we had $125,000 really, another $100,000, could we get a loan from somebody? Like, we have some of the money.

We were asking, we had these conversations. We knew we were making a very expensive product. But because we had done all that other stuff I talked about, our customer was like, we don't care. We know this is going to be the best product in this space ever. So that's what our goal was. We said we were going to make the best to do game work. And the best quality. And so people saw it. And so we went with, we took risks. And we didn't pay it off.

Audience member: Hello. Hi, good evening. My name is [unclear]. Thank you for the selection of this talk. My question maybe backs off the pre-launch. My main concern is I'm getting ready for a Kickstarter, launching in about a month. The biggest concern is how much to share. Because you don't want to jump the gun if you have a product launch. And then have other people that beat you to the gun. If you do that. So that's probably patentable. But your name is just a really good idea. For example, on your product, maybe the way of a game function. I don't know if that was a concern for you. Or just kind of that question. I'm just going to share.

Robert M. Atkins: What's your product? Mobile accessories.

So, listen man. We talked about that a little bit. It was like, it's an entrepreneur. You're always like, well, it's not an NDA. We don't want to share, you know, like what's patentable. Like our ideas or whatever. And like when you put it out there, it's definitely people. There is that risk, right? If someone comes and, I mean, chances are nobody's in your head like you are. Or can react as quickly to beat you to market. If they beat you to market, it's because they were already there. They were already ready anyway. You know? And, I mean, that is one of those things that we were concerned about. Like what if someone launches a like thing that takes away our traction somehow.

But my suggestion is if someone is sort of in a wheelhouse, reach out to them. Cross promote. Both products may have an audience. You know? I wouldn't be too afraid. You have to promote. If people don't know what's coming and you haven't got that campaign built for that pre-launch, then that's a worse scenario than keep it a secret. This is about exposure. It's not about secret. It's not about crowdfunding. You have to get exposure.

Audience member: Have you done that? Have you noticed in your research? Sorry. Have you noticed in your research and the things that you've done? Is it seasonal to perhaps launch at a particular time but at another time?

Robert M. Atkins: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. One of the products, we try to do, I say we, it wasn't me. Richard and I left from the company about a year after we launched this thing. And they relaunched the new company, Peterson Games, launched an Italian version or a Spanish version of the same game. They did it in the month of December, which is idiotic. I mean, people are already tied with money during the holidays, so you're going to invest in something you're not going to get for a year over $300 investment. It's not happening. People can't put an investment on Christmas tree for their food. They're going to want to play. Oh, yeah. I've got this for you.

So here's a card with the picture. The other thing that we learned was people, if it is expensive, people want to have multiple pay cycles. So launching it on a Friday is better than launching it in the middle of the week. Sometimes that makes a difference. Try to launch it in a month that has, because it's usually a 30-day cycle, try to launch it before you get more weekends. Because of the more weekends, we saw a lot of our activity during the weekends. That's really important.

The other thing that we did was there were holidays that fell during our campaign, so we actually ran holiday specials. We had, like, a Father's Day package. I think it's Father's Day, wasn't it? Yeah, we did a special Father's Day level, and we had a lot of, we sold out those things instantly. I mean, it was like, people want to, it's the whole mentality that we've been brainwashed with. Oh, it's a sale. It's a Labor Day sale. We've got to have it. I don't care what it is. We've got to have it. I don't care what it is. We've got to have it. So, it's all marketing. It really is. It's pitiful, but it works.

Audience member: Have you seen a lot of success with sports, health, or fitness-type equipment for the Kickstarter?

Robert M. Atkins: Sports-related? If drinking is a sport, then yes. A lot of drinking stuff on Kickstarter. I don't know about sports, man. That's a good question. I don't know. I'd have to do my research. What I do is just like with Cthulhu, and what I did was I, the way I convinced Sandy, who was an expert in Cthulhu, wasn't going, hey, you're an expert. Let's do this, was I looked up Cthulhu on crowdfunding, and I showed him the success rate. And I said, this is, these are passionate fans. 70% of these things get back. At the time, there were probably 12 Lovecraftian campaigns, and 90% were successful. So it was not about me trying to convince someone to do something that they were an expert in. It was about showing them the numbers. Look, man, this is, this works. It's always about doing the research. There's no shortcut around it.

Audience member: I think this works, and my question is regarding reverse analytics. So I'd like to believe that there are frequent contributors to certain verticals, and I'll just use your game as an example. Is there a way that Kickstarter tells you, like, who are the frequent contributors to board games? Are you able to see those type or get that type of reverse analytics for Kickstarter? Because I can back in here to

Robert M. Atkins: help. Yes. KickTrack is the best tool that I've found. Now, Kickstarter itself has a blog, and it's a really incredibly useful tool. It will actually, they have articles, they break down, they show you exactly what spaces have what kind of traction and conversion. And through that, you can turn around and look and see, okay, this is, this area is successful for whatever reason. Okay, these seem to be the leading contenders in that space. Okay, and you can arrange by most successfully funded. And okay, those are the most successfully funded. What does that mean? I don't know. So go to their things. You start looking at their comments. You start looking at, if you cross-reference to KickTrack. KickTrack shows their daily, uh, daily information. So you can say, okay, this day they spiked. What does that mean? Okay. Well, guess what? They were on, they were on this particular page. Uh, that, so that's an influencer. Now they're on my, now they're on my radar to be an influencer. You can reach out to them directly and say, hey, I know you, I saw that you're engaged with this type of product. I'm bringing this up. So it really is just, I don't know what, if there's a term for it, because I'm not like an analytics guy. I just know what worked for us. And, and so we did the lead work.

Now, there may be companies you can hire that do that same exact reporting. I don't, I, we couldn't afford that. You know, so we, we did this ourselves. We spent time and did the study and did the math and it was, it worked. You know, we only reached 4,000, we only had 4,000 backers. But if, if you had the right kind of product, you could, heck, you might reach 10 times that. You know, I don't think. I don't know if that answered your question, but that's how we did it.

Audience member: I guess I was really thinking about how do you determine contributors across campaigns? That, you know, frequent contributors to a certain vertical—is there a way to assess that?

Robert M. Atkins: Other than the studying the successful examples in those verticals, I, I couldn't tell you how that, how that works. And trying to reach those people directly. The nice thing about Kickstarter and crowdfunding is they always have the person who launched it. You can reach them directly. Yeah. Then you can ask them questions.

Audience member: Okay, perfect. Like. Thank you. Sure. Is this helpful at all? Absolutely. Hey, Cory. Hey, Rob. How are you? Good, how are you? Okay. So you mentioned 40% of organizations come up with Kickstarter audience. So the other 60% is, is that the social media for having the attention driving their new Kickstarter? What about the other 60%?

Robert M. Atkins: What's your question? No. So he asked the question with, because we can see a Kickstarter's analytics, we know where people came from. We know what site they came from. We know where, where they traveled from and, and, and, and backed our project. 40% comes from the Kickstarter community. I don't think that's going away. I think that community is growing. So, you know, you want to always appeal to that community. Um, and that's why things like getting the staff pick is important and whatnot. Uh, cause you get on the front page, which we did. That was really huge for us. But where do these other people come from? And how do you engage them? So you can see that where we saw them come from, Cory, was, uh, not from Facebook. Facebook really had very little to do. Richard has a huge Facebook following. He has over 110,000 people that engage him pretty heavily. What percentage would you say come from Facebook on your campaign right now?

Audience member: Uh, probably like 75% of mine.

Robert M. Atkins: 75%. That's an anomaly. Because he's very engaging. And this guy, every time he posts something, hundreds of people share his work. So if you have a Facebook presence, which I know you do, and you have hundreds of thousands of people, or a lot of engagement, when it comes with sharing, sharing is huge. So if you have a lot of sharing, then your, the chances are your Facebook numbers will go up. Ours were like 2%, I'm kidding. No, I'm kidding. On the Cthulhu Wars, What we saw, the most traction came from specific sites that were verticals themselves that covered, that covered the information. Like, they were Lovecraftian sites. They were, uh, sites that were people who were into, uh, the lore of the universe. Those were, and it was sort of like, you know, 10% here. And everywhere we did interviews. Everywhere where Sandy did podcasts. Everywhere where we were putting media. Uh, that's where we saw. That's where we saw, that's where we saw our followers coming from. That's where we saw the backers coming from.

Audience member: Did you guys have any social media presence before you started the Kickstarter?

Robert M. Atkins: Uh, I, I helped build that. That was primarily what I did. We literally had like a little over 2,000 by the time we finished the campaign.

Robert M. Atkins: That was it. What was the question?

Robert M. Atkins: How many people we had in the social media, and I'm talking Facebook, that's really, we had no, we tried, we, we just launched Twitter and it wasn't, we really weren't, but we didn't build an audience there beforehand. You have to have those audiences built beforehand. If you have less than 500 people before that are following you or that are, that are engaging with it, it didn't waste your time. You want to have thousands. Richard made it until he got over 10,000, um, Facebook, and he is, like I said, a not link. There, there are a lot of people that have, uh, hundreds, you know, like dozens and dozens of thousands and they, they don't get any traction because they don't post a lot or they don't, they don't have people sharing their, sharing their messages or whatever. So you have to have engagement wherever they're coming from, you have to be engaged.

Audience member: That's a question about contests. Um, you said you run a contest and, like, ask them for shares. How do you, um, measure or find out who shared the most to be able to reward them for being their shares?

Robert M. Atkins: Does that make sense? Yeah, uh, so I, if you just ask people to share, sometimes they set their, um, information in private, so you actually won't be able to tell who shares. So I make sure I tell them they have to share, comment, and like it. So that way you're hitting it with all three angles. Some people are only going to see if they like a page. Some people are only going to see if they share. And then they comment, you get to see their name exactly. So I just, uh, go online to a random number generator and, you know, 1-300, number 295, I go down the list and I choose that person. That's it.

Robert M. Atkins: Or if I don't like them, I don't choose them, so. I've never won one of his contests, which I've kind of insulted. Yeah. Oh. He runs contests all the time, and he does it for weird stuff. Like, help me, help me gain two more thousand followers and, you know, I'll give you a t-shirt or whatever. It's like, it works. It's, it's old school marketing. It somehow works. You talked earlier. You talked earlier. You talked earlier. So my question would go back to what we talked about earlier in regards to a product that's somewhat out there and basically putting out a different iteration of a product that wasn't created. I'm here. You can't hear it. Can we hear you? All right. So

Audience member: the question was, we had talked earlier, it's about, we have a particular product and we have a different use for a product that wasn't being used. So we have different versions that were using with the product. So how successful do you think coming out with a different iteration of the product as opposed to what it's currently

Robert M. Atkins: being used? Building the better mousetrap. I mean, who has, I have three different coolers in my garage right now, but I still want the coolest cooler. Because it's a better version of it. It's a different version. People are willing to upgrade all the time. We upgrade constantly in our society. All of a sudden better. It's your message. It's your story. It's reaching the people. If you have a way to take something that already exists and you have to rebrand it or repackage it and deliver it in a way that you can communicate to them effectively, this is going to improve your lives. You may have heard this. You may know how to have. Then you have a great chance to be successful. But you can't just take something that already exists without all that and then say, hey, buy this from me instead of this guy. That's a lot more difficult.

Audience member: When people were contributing the $300 or whatever, so did that buy a game for them?

Robert M. Atkins: Yeah. So this is a good question. So part of why we were successful is, we've heard of blitz points, like the blitz factor where you're like, you try to like create that honey spot or that sweet spot, that thing that people like look at and go, man, that is a deal. That is like, I'm getting a deal if I go in at that level. And that's what we did. We created a deal point. The reason we have, we had 1,400 of our 4,000 backers that went all in. They spent over $500 on a board game. Okay. Monopoly, you go to a Target. If you saw a $50 Monopoly, you'd be like, $50? That's like ridiculous. Why would I pay $50 for a board game? We had people go $500. It's because we created a frenzy and we created certain entry levels that were like all in. All this great stuff. And if you go to our page, you page down forever. I mean, you page and page and page and page down. You forget what you even looked at. All you know is, I get all this stuff for $500. I got to do it.

That or we also created a honey spot. We said, we'll give you the game way below retail price. We'll give you all the free add-outs. We'll give you all the exclusives. We're going to give you so much free stuff. It's double what you're going to get if you go buy this game in the stores. So our messaging and how we worded it created a perfect level for us to where we knew it's going to cost us, you know, it's going to cost us $100 to create all this. So we're going to, because the honey spot is $300, $350, we're going to make $250. And that's really how we did it. We just did the math. We figured out how to bundle things to where we would entice people to spend more than they normally would because they cannot get this deal in the other place. It's all about, it's all about branding and value. You know, at the end of the day, we did bring value. It wasn't just perception. It wasn't just, it wasn't just a visual trick or anything. Look at the product. You can't go find, there's no, there's no characters like that in 99% of the other games out there. They don't exist.

We made the Mercedes product. We charged a lot of money, then we marketed it just like the Mercedes. What we did, we gave it a reduced price.

Audience member: Because we're doing it. So I have an example. One, two, three, four, five, six. These are the same microphones, but they're two different, right?

Robert M. Atkins: That's what you're doing, and that's what you're just pointing to the point you just made. You want to build something that's better than you want to believe in it, right? And then selling it is almost easy. You want to do the work.