KickstarterForum.org

Hi there, my design partner John and I have been designing a sci-fi exploration board game called Space Frontier for the last 15 months or so. We launched our Kickstarter campaign a little less than 3 weeks ago and we're almost 20% of the way to our funding goal. We've got glowing video reviews that praise our game endlessly and have been sending press releases to bloggers and board game websites like mad for the past few weeks. We've paid for advertising on Facebook, Boardgamegeek.com and several other gaming websites. We held a AMA on Reddit a few days ago and have been trying to spread the word as many places as we can.

We've tested the game with upwards of 50 people at this point and everyone who has played Space Frontier has enjoyed it. We continue to improve it after every playtest and are constantly updating the rules. However, it just seems like we're not getting enough traffic to our Kickstarter Page. I see similar board game projects garnering hundreds of comments and easily hitting their funding goals and their project pages have similar layouts as ours. It just seems like Space Frontier doesn't get any comments.

I know that we don't have copious amounts of pretty artwork but that's because we just don't have the money. John and I both lack upfront funds and we've stretched what little budget to have to the absolute maximum. It seems like a lot of the most successful Kickstarter board games have a completed game before their campaign even begins and that's not something we can do.

Does anyone have advice or a similar story to tell? I know we haven't done everything we could have. Our social media presence isn't great and a few thousand dollars more in advertising would go a dang long way, but those are things that take too much time to cultivate at the moment to be helpful.

We're eager to hear opinions and advice.

Hmm..... so when I'm doing marketing I usually try to establish two things.

1. I am actually sending traffic (numbers via using trackable links like adding "+" to your Kickstarter shortlink to see bitly stats

2. That traffic is converting, and what percentage of traffic is converting. In your case, this could be measured by video completions and pledges.

If you've established both 1 and 2, then it comes down to 1. Improving your conversions so you have to drive less traffic 2. Figuring out the repeatable actions you can take each day to drive traffic & Figuring out the "long shot" non-repeatable actions.

An example of a repeatable action might be a tweet, your own blog post which is shared and drives traffic to site and clicks to kickstarter, engaging in messaging boards, etc.

An example of a non-repeatable action might be being featured on a blog or publication.

I then create a time-line with goals. Realistically, I can take these X actions in this timespan. If it doesn't look like it will be enough for the timespan, you may need to think more creatively about marketing and go for more "long shots." For example, I remember one campaigner who did a buzzfeed post that went semi-viral and received pledges from that.

Interesting stuff. I had no idea what bitly even was until I did some research based on your suggestion. A useful tool for sure. We're trying to get more non-repeatable actions but they all seem to cost money or ignore us entirely.