Takeaways from My First TTRPG Crowdfunder

Background

After a couple of years making content about Draw Steel and publishing a well-received adventure for the same system, I decided it was time to be a little more ambitious.

I had this cool idea for a supplement that, unlike my little one-shot, would require art commissions and professional editing. I wrote a draft and shared it with a few people; it seemed like the concept had legs.

The big question at that point was: should I pay for everything or should I crowdfund this?

I ran the numbers and it would cost me around US$ 1500 to bring the project to life. Did you know that making 1.5k a month where I live puts you in the top 10% of earners? It was time to launch my first crowdfunder.

Preparation

Before I could start the campaign, I had to have a preview of the product. Something the backers could look at and know that I had the chops to get this done.

I decided that I needed at least four pages of text, some well-known contributors, an announcement video, and good art. My budged for these art pieces would be US$ 500 and I was ok with not making this money back, so I’d ask for a nice round 1k in the campaign.

First, I reached out to 10 other Draw Steel creators that I admire and asked them if they’d contribute to the project if it was successful. Every single one accepted, which gave me the boost I needed to continue on this journey.

Then I made a video to accompany the campaign and explain what it was all about. Short and to the point. I was mostly happy with it.

Finally, I picked Ricardo “Dojikaan” Rivera and Inge for the art. I wasn’t happy with the results — I was elated.

Numbers

Time to decide the price. Because of the bespoke art, I decided to charge 50%-100% more per word than I was charging for my adventure. The final price was US$ 12.50, which sounded fair.

To entice people to back during the crowdfunder, I was going to give them a 20% discount. This meant I was charging US$ 10 and needed 100 backers to fund. I love round numbers.

More important than being round, 100 backers is a number I considered achievable. The table below lists every third-party Draw Steel crowdfunder to date (including one that’s still ongoing).

Excluding Weapons of Legend, which I consider an outlier¹, the average number of backers per campaign was 121. Me just needing 100 backers put me on the safe side of this equation.

Since I went through the trouble of collecting this data, please indulge me in a little bit more math. The table below includes how many backers each campaign would require if everyone pledged at the lowest possible level.

Three campaigns rise above the rest: Nomas, Vessel, and Scions. Nomas is still not funded, the Vessel did not fund, and Scions funded literally on the last day.

If you’re working on a Draw Steel crowdfunder and want to be safe, it seems like you should aim for less than 200 backers at the lowest pledge level. At least this seems to be true in these early days of the game.

Itch

I wanted to run the campaign on BackerKit, the platform that MCDM and almost all other Draw Steel creators use for their crowdfunders. Kickstarter was a good second option if something went wrong with BackerKit.

Did you know that BackerKit and Kickstarter only accept campaigns from around 30 select countries? Both take money from “more than 200 countries/regions,” but sending money to the other 170 seems to be very low on their priority list.

The alternative I chose was itchfunding. In short, you just set up a sale on Itch for a product that is still in development. Since you can add a goal to the sale, you even get a pretty progress bar like on Kickstarter!

Would choosing Itch have an impact on my sales? On one hand, BackerKit looks much more professional, allows you to set up pledge tiers, and has better name recognition. On the other hand, Itch is where most third-party Draw Steel products are being sold, and allows for tips. It was (and is) impossible to know.

Campaign

With the preview done, the price set, and the video ready, it was time to launch. I clicked all the buttons and… Waited. There was nothing left to do but to see the number slowly go up.

The first bad sign I got was from the video. Not only did it not do well, it was actually one of my worst performing videos of the last year. The second bad sign came from the number, which REFUSED TO GO UP FASTER.

I stopped panicking and went to bed. This wasn’t going to be a campaign like the Cave of Amber Tears that funds in a few hours and just demolishes the funding goal. I had to keep it cool.

And everything worked out in the end. After nine excruciating days I reached the funding goal 🎉 The final days really surprised me, pushing the number of backers over 200!

If you’re into this sort of thing, here’s the number of pledges per day. I added notes to the spikes because they’re very relevant.

• Launch: This is when the campaign started. After a couple of days the campaign had reached US$ 800, which is about a third of the final revenue.

• Funded: The campaign crossed US$ 1000, so I decided to announce this everywhere. I picked up a few new people here, who I assume weren’t sure the campaign was going to fund. My post on Reddit actually got more traction than the original announcement.

• Matt: Colville posted a video highlighting a bunch of creations from the community, including my crowdfunder. It really surprised me that this was not the largest spike in sales, indicating that maybe I had already reached everyone that was going to back?

• Reminder: Nope! With around a day left, I reminded everyone that the campaign was almost over and loads of new people showed up. Note that these spikes are larger than the first couple of days. Incredible.

Since I mentioned posts, you might also be curious about which places generated the most traffic. The table below shows this, but unfortunately I can’t filter for people who actually pledged. I believe (but have no way of proving) that Reddit is the one that generates the most purchases.

Takeaways

I’m not sure how much there is to learn from my experience. Draw Steel has been out for only a few months, I’m quite well-known in the community because of my videos, and this was a crowdfunder on Itch.

However, I still think there are some lessons hiding in there:

• Have a community. Most traffic to the crowdfunder came from my YouTube. I know these visits weren’t from Matt because his link to my page was on Google Sheets.

• Choose the platform that suits you. I thought this campaign was going to fail because I had to do it on Itch. Fortunately I was wrong!

• Don’t aim too high. For now, it seems like you should expect on average 120-140 backers on your Draw Steel crowdfunder. If your project needs more backers, I’d personally wait until the community is larger and more established.

• Don’t underestimate the final days. It really seems like there is a big spike at the end of campaigns. I know many people have said this before, but I wasn’t expecting the volume of pledges that I got.

I hope this post was useful. Now I have to go make Hooked on Crafting! Expect another post once the product is out.