How We Raised $120K on Kickstarter and Made a Card Game
By: Greg Dybec
Tags: Games, Crowdfunding, Marketing, Kickstarter, Business

Back in February of this year I launched my first-ever Kickstarter campaign alongside my business and creative partner, Joe Santagato. The goal of the campaign was to raise enough money to mass produce a card game concept called Pay the Price — a trivia party game where wrong answers result in having to complete awkward and ridiculous consequences. We ended up raising $120,340 in 30 days thanks to the pre-orders of 3,205 backers.

Since the campaign ended in March, I’ve received a ton of questions around the crowdfunding process and how we independently manufactured a game. I decided to put together a comprehensive and transparent guide, since I believe our journey can be applied to similar product launches and crowdfunding efforts, and not just games.

While it’s impossible to note every detail, I’ll do my best to go through the journey in the order of events as they occurred. My hope is that by laying out some key learnings and by being honest about our actual costs and figures, it might help others prepare for their own ventures, whether it be raising money through crowdfunding, having an original product manufactured, or simply taking the first step to turn an idea into a reality.

The Ideation Stage

“If we don’t make it, someone else will.”

The concept for Pay the Price first came up as an idea for an Internet game show back in 2019. Though, Joe and I quickly became worried that if we produced “game show” videos, someone would end up turning our concept into an actual game. Our focus immediately shifted toward creating a card game and not a video series. Pivoting at the idea stage is often necessary; and if you think someone else would be able to turn your idea into a reality, then it’s likely worth pursuing.

Conquering the Idea Hangover

“How do you even make a game?”

I promise I’ll get into the practical logistics of making a game and launching a Kickstarter campaign, but I believe this phase is often overlooked.

It’s the moment I call the Idea Hangover. It’s when the initial bliss of an original idea wears off and you realize that in order to convert an idea into a reality, there will be a ton of questions to answer and problems to solve. This is when people unfortunately end up laughing off their idea as nothing more than a crazy thought.

The best way to combat the Idea Hangover, in my opinion, is to get moving immediately. Get lost in the research and validate that your idea is possible. For us, it was figuring out how to actually get physical games printed.

Find a Printing Company/Manufacturer

“Let’s see what other successful games did.”

Often times, bringing an original idea to life doesn’t mean reinventing the wheel on how to bring it to life. Our initial Google searches like “how do you make a card game?” and “who are the top game manufacturers?” didn’t bear much fruit, so we decided to trace the origins of the most successful independent card game we could think of: Cards Against Humanity.

Luckily, we found a clue right on the back of the COH box. In the bottom left corner, under the barcode, we noticed the words: “Printed in China by Ad Magic.” We found Ad Magic’s website, where they refer to themselves as a “personalized playing card printing company.” We fired off an email and scheduled a call for later that week.

The Cards Against Humanity barcode and Ad magic text

A huge first step in the game manufacturing process is finding a company that will print your product. Ad Magic is essentially a middle man with ties to the factories that do the actual printing — typically in China, though, there are US-based options. Companies like Ad Magic do not require money up front and they do not claim any ownership over your idea or product. They simply tack a small fee onto the manufacturing costs. If a game costs $4.00 to make at the factory, then it may end up costing $4.25 per game with Ad Magic’s added fee. Those are not exact numbers, but you get the idea.

It’s important to note that these printing partners are not all-in-one solutions to making a successful product. They help handle the production and logistics of getting a product physically made, though the bulk of the work is still on your plate. You still have to create the product, raise money to pay for a bulk order, figure out your marketing and sales strategies, and handle domestic shipping to customers.

Here’s a more detailed list as to why a printing partner like Ad Magic is important:

They handle all communication with the factory.

They get exact price quotes for you based on a range of quantities, so you can know what your costs will be based on the number of games you eventually want to order. For example, it may cost $4.80 per game if you order 2,500 games or $4.40 per game if you order 20,000 games.

They ensure your final design assets are properly sized and formatted for printing. For an additional cost they will also help you with your design, though we handled that ourselves.

They quote and facilitate the final shipping costs from the factory and handle all logistics to get the game to the destination of your choice (in our case, a freight shipment via boat and train to a warehouse in Dallas, Texas — more on that later).

Other popular options in the game space besides Ad Magic are Panda and Delano.

The Simplification Process

“This is way too confusing.”

Like so many concepts fresh off the ideation stage, our initial concept became riddled with complexity. We had rules on top of rules and games within the game. Unfortunately, keeping things simple isn’t always simple. Just remember that simple sells. Simple sparks word of mouth hype. Simple is likely to have people come back for more. Simple is easy to market. So, we decided to kill our darlings and strip our idea back to its basic function.

Get a Prototype Made and Test the Product

“I can’t believe we’re holding it.”

Once you finalize your actual game rules, design, and contents (or at least come close to finalizing it), it’s time to order a few prototypes. Prototypes allow for three things:

You get to see your creation in real life and ensure you like the design, look, and feel. Plus, it’s easier to catch mistakes and flaws. You can test your concept by having people play the game or use the product. You can start gathering product shots and content for your eventual Kickstarter and marketing efforts. (We used Tachuk Media.)

We ordered a handful of prototypes from a company called Print & Play, which is owned by Ad Magic. Prototypes are much more expensive to make than actual games, even though the quality is not nearly as high. It cost us about $150-$180 per prototype.

Experimenting with the prototype on camera (Photo by: https://www.tachukmedia.com/)

Back of the prototype box (Photo by: https://www.tachukmedia.com/)

Plan Your Domestic Shipping & Logistics

“Shipping is no joke.”

There is a lot to unpack here and I urge you to do a ton of research on your own, but let’s try to cover some basics.

There are two options when it comes to shipping:

Handle the shipping yourself.

If you don’t plan on holding a ton of inventory with your first order, then you can choose to ship the items yourself. In this case, you should know the weight and size of your product (thanks prototypes), and research how much shipping will cost for the item via USPS, UPS, Fedex and other services to different zones across the US. If you plan on shipping internationally, this will require a lot more research since it varies for each country. It’s easiest to plan for domestic shipping first to get the hang of it. It’s crucial you know how much it will cost to ship one item in order to determine a.) how much you will charge for your product and b.) how much money you’ll need to set aside for shipping to your initial backers.

2. Work with a 3PL (third-party logistics company).

A 3PL is an established fulfillment company that has strategically placed warehouses, a robust staff, an established user interface, and can handle all your shipping needs. For a price, of course.

We went with a well-known 3PL called ShipBob. The way it will work is we’ll order a bulk shipment from the factory and that shipment will get delivered to our ShipBob warehouse. ShipBob then stores the inventory for us and plugs into our sales funnels. In our case, a website we created through Shopify and an Amazon store. Whenever someone orders a game from either location, ShipBob will get the notification and shipping info and immediately pack up the order and send it out. Convenient, yes, but they do add a fee per shipment for their labor and the packaging materials. This will increase your overall shipping costs but decrease stress and a ton of work on your end.

Let’s do some math, because shipping is all math.

For our game, which weighs over a pound, the average domestic shipping cost via ShipBob (fees and packaging included) will come to about $11-$13. Let’s call it $12. It’s critical that we know this number early on since it will determine our budgeting, forecasting, and what we want our profit margins to be.

When our game is available and for sale this summer (2021), we will likely sell it for between $25 - $29 with a possible flat $5 domestic shipping fee. This is with the knowledge that we’ll be paying $12 or more for shipping on a game that costs roughly $4.50 to make. This is why profit can look a lot different than revenue, so you’ll need to carefully plan your margins.

As for international shipping to Europe and other areas, it can get expensive. Upwards of $20 in many cases. Of course, if the game gets popular enough, we can connect with global 3PLs to cut international shipping costs and delivery time.

Budget, Budget, Budget.

“I haven’t done this much math since High School.”

For the sake of transparency, I’ve added a list of some additional expenses that accumulated throughout the process, as well as some future-facing costs to consider.

LLC Formation: $737.50

Trademark Application & Legal Services: $1,700

Prototypes Costs: $928.32

Barcode (Purchased via GS1): $250

URL & Shopify: $250 (Shopify is recurring monthly payment of at least $30).

Designer Costs: $1,000

Promotional Marketing Video for Kickstarter: $5,500 (we splurged and used Top Notch Cinema)

Future-scope budgeting and costs:

Kickstarter takes 5% of total funds raised, plus a payment processing fee of 3% + $0.20 per pledge.

Freight costs to ship the game from the factory will be hefty. For us, it will cost about $10,000 to ship 8,000 games to our ShipBob warehouse.

Don’t forget you will have to pay to ship your product to every Kickstarter backer. If a backer pays you $30 as a “pre-order,” that person is still going to cost you money to ship to — and that shipping bill comes later on down the road, so don’t spend all that crowdfunding money right away.

You’ll likely have to work with an accountant to figure out the tax side of your Kickstarter earnings (as well as sales tax for when you start selling product).

Executing a Kickstarter Campaign

“Here goes nothing!”

The goal of a Kickstarter campaign should not be to make money for yourself. I’ll show you our breakdown of funds in the next section. For now, let’s dive into some key elements of a Kickstarter campaign. Here’s a link to ours.

Produce High Quality Content:

Be sure to have quality images and/or video content to bring your project to life.

Make your game rules and concept clear from the start.

Be up front about why you’ve chosen Kickstarter and what the funds will be used for. Transparency builds trust.

Set Your Goal Amount:

Kickstarter is all or nothing funding. That means if you raise less money than the goal you set, the campaign does not get funded. You don’t see a dime and your backers don’t get charged.

Your goal should be the minimum amount of what will be needed to actually manufacture your product at some scale, plus all the associated shipping costs. (Keep the Kickstarter fee in mind).

We set our goal at $10,000, but only because that seemed to be the trend among card games. I suppose because it improves the odds of funding being secured. Though, you should not set an amount lower than what is actually needed to bring your project to life.

Create Tiers:

Create tier options that will incentivize, but don’t spread yourself too thin. Our philosophy was to keep tiers simple without needing to print expansion packs or have multiple SKUs right away.

We had three tiers: order one game, order two games, or order three or more games — with the price per game slightly decreasing with the bulk purchases. Could we have been more creative? Absolutely! Some people are amazing at coming up with motivating tiers and stretch goals . We just played it safe and simple this time around.

Two of the three tiers we offered

Select Shipping Options:

We set our Kickstarter shipping to “ships anywhere in the world.” This means anyone could back our project and we’d have to ship them a game, no matter their shipping address. To avoid putting ourselves in a financial hole, we decided to charge for shipping. And we did it up front and right through Kickstarter. Some people choose to charge for shipping when the campaign ends so they can pass the exact shipping costs on to the backers. We simply decided on static amounts based on location that would keep our margins in the range we wanted.

For US backers we added on $5 for shipping. For Canada we added $11. For all other countries we added $25 for shipping.

The Launch and Afterwards:

We tried not to overthink the actual launch and picked a 30-day campaign (which is the most popular and effective). Then we promoted our campaign as much as possible throughout the thirty days. Now, if you know myself or Joe, you know we are lucky to have a built-in audience to market to due to other creative ventures (especially Joe!), and we don’t discount how much that aided in our campaign’s success.

A few other tips:

Don’t be shy about writing updates on your Kickstarter page during and at the end of the campaign. Keep people posted on your progress as it adds trust and legitimacy.

Backer surveys can be stressful! This is a survey sent out to all backers after the campaign ends that requires them to fill in their shipping address. Of course, not everyone fills it out right away, so you will have to keep sending reminders. We directly emailed backers who didn’t complete the survey from our own email account and not just through the Kickstarter messaging platform. You can choose to work with a third-party company like Backerkit, but since we only had a single item and no up-sells, we just used the built-in Kickstarter survey.

You can run digital ads directly to your Kickstarter campaign if you have a budget for marketing. Install Google Analytics to retarget people who have visited the page as well.

Use of Funds

“Where did all our money go?”

Congratulations, you’ve made it to the final section! Let’s use Pay the Price’s actual numbers here to discuss our use of funds. Now buckle up, because it’s math time again. Actually, it’s magic time, because I’m about to make money disappear before your eyes. (To simplify, I’ll round some of the below numbers to their approximate amounts.)

Total amount raised on Kickstarter: $120,340

Money deducted due to “failed payments”: $3,000

Kickstarter fees: $10,000

Total funds after fees and failed payments: $107,736.63

After the campaign ended, we uploaded our final assets for the factory and placed our first bulk order of games. The first round of manufacturing and shipping can take up to three months (our game is currently being made in the factory as I write this).

We ordered 8,000 games through Ad Magic for a total of $37,200, which must be paid up front and in full for manufacturing to begin.

Funds left after the initial game order: $69,500

As I write this, we have $69,500 in the account, but there are some hefty payments on the horizon. That’s why we are not spending any money other than for our monthly Shopify and MailChimp service fees. This is where future-scope budgeting is crucial. If you order too much product up front without considering the payments to come, you could sink yourself. You’ll see why we decided to order 8,000 games to start.

Payments on the horizon:

Freight shipping to the US: $10,000

Shipping the games to approximately 3,000 backers: $49,000

Estimated funds left after freight shipping and backer shipping: $10,000

After we ship out the 3,000 or so games to our backers, we will be left with 5,000 units sitting in a warehouse. This remaining $10,000 or so will be our marketing budget (minus small additional fees to ShipBob for storing our inventory).

If we are able to successfully sell those remaining 5,000 units through cost-effective marketing and word of mouth, then we will take that new revenue and place another bulk order with Ad Magic. If we are lucky, the cycle will continue this way. With each new bulk order, we will find ourselves with a larger pool of profit that we can allocate toward reorders and continued marketing.

If the profit pool gets big enough, we can even think about paying ourselves. But as you can see, that’s not the short-term goal. This process is far from a get-rich-quick scheme. Especially since we decided to recycle all the initial earnings right back into the business with the goal of creating a game that will have a long lifespan and become a true game-night staple. Of course, only time will tell if that happens, but at least we learned a ton along the way. I mean, look how far we’ve made it just by acting on a fun idea we had back in 2019. Anything is possible.

Join our mailing list at paythepricegame.com for updates on the game’s release.