Tabletop Legend Jamey Stegmaier on the Future of Crowdfunding

George: 0:00
Hi there. My name is George and I help creators launch their products and games with my company’s YG and fantastic funding. On this podcast, you’ll hear from the creators and experts how they consistently launch record breaking campaigns so you can do the same. Our guest today is Jamey Stegmaier. He’s the founder of Stonemaier Games, and he has raised millions of dollars with his Kickstarter campaigns, but he might be even more famous for his blog with resources for creators in the tabletop space. If you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, you’ll have heard many creators mention his name. So today we finally have the man, the legend himself here. Welcome, Jamey.

Jamey: 0:36
I’m so honored to be here today, and it’s flattering to hear that other people have mentioned my blog in the past. Thank you.

George: 0:41
It’s one of those legendary things. I used to work at Kickstarter. I was on the design and technology team, not on the gaming team, but even there it was just always, Jamey Stegmaier, Jamey Stegmaier’s blog. It’s mandatory reading at this point for anyone who wants to do anything in crowdfunding. So it’s It’s amazing to have you. Let’s start at the very beginning of your crowdfunding journey. When we look at your Kickstarter profile, we see a teeny tiny campaign that raised a few hundred dollars for something in publishing. Tell us about the early beginnings of your crowdfunding journey.

Jamey: 1:13
Yeah. Yeah. I often even forget about this one because it was so small. It was so early on. But I was I was truly fascinated by Kickstarter from the very first day, largely the idea that I could connect directly with people who were interested in the same thing that I was interested in. And at the time my two creative passions in life are writing and game design. And the writing part came first. I was involved in a very small book publishing company here in St. Louis, and I advocated for running a Kickstarter campaign to launch our first two authors. I don’t think I did many things right at all in that campaign, but we got pretty lucky and ended up funding for just a few hundred dollars, like you mentioned. I still learned a lot from it that I applied to future campaigns. I basically tried to be too fancy and too gimmicky in the campaign and what I was trying to accomplish.

George: 1:58
It’s funding successful, so that’s all that matters. Yeah. But you so one doesn’t just I get born a crowdfunding expert and legend. How did you learn about crowdfunding in the early days and with your first games? What was your learning path?

Jamey: 2:15
Yeah, really the main thing I did is that I backed campaigns from other creators at the time in a variety of categories. Now most of what I back are just games, but at the time I was bouncing around between different campaigns engaging in them and also just watching how the creators manage those campaigns, how they structured the project pages, how they interacted with backers and the comments and how they updated backers during the campaign and afterwards. So I don’t know how many campaigns I backed in those early days. It feels like maybe a few dozen. Just backing sometimes to get the product, sometimes just for a dollar to follow along and participate in the campaign. And I learned so much from watching these creators do things that I liked and some things that frustrated me that I didn’t like, that I wanted to do differently on my campaign.

George: 2:53
And when did you start writing about this? Because if someone goes to your website your company that you have now is almost like an open source company, meaning that you document everything that you do obviously your blogs, but also it just so many things about your company, like the about page, it has like a chart showing, how many men versus women work in your company. Everything is documented in public. When did that start?

Jamey: 3:19
Yeah, the blog, I guess leading up to my 2012 Kickstarter campaign for Viticulture, the first game campaign, I started a blog on stonemaiergames.com. And at the time, I didn’t really know what it was gonna be about, and so I started writing about, mostly about Viticulture. I was writing about the game itself, and then I ran the campaign, finished the campaign. I was still writing about Viticulture a little bit. Started to feel a little bit like project updates, and at one point, I think in late 2012, I was like, Am I really offering anything of value to people by talking about another card in Viticulture? And so I thought instead of writing about this why don’t I write about Kickstarter itself and crowdfunding and entrepreneurship? I write about the things that I’ve tried and that I’ve failed to do, mistakes that I’ve made, things that I’ve learned, and just write about it on the blog. So I’ve been writing the blog twice a week, every week since late 2012.

George: 4:07
That is a huge commitment, especially when you’re just starting out. What is it that drives, especially in those early days, like were you already expecting people to read it or did you just write it for yourself as a journal, as a diary.

Jamey: 4:21
That’s a good question cuz it, it’s a, I guess it is always a little bit of a journal. I process things best in writing, just personally that’s how I process things, so that’s certainly part of it. But a big part of it really was that I wanted to offer something of value to other people. And I had a very small audience at the time thanks to the Kickstarter campaign and so I think I in introduced the blog to people who would follow the campaign and I think that’s where it started to take off a little bit. Some people from the campaign started to read it and share it. And at the time there really weren’t many resources about crowdfunding available out there. There were a few, and I, at the time, there was a company called Tasty Minstrel Games. Michael, who ran that company back then had written kinda an ebook about it. But there I wasn’t aware of many podcasts or videos or blogs that talked about it.

George: 5:06
Which is very different today.

Jamey: 5:07
Very different today. Absolutely. Yeah. I’m glad there are a variety of, has podcast like yours. Yeah. Everyone has a podcast. Yeah.

George: 5:12
So you’ve basically seen crowdfunding through the years. You’ve also famously stopped using crowdfunding yourself. What do you feel are the biggest differences between crowdfunding back in the day when you still did it and the scene today?

Jamey: 5:28
Yeah. The main difference that, that I can think about looking back is that campaigns these days, not only are they more polished than I think back in the day in terms of the aesthetic of the project page really a lot of it is the aesthetic and the structure and how they’re presented. Not only are they that way, but I feel like they need to be, to stand out because there are just so many more campaigns nowadays than there were back then. Like I’m guessing the week that I launched Viticulture. I don’t know the exact numbers, but I would guess that maybe at most, there were two other campaign, two other game related campaigns that launched that week and maybe none. It, there were very few, whereas these days, I don’t know what a few dozen launch every Tuesday in the gaming category alone. So I think that it’s very different in terms of competition. I think the competition has elevated everybody a little bit. You need to have that polished on your campaign, but that was not the case back in the day. Viticulture. If you go back and look at that 2012 Viticulture campaign if I launched that today, it would not have funded nowhere. Even close.

George: 6:22
Maybe. But I mean, it’s still a good game, but, oh, the game,

Jamey: 6:25
yeah. For the, the presentation. Yeah.

George: 6:28
Yes. I see your point. Um, do you feel that there is still space for smaller creators to launch something, or do they just need to level up to get to a certain level of professionalism before they have a shot at this?

Jamey: 6:43
So I like to think, I’m curious what you think about this too, because I like to think that you can be small and nimble and agile, all of which I see as advantages, not disadvantages, but also be professional about it. You can be personal and also professional in the way that you present these product pages. I think you can have both. I think in general it requires a little bit of a budget to get that polish, especially if you are hiring an artist and or a graphic designer to help you get that polish. But I think that’s money well spent in general. Yeah. What do you think about that? Do you think it’s possible to have a little bit of both of those elements? Can you be small and nimble and personal, but also professional in the way that you present things?

George: 7:20
We do a lot in hardware as well, and that’s my background. And there’s that same thing where it’s on one hand, people want to support the person behind the project, right? Sometimes it’s not just about the product itself or the game itself. They just want to help you. But at the same time, especially if when you have an ambitious project, you need to show a certain level of professionalism. Otherwise people have no confidence that you’re gonna get it there. One of the things that I really struggle with sometimes is when things are too polished. And again, this may be more of a hardware example when things are really rendery and super polished, but then they don’t have a lot of. Actual nitty gritty prototypes, the real things that for me, always kinda sets off like red flags. And so I think that balance is super, super important. But then again, maybe that’s a little bit different for games. But that’s just my personal opinion when I judge Kickstarter campaigns,

Jamey: 8:12
I can definitely see what you’re saying. I absolutely agree with that too. I think sometimes those really professional polished campaigns that they probably spent thousands of dollars on, including the video I. It does sometimes almost come across as too professional. I think there’s maybe an extreme to that spectrum too. Too professional, maybe a little bit too bare bones. Like you’ve probably seen some project pages that are just text and that doesn’t, just doesn’t present well. Yes. You need some images in there. Yeah. Yeah.

George: 8:37
Yeah, and I also think it, again, maybe I look at things really deeply, but I think it also has to do a lot with what stage they’re in. So if this is someone’s first campaign, I definitely forgive them for having a less polished campaign. I think that is more authentic. Whereas if someone is on their first campaign, I see no prior experience and it’s super polished, that kind of worries me a little bit sometimes, because I’m always feeling like, what are you overselling? But then if someone’s on their third or fourth campaign, You wanna see a little bit of progress in how, they’re doing their next campaigns, but we are so harsh on creators as professionals. I sometimes feel we judge them harshly. You famously stopped using Kickstarter and I as someone who used to work there and someone who’s trying to launch their own crowdfunding platform. When I look at your profile, I see project after project. It’s getting better, it’s looking better, it’s raising more, and then it stops and it feels. On some level, like a bit of a failure on the platform’s part that someone who’s doing so well leaves and stops doing it. Is there anything that a platform like Kickstarter could do or improve or features that they could add to get you back?

Jamey: 9:47
That’s a fantastic question. And it’s a really interesting viewpoint on that evolution. You’re right we, I ran seven different campaigns on Kickstarter. From 2012 to 2015, we ended with Scythe our biggest campaign. And I do agree that I think they got more polished, they got in general, they got bigger. With size I think comes more risk. You’re making more products. You’re shipping more products. There are more people to serve when you have those bigger campaigns and. Honestly, after Scythe, I became really worried about that risk. I saw some very close calls happen with, say, fulfillment centers that, that didn’t necessarily follow through on what I thought they were gonna do. It worked out. But there were some close calls, and for a while my thinking was one of the original reasons I moved away from crowdfunding. It isn’t even about, it really isn’t about Kickstarter specifically was about crowdfunding. Is That I was worried about fulfillment specifically. And so for the next project, Charter Stone, we didn’t do pre-orders in any form. Like we completely moved away from that. We just went to retail and distribution and since then we found a balance between the two. Now we do work with fulfillment centers that we trust, and we also work with retailers and distribution a lot. So we kinda have the both of them going now, I think The main reason I haven’t gone back to Kickstarter now, like the reason now that I, cause I still, I look back on those campaigns and I had so much fun with them. There’s so much energy that happens during a crowdfunding campaign. I miss that. But the reason I haven’t gone back is really the gap between when a project funds and when most creators actually deliver what they said they were gonna deliver is, I think I can serve our audiences better by keeping that gap really short. And I don’t think crowdfunding does that very well. Nothing to do with the platforms itself, but I think that it’s just structured around this idea that there’s a big gap there. There’s a big delay between when the camp, when you get people’s money and when you actually deliver the product to them. And I’m in a position now with Stonemaier Games that we can close that gap down to sometimes just a few weeks because we’ve completely already made the product. We already have it in fulfillment centers.

George: 11:45
I think that also maybe speaks a lot to your personal integrity, because I also say there’s a lot of creators. Who would say the opposite? They like that there’s such a big gap possible that they can endlessly delay while already having the money. So maybe you just as a business have outgrown the model. Is that fair to say?

Jamey: 12:05
Maybe a little bit, but at the same time, there’s so much that I learned from crowdfunding that I still apply. Like the idea, all the core principles that you’re gauging demand, that you’re making the product better with people, that you’re building community. I still try to do all those things with my projects. I just do them in a little different way than I did on Kickstarter back in the day.

George: 12:23
And do you still have this sort of buildup that you do towards when you launch a new game, do you build this huge hyper momentum around it, or do you just quietly release it and just let it get picked up?

Jamey: 12:38
Yeah, that’s one of the big challenges because I definitely I want that excitement. I want that anticipation. I think about it sometimes as the anticipation gap, like what is the right time for people? To get excited about something and also not fall out of excitement for it. And so most of our projects over the last few years, the method has been that we make the game. We completely made the game. We don’t talk about it. We’ve made the game. And then when it’s getting close to arriving at our fulfillment centers. Another thing I learned from crowdfunding, using those fulfillment centers around the world When it’s getting close to that’s when I announce the game and when I reveal it to everyone, that I showcase what the game is and what it’s all about. And that’s when I’m really building up that excitement, building up that anticipation. And then a few weeks later we do the pre-order for it. And then a few weeks over the next few weeks, starting with that pre-order, we’re actually shipping it. So it’s opposed to being maybe a six to eight month period between the end of a Kickstarter campaign and the delivery. It is a six to eight week period. But they’re still trying to, I still love anticipation. I think it’s fun to anticipate something, so I still want some of that in there. I, in fact, very early on I tried having no anticipation. Like I announced a product and had it for sale that same day and shipping the next day, and it was too fast. People wanted some time to get excited about it before they actually got the product.

George: 13:51
Maybe this is very pessimistic to me, but what if people don’t like it? Then you’ve already made it.

Jamey: 13:56
Yeah that’s a absolutely, that’s where the accountability, I think, is on me as a developer at Stonemaier Games to make our games as good as they can be. And I don’t always succeed in that. But fortunately, there’s lots of checks and balances in place through our play testers many play testers, blind play testers, local play testers, who help me figure out if a game is good enough to make. But you’re right there. There’s, we have some misses at Stonemaier Games and they may have been caught if we had that, that that public feedback opposed to the private feedback that more customized feedback.

George: 14:27
I think this too is maybe an example of how you have maybe graduated crowdfunding a little bit in the sense that when you are a small time creator, Sort of first time, you may not have the capability to do all these play tests and do all the private testing, and therefore crowdfunding is one big sort of public play test in a way. And then as your business evolves, you can you can pay your way into feedback. Essentially. So maybe that’s also a difference just in, in where you are in the process.

Jamey: 14:56
Yeah, and I 100% agree with that, and I fully acknowledge that I am in a privileged position right now based on where Stonemaier Games is, that new creators are not. And that Stonemaier Games would not exist, and I wouldn’t be here today in this privileged position if Kickstarter didn’t exist. Kickstarter, I still highly recommend it to any new creator. Absolutely.

George: 15:16
I think it’s a very honest approach because one of the criticisms lately of crowdfunding and Kickstarter specifically is that you just get really big publishers and this is not just in games. It’s and hardware who have everything is ready. They don’t need the money. We know they don’t need the money. It’s just a launch or a marketing tool, and although on one hand it brings traffic to the site and maybe some spillover to smaller projects, it also defeats the original purpose of giving folks who just have an idea for something small, a platform to raise funds for it. So I think actually that it’s a very noble thing almost to take yourself out of it and be like, we used this when we needed it. Now we no longer need it. We just help other folks who need it to use it. Is that how you feel about it as well?

Jamey: 15:59
Yeah I’d say that’s pretty accurate. Yeah. I definitely think there’s more to it than the money, but that, that does play a role in it. But but yeah I think sometimes creators get they could move on to other ways to create. The things that they want to create. And they maybe they’re a little hooked on crowdfunding and can’t let go of it. And sometimes we’ve seen this, some creators get caught in a vicious cycle where they use one project to fund the previous project and then they have to do another one to fund the previous project. And that’s a very low integrity, I think, way to serve the people who are giving you their money.

George: 16:29
Another word for that is a Ponzi scheme. Yeah.

Jamey: 16:33
Yes. Yeah.

George: 16:34
Yeah. Madoff games and associates. Where do you see the crowdfunding industry going in the next 5 to 10 years?

Jamey: 16:43
I’m fairly new to your podcast. I bet you’ve talked about this. I’d love to hear your short answer to this as well, but I think especially in the gaming space, I think game, the existence of Game Found and the largely the success of Game Found, I think will push Kickstarter in interesting ways to improve and vice versa. I think the two will compliment each other. I hope they will compliment each other. Yeah, so I guess I’m speaking more from a platform term instead of the creators themselves. But I’m really excited about both platforms and how they’ll push each other forward into the next 10 years. I don’t even know what they’ll do 5 10 years from now. 10 years ago, I didn’t even think of the concept of a pre-launch page, but I love that they have pre-launch pages now. That’s such a clever concept. So there’s gonna be, they’re gonna think some really cool things and push each other to do better. What do you think the two can go hand in hand 5 10 years into the future? I.

George: 17:26
Yeah I think, Kickstarter needed a good kick in the butt. And I think there’s a lot of reasons for why Kickstarter is in the position it’s in today. I saw some of those issues firsthand when I was there during a difficult time. They had the issue with unionization, management, Kickstarter has just a really unique ownership structure with. Obviously it left a great opportunity for Game Found to come in and shake things up a little bit and just like you said I think, competition is healthy to have multiple people in a space just drives everyone forward. I completely agree with you. I think just having a challenger is such a good thing for the incumbents. So I think it’s great. I do think it’s gonna be more fragmented though, to be honest. We are also working on an initiative called Fantastic Funding. It’s a completely different approach, whereas I think Game Found and Backer Kit really started at the end of a campaign with pledge managers. We’re starting at the fronts of campaigns by having a better, it’s not just a pre-launch system, but we allow people to make a project page where they just give very early ideas, the opportunity to live somewhere and then people can vote with their wallet and make small donations. And so we are building like a, an early test bed for ideas that can then evolve into full campaigns. So I think it’s, I think it’s good that everyone’s doing these like little things because at the end of the day, it’s better for creators to have options and, have platforms fighting for their business as well. I think that’s always just a healthy thing for creators.

Jamey: 18:54
I’m really excited to see what you do with that. Cause I think one of the things that people, I know you haven’t forgotten this, but people sometimes forget that one of the great things about crowdfunding is making the product better. That you go into the project, hopefully with you having done a lot of work already, but that there’s a little bit of leg room and a little bit of wiggle room in there to make it better with the backers and you’re approaching that from the ground up to make it as good as it could possibly be even before it launches. That’s really clever.

George: 19:18
Yeah, we have this creator now a French guy, Samuel, and he has this project called, Therrarium in French and it’s a Lord of the Ring’s inspired tea machine that he makes. And what he’s doing now on the platform is he doesn’t know if this is viable to, build a whole product business around. But what he’s doing is he is letting people pledge anywhere between$5 to$50. And if you pledge anywhere between$25 and$50, He’s allowing folks to come in and redesign or design parts of it with him for the final product if it ever gets there. And he’s doing that one to see if there’s enough interest from people to actually, put their money where their mouth is and financially contribute to this. And two, to have this group of people who feel real ownership over this project because they co-designed it. With him. And I thought that was just such a smart way of building a community, but just saying, design it with me, and if there’s enough people that are going to co-design it, that is probably the justification it needs for him to quit his daytime job and, do this full-time. So that’s where we’re at right now. Yeah, I think that’s our vision of the future.

Jamey: 20:22
One of the big issues I see with crowdfunding today, and I’m curious what you think about this in terms of your platform. Cause it sounds like it might address this. Is that I see what I think are too many creators launching too soon. When they’ve left a ton of work and uncertainty to follow the campaign. And I’m thinking from what you’re describing there, I need to look, dig deeper into this. I should’ve done my research on what you’re building cuz it sounds awesome that by encouraging people to do that upfront before the real launch that. They can launch something that closes that gap that I was talking about a little bit, that they can, cause I think I view that as a better way to serve your backers in the end. That you aren’t putting, that, you’re putting the risk on yourself to actually finish the thing or getting close to finishing it. And you’re enabling them to do that with other people before that launch.

George: 21:07
Yeah, absolutely. And I think we have a really big sort of distinction almost on a legal level where it’s, if a project is in the idea phase, people make a donation. So there’s no expectation of getting anything in return other than being part of the community or, helping design something or it’s making a donation. You’re not getting a product. If that community is there and the demand is there, you start a pre-order campaign, and a pre-order campaign has a legal obligation to fulfill the thing that you have pre-ordered. So we’re splitting the. The two things in crowdfunding, like the crowd building and the funding. And by putting it in different phases, things might get a bunch of donations but then die. But then that’s fine because it was just a donation. And so that’s, again, that’s like our vision for the future in splitting those things. And yeah, it’s early days. We just launched the MVP a few months ago and we’re, trialing with a bunch of creators and seeing where it goes.

Jamey: 22:03
That sounds awesome. Yeah I’m learning that you have a, I wanna write a blog post about this in the future, cause this sounds fascinating.

George: 22:08
Awesome. But this was not supposed to be about us and what we do. This is supposed to be about you. So another thing I really have been dying to ask you is, what are some of the smartest strategies and things that you have learned from the community that you have built?

Jamey: 22:24
Oh, from the community that I’ve built one of the biggest surprises to me that has come from the Kickstarter campaigns, I don’t know if this is necessarily a lesson learned, but there’s probably a lesson there somewhere, is I was genuinely surprised from day one or maybe the very early days of that first 2012 campaign that. Some people that were engaging with the project were also actively making it better. It’s some of what we’ve just been talking about, like they were actively volunteering to play test and volunteering to give advice if I wanted it. Sometimes if I didn’t want it. But that I really did not expect that. I did not know that. And I’m guessing even creators who might hear that may not fully get it until they launch their campaign and see random strangers from around the world wanting to help and being passionate about the project. And so I think maybe the lesson for me that I took away from that is that formalizing a volunteer program is really helpful or volunteer community slash program. Once those types of people start to show up, that you have a way to actively engage them in a way that’s healthy for you, and healthy for them. And so that, for me, that has manifested to some of our games to our ambassador program where we pull people who play test games, who proofread games, who moderate online forums, who go to conventions that start started with those very first few people who showed up on the Kickstarter campaign and said, I wanna help make this better.

George: 23:39
That is so cool. And also I think that’s great scaling advice for folks whose campaigns are growing big. I talked to the team behind Flock Together. I don’t know, have you seen the Flock Together game that’s coming up because they’re big fans of yours and so they’re already exploding and I think it’s such a great thing what you’re saying for folks who might not be able to handle all the questions and everything, to just find a few sort of heroes within your community. To help you manage that. Jamey, I think our 30 minutes are up. That, that, that went fast. Went really

Jamey: 24:12
fast. Yeah.

George: 24:13
Yes. Thank you so much. Greatly appreciated. Obviously we’ll link to your blog in the show notes, not that anyone doesn’t know where to find it, but obviously the link is gonna be in the show notes. Stonemaiergames.com is where all your amazing content lives. If people wanna interact with you, do they just leave a comment on the blog? Is that the best way for folks to get in touch with you?

Jamey: 24:35
I love to have public conversations, so yeah. If someone wants to comment on the blog content comment on my weekly Facebook Live stream or my YouTube channel about game design. If they’re mostly, if they’re more interested about game design itself, YouTube is the place to do it.

George: 24:47
Yeah. Jamey, thank you so much for your time. It’s been an honor and a pleasure.

Jamey: 24:52
Same here. Thank you.