A/B Testing Your Way To $3 Million On Kickstarter w/ Brendan McCaskell

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. My guest today is Brendan McCaskell, studio head at Open Owl Studios who have launched multiple games including Stars of Akarios, Mythwind, and Stonesaga raising over 3 million combined. He also provides weekly crowdfunding advice through his substack called The Crowdfunding Co. So we’re very excited to have you welcome Brendan.

Brendan: 0:32
Hey, thanks for having me, George.

George: 0:34
Absolutely. So let’s start all the way at the beginning. Your first campaign dates back to 2018, according to Kickstarter records. Yeah. So take us back to 2018. How did you get into board game publishing and into crowdfunding?

Brendan: 0:50
Yeah. And it’s not even a game that you listed. You listed the the three successful ones.

George: 0:55
Yes. It’s not unsuccessful, but I, we’ll get to that in a second cuz my next question was going to be how do you go from a 30,000 Canadian dollar campaign to millions? But let’s, yeah, let’s go to that first campaign.

Brendan: 1:08
So for, what did you do for me as you mentioned, we we make board games. I make board games. But I would probably consider myself like an entrepreneur first, and then like a board game designer second. And so I’ve been fascinated with Kickstarter from the beginning. I don’t know, my first project. But it was years ago, maybe a decade or so ago. And I’ve been toying with different ideas and I was excited to kinda get into the crowdfunding space just cause I love the direct connection with the community. And I, it just so happens, whatever, six years ago that the kinda a hobby passion of mine of board games kinda aligned with the crowdfunding entrepreneurial kind of style. And then, I kinda smashed those together and saw what happened. And it was fun. It was a lot of hard work grinding up that first campaign you mentioned. Yeah, we raised, I think like$28,000. And I learned a ton through the process, but know it was fantastic.

George: 1:57
We go from a campaign that raised 28,000 Canadian dollars. Not bad by any stretch. No. No. That those are ve very valid campaigns. But then two, just two short years later, Stars of Akarios raises almost a million Canadian dollars. What happened in the meantime? Yeah, how did you get there?

Brendan: 2:19
Yeah, pro probably two, two main things. One Last One Standing was a solo effort. Besides I I hired an artist, like a really cheap artist. But I did everything else myself. Graphic design, marketing, just the list goes on. And my budget was like relatively limited. I was engaged at the time and I remember joking with my now wife, I was like, I either spend money on a down payment of a home or I make a board game and ended board game. But then after that connected with some people in town and specifically this one guy who has a video game history and he’s kinda founded a few video game studios and he was interested in doing some board game stuff. So really a partnership with him was first and foremost there’s, there’s things you can do when you have some cash to play with that you can’t do solo. Whether it’s just higher quality kind of design artwork money. To spend on advertising. That so I would say that’s one bucket. And then the other bucket. For something that kind of, yeah, the 30,000 to the almost a million raised was, I think I, I had a much better idea of who my market and my target audience was in that second campaign. The first one was just like, a little bit of a shot in the dark and, was interested to see who, who showed up, who didn’t show up. By the time I went around and did the second campaign for Stars of Akarios, I had a pretty good idea who the board game market was on Kickstarter. And then, being able to take an idea that I was passionate about, but then align that with what I felt that market would like, and would be excited. And and it just so happened that there were, and that kind of started off this trajectory that we’re in now.

George: 3:50
Okay. We Need to probe this a little further. Yeah. You haven’t had just one successful campaign. You haven’t, you’ve had three increasingly successful campaigns in a row, so one could be luck. Two, you’re onto something, three, you know something that other people don’t. Yeah. So what is your recipe for success? Yeah. What are the steps that you take from the early idea to the last minute of the campaign?

Brendan: 4:14
Yeah, that’s, yeah, that’s a big question. Also this is a fun conversation to have today because we just announced our Stars of Akarios 1.5 campaign. So that one went, so the preview page went live. And it’s getting followers today, so that’s kind of a fun full circle moment. But yeah. There’s a couple things. I imagine, George, we should have talked a little bit about who your audience is. Cause typically I tailor my audience based off of based off of who’s speaking. And I imagine, from your website it’s mostly kinda founders a little bit more in, in the tech product space. Probably less like kinda creative game designers. Hey.

George: 4:48
Yeah, so typically how we structure this podcast is we, this podcast is category agnostic, so we don’t typically speak much about the game and the game mechanics itself. We we talk about more of the entrepreneurial journey and the technicalities of how you set this campaign up. So that’s the audience.

Brendan: 5:09
Perfect. So again, big question. How do we, go from idea to to product launch and, to, to inception of the product? For us it always does start with an idea. And, being in the creative space it tends to be an experience we wanna capture around the table. But it really doesn’t matter. And whatever the idea is, before any work is done on the project I set up like a like a fake Facebook and Instagram account, and then I do some AB testing. And I we’ve spent enough money in online marketing in the past to know what good click rates are for our industry. And so I throw it a bunch of copy that I feel sums up the idea and if people are clicking and giving me their emails, then I know that we’re potentially onto something. And so that’s really our first step. We, we ab test our ideas before we do any actual development in it.

George: 5:58
Can I just zoom in on that for a second? Yeah. So you set up fake accounts. So are those like fake accounts for this game that you’re testing?

Brendan: 6:07
Yeah. Typically I don’t like tying advertisements to our main page because, people will see the advertisement and oh, are you guys making something? So I tend to just run Facebook ads through random pages that people don’t have an association with our account. And it really is just to test the idea itself. So it’s just to see whether or not people will respond on, the image or the idea. I typically just use stock art. I just buy some stock cards and then that, that I feel like captures it. And if people are clicking on the copy then it’s good if it’s not then we won’t really continue on to the next step.

George: 6:41
And this Determines whether or not you even wanna move forward with the game itself. Yeah. So what’s interesting about this, and then we’ll continue on to the next steps. Cause I know I’m stopping you at like step 0.1. No, that’s okay. It’s great. What’s interesting to me about this is that basically you’re say, you’re not saying, if people don’t like playing this game, I’m not gonna do it. But you’re saying if. Ads for this game don’t work. And so I think that recognizes the importance that ads and digital marketing play in the success of this. Because if people can love the game, but if the ads don’t work, you’re still not moving forward with it.

Brendan: 7:16
Yeah. And for us, we’re a crowdfunding-first platform. So we do a bulk of our sales through crowdfunding. And I we have good designers and developers that I’m confident we can get many ideas to a place of being fun and interesting and unique. But if that core idea doesn’t resonate with our audience, there’s no reason to dump thousands of dollars into it. We take the idea if we have good product market fit, then we move on to the next stage. We spend a lot of money on art, on all the development, but I think one, one key thing that is transcendent of. Genre on Kickstarter is we launched our preview page for our for our crowdfunding campaign really early. And there’s a couple things for this. There’s, there’s just probably a few different ways that I would say the traditional. Way of doing the preview page is like a landing page on your own website where you can start to generate emails so you can do follow up stuff. And I think that works quite well, especially if you have a limited budget and and you’re hoping to capture the sale sometime along the journey. But we do something a little bit different because in our industry on Kickstarter specifically the board game, we have a high rate of conversion on followers. So as, as much as it pains me to not capture the customer’s information we send them. Directly to our Kickstarter page to the Kickstarter preview page. And we do that because what you’re talking about is we’ve run a couple campaigns and so I’m confident that I can get between a 20 and 30% conversion on the follower number. Which I think is high in Kickstarter in general. That’s pretty average in our industry. For a campaign that does well. So I know that I get the highest rate of return just sending them to our preview page. And we start that up like as soon as we’re ready we throw that live. So we’re collecting emails. We’re doing paid advertisements specifically through Facebook, Google ads, and Instagram we see the most return on the Meta ads yeah, we’re live, we’re rock and rolling from the beginning of that because for us it’s generating, a hype. And another thing that is unique in the kinda board game space is the first three days of the campaign are like crucially important. We do, I think 70% of our funding in the first three days, which is wild. I know there’s an espresso machine on Kickstarter like a month or two ago. It was an incredible espresso machine. The, one of the, if all the Kickstarter or crowdfunding people out there go watch it. Kickstarter, espresso. And the reason why it had it was called Meticulous. Yeah, Meticulous espresso. By far the best. Crowdfunding video I’ve ever seen. But the agency that they hired is top notch. It probably cost them a couple hundred thousand dollars just to do that video. But I’m not too sure on their crowdfunding journey. I imagine it’s a little bit of a slower burn in more traditional markets. But for us, those first couple days we wanna capture as many sales and we find that the best way doing that is with the preview page. And it’s mostly cuz our audience has been conditioned. The boardgame audience has been conditioned. Yeah. Uniquely on Kickstarter.

George: 10:24
And on that audience when you do your targeting for meta ads, do you target previous backers of your own campaigns? So like custom audiences or do you also just do broad interests of people into tabletop plus a match with Kickstarter?

Brendan: 10:39
Yeah, so it, it’s a mixture, right? We do we do our custom audiences based off of our mailing list. We do the lookalike audiences based off of those. And then we also do what you suggest, in board game plus Kickstarter, and then we target the markets. And then we’ll just we’ll feed we spend a lot of money on marketing because we’re confident in the conversion at anytime there’s a new. There’s a new entrepreneur, a new crowdfunder. I’m always hesitant to be like, Hey, go spend a lot of money. Because ad spend, if you don’t know what you’re doing, can be like a quick way to lose a lot of money really quick. But if you are confident in return you can get a really high return. Typically, our Pre- Kickstarter, prec crowdfunding ad spend. ROAS is like like we hover around a 10 which is like insane, like good ro good ROAS is like four typically. And that’s where we’re at when it’s like during campaign, but for some reason our pre-campaign ROAS it’s just it’s astronomical. And I’m not too sure why, I’m not complaining, but it is kind of what it

George: 11:43
Yeah, please don’t jinx the meta gods. If the algorithm is in your favor don’t question it. So you’re really good at your pre-launch campaign. You get 70% of your funding in your first couple days. That last 30%, what is that? Is that Kickstarter Organic traffic? Is that ads when you’re live?

Brendan: 12:03
Yeah. It’s a combination of all those things. So we partner with like a lot of content creators in our space. Really saying YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, all that content, just so that there’s a steady stream of new content. I, I think, We probably spend more there than we should. There’s a lot of overlap in the channels that we end up using, so I don’t know how large those audiences are. But we do that we see some organic growth through Kickstarter. Not as much as we used to, I feel. So I’m, I’m not too sure what’s going on there, but we still see there’s some networking effects on Kickstarter which is nice. And then And then we are running ads as well. And those are just standard Google and Facebook ads to generate sales. But it’s always a slog the middle of the campaign. It’s it’s, it doesn’t matter how big of a campaign, how small of a campaign you are, it’s just it’s a slog. If you like look on any of the campaign trackers, it’s always painful.

George: 12:52
And I think another thing that’s really difficult to know in terms of your data is when you do this pre-launch strategy with a lot of people that like notify me on launch from Kickstarter. If you then look in your Kickstarter dashboard, the amount of backers that Kickstarter reports is coming from Kickstarter, yeah. Include those people. And that’s not accurate, obviously, because you drove them there

Brendan: 13:12
And I’m not sure. Exactly how Kickstarter tracks some of those things. Like it’s a little bit of a black box, I think the conversion follower stuff. Cause I’m like, I feel like I, it’s never sat like a hundred percent well with me. I’m like, it’s working, but I’m like, there’s something missing here in the analytics. I know they’ve opened up like advanced dashboards. So I, I haven’t launched a campaign since they have, and I’m interested to try that out.

George: 13:39
I think as a general rule of thumb, having your Google Analytics run side by side with the Kickstarter analytics is a good choice. Even though it, that data ultimately also comes from a Kickstarter, but it’s definitely good to have that run. Side by side. It is a bit of a black box. I definitely think that your hunch is correct, that there is a little bit of overreporting, especially when it comes to that notification sequence. Like it’s hard to unpack Yeah. Where people come from. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Okay, so I feel like we have some really good steps as to how you go from an early idea, which you ab test with. It was fake or unbranded accounts. Then you run ads. Some are emails. A majority of them are going through your, notify me on launch. Page 70% of your funding comes from those pre-launch efforts. And then the remaining 30% is a mix of Kickstarter traffic, organic, some ads and some influencers. So that’s a campaign for you. Yeah. That may brings us through a hundred percent. Yeah. Okay. Perfect. Then I want to move on from Kickstarter for a minute, because you recently started a substack newsletter called The Crowdfunding Coach, which is very awesome. It will be linked in the show notes and in a recent article you talk about Kickstarter versus Game Found. Because Game Found has gained a lot of traction recently. Before we dive into that comparison, What I find a little bit awkward is that you are not even considering BackerKit in this comparison. Even though BackerKit has been around for about as long as Kickstarter, they have launched their own crowdfunding platform as well. Yet the conversation is about Game Found and Kickstarter. What do you feel is missing from BackerKit that makes you not even consider it in an article?

Brendan: 15:23
Hey, I have friends at BackerKit, so if you’re listening I still do love you. So I Gloomhaven if you’ve ever heard of Gloomhaven and Frosthaven, I think two of the most funded campaigns ever on Kickstarter. So like significant, raised millions and millions and millions of dollars. There’s a Gloomhaven campaign. I don’t know if you knew this on BackerKit right now. And it’s called, Gloomhaven Grand Festival. It’s raised 1.6 million. And this, it’s only been online for a day in a bit 6,700 backers in two days. So good on them. They’re gonna hit their funding goal. They have a really high funding goal. I don’t know what happened. Like for me, this is, maybe I’m looking at it, I’m like, okay, this is maybe a third of what they, where they should be. I don’t know if this is like macroeconomic. It’s not good though. It’s not good. No. Not for, not. So I was comparing it to our Mythwind numbers and not the dollar value. Because dollar value is one thing. I was comparing it to our backer numbers. In the first two days of Mythwinds campaign, we ended up with, we had 5,400 backers in two days. Compared to Gloomhaven we’re nobody. We’re somebody in the bigger sphere, but compared to Gloomhaven, we’re nobody. So the fact that we could track, we could be on par with them in the terms of number of backers, I’m like, okay, something’s wrong there. And just because of that, and it’s also not like public, like the, their crowdfunding campaign isn’t public. That’s just why I don’t talk about it. That’s all. I use them. I hire them for my marketing services. So thanks guys.

George: 16:51
It’s awkward because this is not to rip on Backer Kit or anything. I it’s really, it’s interesting to me because I think, again, they have been around for so long. They have so much data. So many people have a Backer Kit account. I think when they announced. Crowdfunding by BackerKit. That was a bigger shock to Kickstarter, I feel, than when just Game Found came along. Because I feel like with BackerKit, the call came from inside the house almost, right? Like they have been. Backer Kit was one of the only companies that have access or had access to Kickstarter’s, elusive API that does exist, but is for no one but Backer kit and a few other companies. And I feel it was a real shock to the system. But it has not caught as much, tailwinds, I feel as Game Found. So I also don’t know what’s going on there. That’s why I was interested to hear if you have any thoughts.

Brendan: 17:42
For me, I think it’s feature set. So we’re actually using Game Found for our new starts of a Akarios One. It’s interesting. Main reason is I don’t feel that kickstarter offers me enough in the terms of organic growth in order to, like we, we drive most of our traffic through ad spend. And if you’re a smaller company and you’re relying on that organic growth, then a hundred percent stay on Kickstarter. But for us, I don’t think it matters as much. And I could be eating my words in a couple months after we run our campaign. That’s ok. But the features Game Found offers it’s unbelievable. Like I’ve been. Asking Kickstarter. So we’re Canadians. I’ve been asking Kickstarter for years for the ability to run a campaign in US Dollars. Like I don’t think Americans understand how important that is. We have to run you go on one of our Kickstarter pages and we, you’ll see a US dollar listed and then a Canadian dollar was we lose a couple percent every time we convert funds back over. But we also have to pay our vendors in American right. That for me is just I will be using Kickstarter in the future like our next Mythwind when launch, but it definitely drives me insane. And I like Everett the new ceo. I think he understands that. He even mentioned that Kickstarter. What’d he say? It was a stagnant company. I think he said even though it was like a new company, he mentioned that it was stagnant and it needs to grow. And I’m like, okay, good. You see that? I, nothing against unions. I just think that sometimes unions slow things way down and so maybe I’m reading into something there. But there’s been no love for the board game community on Kickstarter up until recently, and there’s still very little love. And we do what, 30, 40% of Kickstarter sales. I think something crazy like that. So I went under a little bit of a rant there. I love Kickstarter and the opportunities it’s given me, but the fact of the feature growth being so slow has been pretty wild.

George: 19:36
You’re not the first person to say this, and I think everyone agrees. Kickstarter sometimes feel like we love Kickstarter, but Kickstarter doesn’t love itself. And also I think what’s just a hard thing for, Game Found is for game creators. So they just need to hear you say this thing about, the dollar thing and whatnot, and they can just implement it because it’s probably the same for all the creators on there. But Kickstarter obviously serves. All categories in the world, right? Like people wanting to raise for a film for this, for that. And so building something for everyone also means building something for no one. And I think that’s also where a lot of those, they get this feedback from the gaming community, but then what if they implement that and it turns out to be a horrible decision for comics for whatever reason. And so that is, I think two Kickstarters depends. Difficulty. Yeah.

Brendan: 20:19
There’s things like Game Found is offering stretch pay which is pretty neat. We’re gonna be using that. I don’t think here, the biggest threat to the Kickstarting platform is actually the creators themselves, like that’s the biggest threat. Because, I don’t, at least in, in our little industry, there’s been an implosion of board game companies over promising and under delivering or just not delivering at all. Or selling the game and then asking people for another 50% so that they can ship it across and that happens in a lot of campaigns, not just board games. There’s been so many I think I still have a few outstanding tech campaigns. It’s interesting because Kickstarter is not incentivized to worry about that, right? They’re incentivized to prop up big campaigns and big creators and at the expense of their customer and their customers, the backer. And so it’s really a question of incentivization right now. And there is no, as long as backers keep on returning, if they have a policy that you can have no more than three. Three outstanding campaigns. But they just launched a a public partnership with was it Steam Forge? And I think Steam Forge has six outstanding campaigns right now or something like that. And this isn’t I, right? This isn’t to be a rail on Kickstarter, but I’m here, I’m trying to like, Diligently manage our finances, and we don’t charge, we haven’t charged our backers anything extra. We launched like the day the pandemic like shut down the world. We launched stars of Akarios. And we suffered the 4,000 to$20,000 container increase and we took that, right? So we’ve done all those things and it’s man it’s hard because I have a lot of backers who don’t want to keep on backing because they’ve just been burned by so many different people. So that’s a tough one

George: 22:08
One of the things that I’ve always noticed both internally and externally at Kickstarter is that Kickstarter relies a lot on individual relationships with the outreach leads. So it’s like there’s a set of rules that is general for all creators. But if you have some sort of relationship with Kickstarter, whether it being this newly announced public one or just a really good relationship with the outreach lead, they trust you. They can override some of the rules that are for everyone. And although that seems like a good thing in that if you are that specific creator that has that relationship, it creates this really weird thing for everyone else who doesn’t know why the rules are applied to some folks and aren’t applied to others, and then they’re not being open about that. So I think it like it comes from a really good place because when I was an outreach lead, I did the exact same thing, right? Like I would meet with the creator face to face and hold their prototypes in my hand and go to their office and see the legitness of it firsthand. So I would go to the trust and safety team and be like, can you expedite the review process? Because I’m literally like here or with them right now. I show trust and safety like on my phone and then, and so it’s, then it’s very nice that they’re able to say, yeah, we’ll, expedite that process. But then no one sees that on the backer side. And so then it just creates these weird friction moments where people are like, why? I heard Everett say in a different talk I heard the other day, he is actually looking into sort of some of these processes internally because he also sometimes looks at projects is what he said. And he’s I don’t understand why this is project we love and that isn’t right. And I think that also comes back to this sort of personal relationship thing.

Brendan: 23:47
It’s because you email the right person. Which it’s so bad I love Kickstarter, but it just, it is so confusing to me. Like I email someone and I get a badge. I’m like, okay, let’s, anyways, sorry, George, I’m, I didn’t mean to take this over in a Kickstarter gripe session. We can keep on talking about that.

George: 24:04
No, it’s, no, it’s not. But I think it’s really good and I think it’s really honest. And also I feel like with Everett this is not like bashing Kickstarter. I think this is just being really productive and I think this is why it’s good that there’s Game Found, because if there’s only one player in the market, they don’t really have to improve. And I think just because of Game Founds existence and Rise, people are having these conversations and it will only make the platform better. And that just serves the whole community.

Brendan: 24:31
And I’m optimistic about Kickstarter’s future. Like I want it to succeed

George: 24:34
if you were the CEO of Kickstarter or Game Found, which five features would you push immediately?

Brendan: 24:43
I would purchase BackerKit. That’d be step number one. I don’t know if they’re available for purchase, but I would raise the cash and make an offer because they’re literally leaving 30 to 50% extra revenue on the table. I know they made this informal partnership with, or this formal partnership with Pledge Manager. Nothing against Pledge Manager, but it’s the worst of the three. It’s, yeah, and it’s the worst of the three, right? If you look at Game Found, Backer Kit or Pledge Manager and purchase or, or buy pledge manager, bake it in what, whatever it is. So step one, integrated pledge manager, because. A hangup for Kickstarter, for the average Joe is why do I have to buy something on Kickstarter and then go somewhere else and do a pledge manager and then pay for, right? It’s okay, we don’t need to do that. We can capture it all in one place. Do it. That’s one, two, I would integrate some accountability for creators. I’m not too sure what that would look like, but I think we need to have some accountability for creators and whether that’s Kickstarter, ponying up Hey, we’re going to. We’re gonna back your pledge. If we say this is a trusted creator and they fall through we got your back. And that’s tough because I know Kickstarter doesn’t make a ton of money. 5% isn’t crazy. On the revenue they do. But so some accountability I’m trying to think of other features. Obviously, I’m complaining about currency. There’s a bunch of quality-of-life stuff. Their editor is like, from the nineties, sorry, early two thousands. It’s, yeah, it’s, it hasn’t changed since, I don’t know, I, maybe they’ve done one thing to it, but if you upload a picture, it still sent you to the top of the page when you’re doing the descriptions. And for us people with long pages, then you have to scroll all the way down and it’s a mess. So there’s a handful, Everett, if you’re listening please

George: 26:38
fix it, and subscribe to The Crowdfunding Coach. Yes, sure. On substack for great tips. What’s the new thing and where can people go to subscribe?

Brendan: 26:47
Yeah, so as I mentioned you’re welcome to search Stars of Akarios One, on Game Found. We’ll be there. That’s a new campaign. You mentioned the substack that’s great. Really that’s just where I’m at. We have our Facebook groups and our Discord groups. If you’re interested to learn more or openowlstudios.com, you can find us on our website our games. If you’re interested in kinda learning more about, we got these. Big, they’re like movies in a box is kinda how I describe them to people. So lots of artwork, lots of story, lots of game. So yeah, that’s pretty much it.

George: 27:16
Perfect. All the links mentioned are in the description. If so, if you’re in your podcast player right now, just go into the description. You can click everything. Brendan, thank you so much for your time I think it’s been a really good candid discussion and best of luck with everything and let us know what, if you launch on Game Found. Let’s have you back on the pod and hear how that experience was.

Brendan: 27:35
Yeah let’s hope it’s a good one for sure. Thanks guys.

George: 27:39
Thank you so much.