Art, Cheese and Millions of Dollars, the Story of R2I Games

George: 0:00

Hi there, and welcome to the Crowdfunding Academy. My name is George, and I help independent creators launch their products and games on this podcast. Those creators share their journey from an idea to an actual product and everything in between. I. Today’s guests are Andrew and Jeff. They are the founders of Road 2 Infamy games. They raised over$3 million across 11 crowdfunding campaigns, including the immensely popular Canvas series, and they just closed Fromage welcome Andrew and Jeff.

Andrew: 0:27

Thanks for having us.

George: 0:30

Absolutely. I love that you are so in sync as co-founders that you even speak at the same time. That’s amazing. You guys have an interesting history that we’re going to dive into, which starts all the way in 2015. You also just closed your latest campaign Fromage which raised almost$300,000. But let’s start at the early, early beginnings. We go back to the year 2015, about 11 crowdfunding campaigns ago. You launched your first project called Road2Infamy. What prompted you in 2015 to even start doing crowdfunding?

Jeff: 1:01

I think the idea for crowdfunding came from my cousin Alex Chin, who he does the seasons playing card series, and he was my first introduction to Kickstarter. He was just making artistic decks of playing cards and selling them. Crushing it. And I was like, you mean it’s just you? Like you don’t have to get some publisher or something to do this. You can just go online and, sell your, your games. He is yeah. I’m like, we could do that. I don’t know why not. And Andrea and I had been, I. Designing games to entertain our friends for a while. So that’s, that’s sort of where that idea came from to turn our little like hobby of, just making games for fun and turning it into a reproducible experience for other people to purchase without needing a big publisher. To say yes to our ideas.

George: 1:51

And what a great journey it has been. Uh, Because you launched Road To infamy, you raised$18,000, which is Very good for your first campaign. But then you raise another$18,000 for Cosmocracy your next game. Then you have a game called Bow Ties, which doesn’t hit its funding goal and is canceled. Then from there on you launch Crypt, which raises more than$220,000, which is an insane jump. Then you have another campaign after Nova, almost$50,000. And then something insane happens, you launch Canvas and it raises over$700,000 and stop the madness. There’s more, you just, you do it again with another Canvas game, which raises almost$800,000. And then this feels like an infomercial. There is more. You do it a third time and you raise another$700,000 which is just insane. So talk us through what happened with Canvas and when did you know that you caught lightning in a bottle?

Andrew: 3:00

Yeah. So what happened with Canvas? Canvas was a really great idea. Jeff and I had played a game called Mystic Veil that uses transparent cards, and I think we both thought that game specifically just underutilized it. months later, Jeff said, I think we should do an art game with transparent cards. The card should layer on top of each other, and the artwork between the layers should transform what people see. it was a really great idea. And from there we really just spent a lot of time developing and figuring out how you can get good looking piece of art by mixing and matching any three layers of transparencies. When we realized I think we hadn’t had a. Crazy, Crazy success before that one, as you talked about our other campaigns. So I think the entire time it wasn’t a guarantee in our minds that this was gonna be a huge success. The thing that set off that we had something really special was we when we got the final artwork together, Jeff put together this gif that just showed a rotation of cards. In a sleeve showing people that they could make endless creations of artwork. With this game and was just like on a ten second loop. We put that all over Facebook board game groups and kind of the response was like media and very crazy, tons of likes, tons of comments and tons of people who wanted to know when the Kickstarter was coming out. was our first glimpse of oh, this is something very special and very different from any project we had worked on previously.

Jeff: 4:31

I think a big difference between Canvas and our previous projects is Canvas, we really focused on creating something like gave a really unique game experience and as passionately as, I love all our design projects, like our previous games you mentioned like after Nova is a negotiation game. Crypt is a bidding game, Road To Infamy is like another bidding game. Cosmocracy is a social game and then Bow Ties. The failed one is a party game. Like all those things, game experiences. Exist. Yes, our game is different and I love those games, but Canvas was the first one where it’s like when you’re playing it, you’re like, I haven’t a game where I get to make art before. That’s totally different. So I think that was probably the biggest reason why that one finally caught the attention of the Kickstarter crowd.

George: 5:17

And where did those backers come from? Because even though you had done previous campaigns, you didn’t have nearly enough backers to be it all, have it all be repeat backers. So was it just the Facebook groups that you guys run ads? Like where did all those people come from?

Andrew: 5:32

Really organic. Mostly the Facebook groups.

George: 5:35

Facebook groups.

Jeff: 5:35

Kickstarter browsers, like people looking through the projects was a big part of it. We have been building our mailing list for a while and we had a good number of people following from, like the Crypt campaign was very successful in number of. Backers. It was not a very profitable campaign’cause it was like a small$9 game. But that did, put us on the map a little bit as far as building a bit of a following. And that may have contributed to some of the initial traction as well.

George: 6:01

So no paid marketing, no ads. Is that something to this day that you still don’t do or are today with Fromage you do rely a little bit more on ads?

Andrew: 6:11

We do now rely on ads a bit more. Like the environment changed, before there’s just so many more people and so many more communities on Facebook, they were so easy to reach. And now we see that there’s, the Facebook groups, especially for the board gaming hobby, have died off or have just migrated over to places like Discord that really do a better job of kind of cultivating games and putting together gaming sessions. So because of that it’s a little bit harder to reach our audience a completely free way. We have to push market a bit more.

George: 6:47

Yeah.’cause you’ve been crowdfunding for almost a decade now, which is crazy. Aside from not being able to fully rely on organic reach anymore, what other changes have you seen in that past decade?

Andrew: 7:00

I would say that back in 2015 when we came out with a game, The competition, the level of polish you needed on your games was so much lower. People are, were more willing to accept what looked like a work in progress or a little bit more amateur of a look nowadays a brand new company, board game company to go on to Kickstarter, they need to look and present themselves in the same way that A veteran publisher does with very high quality illustration, graphic design, have their pricing down, have incredible components and also have that like very veteran marketing push of reaching as many different avenues and websites for advertising as well as having the people in the industry. Behind the game as well, like your reviewers and your taste makers.

George: 7:49

Yeah. Good thing that you had 10 years to practice and grow up with the medium. Jeff, what was the moment where this turned from a hobby to this being a full-time business for you guys?

Jeff: 8:01

I think the big turning point for me was getting laid off from my full-time job. I was doing pre-production directing animation for TV commercials ended up getting laid off right after I had bought a condo. In the city, Chicago. And I was like if ever there was a time for this board game thing to work, it’s now so that, that was really tough. It was almost out of necessity. But it also gave me the time to, focus all of my efforts on, on making the Kickstarter campaigns, as, professional looking as as possible.

George: 8:35

And where sort of, how many years in were you at this point?

Jeff: 8:38

I’m trying to remember, was that before or after the crypt campaign? Andrew, do you remember?

Andrew: 8:42

It was before, so 20,

Jeff: 8:45

Was it before or after Bow Ties? think it was before Bow Ties.

Andrew: 8:48

Yeah.

Jeff: 8:48

yeah, so I got laid off and then the bow ties campaign happened, which was our one failed one. So it was like, okay, maybe this isn’t going to work out, but stuck with it. very next one was Crypt. And then that was the, our first one that kind of us on the map a little bit with the,$200,000 I think 11,000 backers for that one. yeah, going from failed to 11,000 backers. Like we, figured something out in between there. One of the the big things was trying to focus more, more on the, a product that Kickstarter people Be interested in. We learned that party games were not or at least they’re harder to capture a wide Kickstarter audience with. So we tried to make a high quality game in a small box with a undeniable price point, that$9 price point. And I think that helped.

George: 9:36

There’s nothing like having the risk of having your home foreclosed as a driver to to push you towards great success. Yeah I’m glad it worked out for you. That’s great. It’s great to see you still sitting the roof over your head maybe you can speak a little bit to the the business side of this, obviously you’ve had 11 campaigns over roughly nine years, so that’s almost like a little over campaign a year. But to have a successful business, you need to uh, probably do some sales of your crowdfunding campaigns as well. So what does your look like or what does your business look like outside of Kickstarter?

Andrew: 10:09

So right now we do direct sales on our website. We have a Shopify website set up. We also have that link. To Amazon where we get the majority of our direct sales after Kickstarter. And we’ve also begun like a partnership with a major distributor Asmo day in Europe and in North America. The Europe division helps us license and translate the games for Asia and Europe and the US kind of. Opens us up to a lot of retail stores and as a two person business really rely on that to do the cold calling and the sales and kind of manage that piece of the business.

George: 10:46

And what you don’t wanna share this, you don’t have to, what percentage of your business’ revenue comes from the Kickstarters and what percentage comes from the things you just mentioned?

Andrew: 10:56

The Kickstarter is, it just depends on the year and what’s been published in that year. I would say this year I would think that about half our revenue is coming from, say a third comes this year. It’s a third came from Kickstarter, a third came from direct sales, and a third came from distribution

George: 11:15

Yeah.

Andrew: 11:15

So it’s pretty even. But when you have a major Kickstarter, that is, that’s a big time when we get a ton of revenue.

George: 11:21

What is different about managing a huge Kickstarter like canvas compared to a smaller one? And then when you had that for the first time what did you run into?

Jeff: 11:30

With a bigger Kickstarter campaign comes a lot more backers, a lot more opinions and comments and customer service a lot more replacement parts you have to send out on the back end of it. A lot of people have conflicting ideas of what they wanna see as stretch goals or, if they disagree with, some choice of component that you had or some upgrade that you made. And they liked it, how they liked it better, how it used to be. Those voices get louder when there’s more people because there’s more people feeding off those sorts of comments. And Yeah, like it’s exponential. I think with, with bigger campaigns, there’s that much more work to do on the uh, customer service side.

George: 12:07

Okay. So to quote uh, famous rapper, Mo Money, Mo problems is definitely true it comes to crowdfunding campaigns.

Jeff: 12:14

It’s not all, all problems either. Like, um, It’s, some of it’s really, really fun and engaging. With some of the Canvas campaigns, we let people come up with what they wanted to see on the individual art cards, and then our illustrator, Luan would, would draw those things and people were voting on their favorite ideas. They’re coming up with titles for it. With the smaller campaigns we’ve run, That wouldn’t have even really been an option.’cause you would only get like a handful of people engaging with it and it just wouldn’t feel worth it. Or it’s really a community thing. But it was like the community comes together and helps make the game better, it just makes the whole experience feel like just so much more. Gratifying and it’s like, yeah, this is why we do it this way. This is why we use Kickstarter for the community and all their, their great ideas to help make this the best game it can be.

George: 13:00

Amazing. Let’s dive into your latest project Fromage Andrew. Why make a game around cheese?

Andrew: 13:08

Yeah, it was an interesting process. What happened was we’re good friends with the designers, Ben Rossett and Matthew O’Malley, and one day reached out to us and they said, we free time. We ha we love our friendship. And we’re like, what if we could also you know, make something together, design a game for you. And We sent them a list of kind of ideas we had that we either hand fleshed out or were a little bit failed or we just didn’t know where to go with them. read through it and they found a game that we had been working on about whiskey they said, this is really interesting, you developed it pretty far. But we would want, we just wanna do a different theme. We wanna do the theme of cheese. talking about aging whiskey. You can also age cheese and we just said yes to that. Like why not? And they went off and they started designing and it was our first foray into working with designers and producing something that we hadn’t done ourselves in house. So it was just like an opportunity to really fun project with friends.

George: 14:06

One thing I found very disappointing is when I looked at your community tab on Kickstarter, I saw backers from France were not more than many of your other campaigns have French people not taken a particular liking to your game.

Andrew: 14:19

I think the main issue was we’ve always just done Kickstarter for English versions of our game. This game with a French title More than anything, we got a ton of feedback that the French people are like, you have to do a French version if you’re doing a French cheese game. we let them know that we’re, we’ll get there, and eventually we gotta find the right partners. I think for them once, once they saw the success, they knew that. They could just wait and get a French version in a year or two. So I think they decided to go that route.

George: 14:49

Yeah, that’s a good point. Backers have gotten so much more savvy when it comes to those things. Like they know when something’s a success, it’ll come out in different languages and in their local market. makes total sense. What has been the best piece of feedback that you have received about the game so far?

Andrew: 15:04

a good question. There’s been so much good feedback. So something we did special to this game that we haven’t tried before was it’s so first off, it’s the most complicated mechanically game we’ve ever made, so I thought was really important that we were going to need more play testing more feedback than we’d ever needed before. so I decided to create a Discord channel. And this kind of lends into what we talked about earlier where it’s like Facebook is going away, there’s more communities on Discord. And I thought it’s time for us to have our own community on Discord and get more interaction with our fans with people who love our products. So we opened that up and we’ve gotten so much amazing feedback and response about the game people. Being able to play it for the first time and telling us how much they love it. Other people going through say, our rule book with a fine tooth comb and trying to help us out and pick out any tiny little discrepancies so when the final version comes out, know it’s gonna be airtight and everyone’s going to understand every single word that’s in there. So it’s hard to pinpoint for me just one piece of valuable information because so many people have helped in, in. Given us their input and we’ve taken all of it into account as we finish the game and send it to the printer.

George: 16:23

And you mentioned this is from a physical perspective, a more complicated game. The board itself, it has many pieces. It has actual moving uh, parts. So how do you go about that for a crowdfunding campaign? Do you fully sort of flesh this out with a manufacturer until you have prototypes that are Almost retail ready, so you know exactly how it’s going to work and how much it’s going to cost, or is there still some sort of surprise down the line when you need to actually go into manufacturing?

Jeff: 16:49

A little bit of both but we definitely get everything quoted out by the manufacturers ahead of time. Send them the files, and we’ve received a pre-production copy made by the manufacturer we intend to use. Before the Kickstarter has even launched. So we have a really nice looking prototype for our videos, for backers to see Hey, this thing does exist. It’s not just a crazy dream. These guys have, they’ve thought this through. It works but it’s still um, Even, even now as I’m doing all the file preparation making, I’m going through changes, changing shapes of cut lines, trying to make things fit together just a little bit better for a better user experience. There’s always a lot of work to be done after the campaign. Even though going into we thought Hey this looks great. I think we’re really close to, this being a final. Product. But we do things like have stretch goals that changes some specifications of some of the components, We upgraded some of the workers, we had to do some new three D modeling for the way those little plastic worker pieces look. there’s a lot to do, but I think we’re close.

George: 17:52

Yes. So you feel confident that sort of the main big complicated things that you have it down, your manufacturer has it down, you know how to do that. But then there’s small variations, print work, stretch goals are still up in the air a little bit.

Jeff: 18:04

That’s right. Yeah. It was most important that the central board was figured out ahead of time, right? It’s a try layer board with cutouts for all your little cheese pieces. It’s try layer because you can actually insert these cardstock mats in between the layers of the board change the positioning of the different cheeses on the board. it’s a very complex. Piece. Oh, on top of that, it’s also totally modular. You can piece it together in a variety of ways. And then there’s a tile that lays in the center of it that can be oriented or flipped in any way. So a, yeah, a lot of logistical potential problems with that. So we had to make sure that fully functioned ahead of time.

George: 18:43

I, is that also something that you feel more comfortable taking on now that you’ve done multiple campaigns, you’ve been in business for 10 years, to take on slightly more complex projects, or um, would you have done this uh, for your first project as well?

Jeff: 18:55

No, it’s been a huge learning process since the beginning. I remember our very first game, Road to Infamy me was like all default shaped components. We didn’t do anything fancy’cause our prototype was printed by the game crafter who does like a print on demand service. And it you have to print things at their very specific component measurements. You can’t just get every, anything custom cut the way want to. And so we had everything just in these very default templates and weren’t doing anything fancy back then. But as the years have gone by, we’ve certainly got more and more adventurous about designing Pieces and making them very unique to each of our board game experiences.

George: 19:32

Yeah. So the lesson here is do not start by making things cheese shaped when it’s your first project. Keep it standard shaped and then move on to cheese shapes after about 10 years. Okay. I think that’s a great lesson. Andrew, do you have any other lessons for people who are just starting out now, things that you know now that you wish you knew back then?

Andrew: 19:51

Ooh. I will say that like we, we do get quite a bit of people new to Kickstarter or wanting to launch their own things on Kickstarter, I can say the most helpful advice we end up giving that, that people That’s really important for every new creator is that the marketing and the push for your product, for your board game, whatever it is, it needs to start Six to nine months before your Kickstarter ever launches. You need to be getting your product in front of people. need to be building that excitement, building your email marketing list. Once people see your product board game, they play it. Ask them if they would like to join your mailing list and hear the latest news about when it will release. Like build that that audience as soon as you can. for I think, too many people thinking about Kickstarter, they say as soon as it launches on Kickstarter, a whole bunch of strangers, will find my product. They’ll get it, they’ll understand it, and they’ll purchase. Right then there. And maybe that was true in 2013, but it is not true today. You really have to step one is you need to jumpstart your own project by bringing a lot of your own audience in there. once it hits, you know, once it reaches a certain level of success, then it’ll kind of continue to roll as, as new people and new I see the project, but you really have to be thinking about the marketing well before do the Kickstarter.

George: 21:14

Yeah, basically what you’re saying is in addition to building a great game, you also have to build a great marketing plan, and that is at least 50% of a campaign.

Andrew: 21:23

Yeah.

George: 21:23

Okay? That is solid advice. Can people reach out to you with ideas that they might have for games?

Jeff: 21:29

Yeah, definitely. Um, We’re always open to chatting game design. Uh, We’re, Andrew and I are beyond obsessed with game design, and we are always happy to look at other people’s games. Um, we’re, We’re certainly open to even publishing the right game, if ever we come across it. But uh, even if it’s just to, to chat about ideas, you know, we’re, we’re more than happy.

Andrew: 21:53

We read every email and we respond to every email as well.

George: 21:56

Wow, you guys are so generous to your fans. That’s incredible. So that, that is a great tip. If you’re listening and you’re new to crowdfunding, you have two guys with a ton of experience read and reply to every email. So definitely go check out. The link to their website is linked in the show notes. So you can find them or go to R2igames.com. Andrew and Jeff, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us uh, and with the rest of the crowd. I really appreciate it. there anything else you wanna promote? Shout out, make sure people see.

Jeff: 22:28

If you miss the Fromage campaign pretty soon and probably within the next month or so, we’ll have pledge manager open for that. So you join our mailing list, you can get a notification as soon as that’s live. If you want to join in on our latest crowdfunding adventure,

George: 22:43

Amazing. Thank you so much. Make sure to check it out. The links will be in the show notes and you guys so much.

Jeff: 22:48

Thank you

Andrew: 22:48

Thanks, George.