Pledge Manager

My focus is now setting up the pledge manager.

It’s a bit of a faff.

Gamefound is getting better though.

We’re still a bit unusual though.

Lots of stuff that we re-enter every time.

Because it’s essentially the same game.

We can’t turn it on before the 15th.

I’m hoping to hit that date.

Or thereabouts.

Plus Paul and I have a date to finalise all the ships.

A day of playtesting on the horizon

So I can do the dashboards and rules.

Once the pledge manager is up.

Making solid progress.

Production

I've spent the week working on the Pledge Manager.

It goes live at 2pm UK time today.

Paul is making the rewards that we already have the components for.

We're starting to place the orders for the materials that will take longest to arrive.

It's coming together.

Still lots to do.

But moving in the right direction. 

And Breathe

The last few weeks have been a whirlwind. 

Pledge Manager to get live. Pledges to record in the accounts.

Playtesting and finalising rules for new bits.

Starting to work out what we have to deliver and ordering what we can now.

And on top of all of that, my day job went sideways and I needed to find a new one.

So lots of interviews and additional stress.

Thankfully I’ve now got an offer so that’s one less thing to worry about.

Going to take a couple of weeks off in between roles to relax (and finish the P&P pack and the rules and dashboard layout).

And breathe...

Accounts

We’re a small company. Just Paul and me.

So we wear a lot of hats. 

Hats that would be worn by trained professionals in a bigger company.

One of my hats says ‘Accountant’ on it. But I’m not an accountant.

Still I do all the bookkeeping.

When I ran Reiver Games I did cash accounting. 

I hated it and often left it to the last minute. Months later I would be going through bank statements trying to work out where I’d gone wrong.

For Eurydice I do double entry. It’s more work. But so much better. There’s some error correction built in. You can easily see where everything is.

I quite enjoy it now.

Our books are usually up to date every day. I can check account balances at any point to make sure I’ve not made mistakes. Everything tallies.

The only time that isn’t true is now. During a Kickstarter we only get one payment (from KS), so it’s easy to record. During a big pledge manager we get over a hundred. And lots of those arrive the same day.

The books are slowly catching up. But they aren’t there yet. So I can’t check that they’re correct. Check I’ve not made any mistakes.

It’s weighing on me.

Distraction

Paul and I work in shifts.

I do the Kickstarter page.

Then run the Kickstarter.

Then the pledge manager.

Then the graphic design and Print and Play files.

Then catch up on all the accounts and fill in the fulfilment spreadsheet.

Then the real work begins - Paul has hundreds of games and expansions to laser-cut, bag, box and post.

We’re still in the ‘Jack is very busy’ phase.

And now I need to find a new day job, pronto.

It’s been a distraction. Things have slipped.

Only by a few days, but I need to get back on track.

Hoping to have the Pledge Manager go live this week...

It’s mostly done.

Grind

Crafting a Kickstarter page is about design.

Make it look great.

Get the words right.

Hone everything.

Will it grab people’s attention?

Launch!

Then wait and watch it work. Or not. Or only just.

We’re now setting up the Pledge Manager.

It’s very different. A chore.

Setting up a web shop really.

Populating your store with wares.

And we have a lot of wares.

It takes an age, but I’m hoping to finish before the end of the week...

The Eye

All is quiet.

We sit in the eye of the storm.

Kickstarter is a crazy time, comments to respond to. Ad reactions. Messages. Changes to the campaign.

It’s hard work. Even without the worry of funding or not, it’s stressful.

Evenings away from the family trying to keep up.

In a couple of weeks the Pledge Manager should be live on Gamefound.

It’ll be crazy again - loads of bookkeeping to do. Constantly evolving reward totals. Chasing the people who don’t complete it.

For now it’s all quiet. Just plugging away at the Gamefound page. Getting things ready.

A chance to recharge.

Past Jack Says: Tough Week

I usually write my blog posts on the weekend or before work on a Monday. I’m currently in Scotland in a tent though, and have been since Friday, so this one was written last Thursday on a train. 

Last week ended up being very stressful. I did manage to get the P&P files finished and posted, but that was the least of our worries. We found out on Monday that our 11 year old car had probably been written off in the shunt that my wife received on the previous Friday. 

With the holiday looming we needed a replacement car pretty quickly (ours didn’t look badly damaged, but apparently the reinforcement beam behind the bumper had caved in). So I ended up taking a decent chunk of the week off work trying to rapidly find and buy a replacement car. 

Could have done without that. 

Anyway, as far as The Box of Flicks goes we’re still on track. I’ll be closing the pledge manager tonight when I get home (hopefully everyone will have placed their orders by then - at time of writing there’s still 33 outstanding. 

Once we know exactly what’s been ordered we can go ahead and order the acrylic, wooden bits and dashboards and get cracking on the production. The next target is all the deluxe rewards by the end of September and there’s rather a lot of them! At least all the games and expansions are done and it’s just the add-ons we need to do.

Print and Play Week

The print and play pledges from our recent Kickstarter are due this Friday. I’ve done the dashboards (corrections pending) and the rules (with a proof-reader). 

I’ve got three nights to lay out all the ships on the acrylic sheets, record exactly how many wooden bits they need and then write up the instructions and send them all out. I need to do it by Wednesday as I’ve got Games Night on Thursday hopefully and we’re going camping on Friday. I think it should be fine time-wise, but ask me again on Thursday! 

The good news is that almost all of this is stuff I need to do for the full print run too. 

In the meantime, Paul has been busy designing the etching layer for the ships and laying out the ships on the big sheets of acrylic we need to cut (multiple sets at a time). When I get back from camping the pledge manager will be closed so we will know how many copies of things we need to make and we’ll be able to place the orders for the bits we need. 

We’ve a few busy weeks ahead of us!

The Busy Time

With the Kickstarter all wrapped up we now enter the period when I’m very busy (Paul’s very busy period is pending the acrylic for the add-ons arriving).

I’m currently doing the pledge manager, dashboard graphic design, rules graphic design and the orders of bits and acrylic.

The graphic design is top of the list as we have to provide the Print and Play files (including the dashboards and rules) by the end of July. And I’m away at the very end of July, so I have to provide them by the 29th.

The first new dashboard design in progress...

We can’t place the orders until the pledge manager is finished (3rd of August), but I can be almost ready to go before then since the pledge manager is slowing down now and, unlike Kickstarter, we aren’t expecting a last minute rush of orders.

Then it’ll be catch up on the books. We’ve had a lot of orders through the pledge manager, so there’s a decent backlog of work piling up there :-(

Taking the Pledge

We didn't use a pledge manager (a separate system for managing fulfilment, late pledges and pledge upgrades after the Kickstarter closes, e.g. Backerkit or Gamefound) for our first Kickstarter and weren't intending to for our second. As the second Kickstarter came to an end and it was clear we weren't going to unlock all the stretch goals, people started asking if they could get the missed stretch goals as add-ons in a pledge manager. We asked backers if they wanted a pledge manager and nearly 70% of respondents said yes. So we found ourselves at the end of the campaign quickly fishing around for a pledge manager we were not intending to use.

We were not expecting to generate much income through this, so ones like Backerkit that charge a flat fee were a bit off-putting. In the end we found Gamefound which is free to both backers and creators (I've no idea how they fund themselves!). So we went with that.

At the end of the Kickstarter we raised £13,162 which, after dropped pledges, fell to £12,879. The pledge manager ran for about a month and allowed people who missed the Kickstarter to late pledge at Kickstarter prices, people who wanted to upgrade their pledges to do so and anyone to add some extra asteroids on to their order for only £3-4 with free shipping for a single copy.

We had no idea what to expect, but it end up raising an additional £1,688 (an additional 13.1%), of which £552 came from nine late pledges and £442 from add-ons (the asteroids). The remaining £694 came from people who had backed the Kickstarter adding extra copies of the game or expansion or upgrading from standard to deluxe copies. Which is pretty incredible and way beyond what we expected.

Gamefound dashboard for FlickFleet

For comparison on our first Kickstarter we just used the Kickstarter reward surveys and offered to take PayPal payment for anyone interested in an upgrade (we had seven upgrades and an additional deluxe and standard ordered for a total of £198 (an additional 1.6%). It's not a fair comparison as we didn't have an equivalent of the £3-4 add-on, but it's clear the pledge manager was a good thing from a sales point-of-view.

It was not all smooth sailing, however.

Before we get into this, the problems were exacerbated by my own mistake: I told backers (via a Kickstarter update) that the Pledge Manager was live for late pledges before I'd loaded in their rewards from Kickstarter. Some of them immediately leapt on to Gamefound and completed their Gamefound order before I'd uploaded their Kickstarter credits or the rewards for which they had pledged. Afraid this was the beginning of an avalanche of excited backers jumping on early, I quickly uploaded the credits only and cancelled the too-early orders.

So now people who know how to use Gamefound could re-select the rewards they got through Kickstarter and add on anything extra they wanted while only paying for the add-ons or upgrades. But quite a few people didn't realise they needed to add their original pledge to the order (due to my mistake), so we got several orders for just an add-on (and shipping on that), which later needed cancelling along with info to the backer on how to correct the (my!) mistake.

I've spent about 40 hours over the last couple of weeks building a fulfilment spreadsheet from three sources: PayPal (where we received the upgrade/add-on/late pledge money), Gamefound and Kickstarter. I've had to cross-reference them all to ensure we didn't miss anyone. I've had to deal with Kickstarter backers who haven't fulfilled the pledge manager (about 10%), all the erroneous pledges caused by my mistake and include the late pledges that weren't in Kickstarter. That has been just about doable, but clearly is not sustainable if our next Kickstarter is (a lot) more successful. Having to merge the two formats and then do a three way cross-check has been very painful and slow. And even after all the chasing, I'm still missing 6 shipping addresses (about 2%) and 57 (about 34%) lots of personalisation info. The Gamefound support was good (they have a guy in the UK), and things were definitely made worse by my mistakes, but I wonder how much effort would have been saved if I done things right in the first place.

Almost Ready!

Things are starting to move now on the second Kickstarter fulfilment. Last week I made a couple of outstanding website orders and all the Alpha Wing pledges that hadn’t upgraded to a different level in the Pledge manager and I’ve been posting those in my lunch breaks.

I’ve also been catching up on the bookkeeping and trying to collate the Gamefound orders with the Kickstarter backers. Due to an error on my part we didn’t load Kickstarter backers chosen rewards into Gamefound so we have the late pledges and ~90% of people with a Gamefound order and then a bunch of people who haven’t completed the pledge manager so I’ve got to track them down in Kickstarter instead (and chase them for their shipping address). I’m trying to build a single spreadsheet that contains all the information to make fulfilment as straightforward as possible.

The manufacturing orders I whinged about last week are sorting themselves out - the missing acrylic (plus a couple more sheets I needed to order due to another mistake of mine :-( ) arrived on Friday and the missing wooden bits were restocked at our supplier last Friday too and are shipping today. The boxes are due to arrive on Monday 27th and then it's just a case of cutting the bits, bagging them and shipping them.

I was hoping to spend the last day of my current job (31st) going down to York to help Paul with the boxing of bits and to sign all the deluxe boxes, but he's travelling to a convention that day, so we'll need to do that another day instead.

Exciting times!

Pressing Deadlines!

We hit all of our deadlines on our first Kickstarter, fulfilling pledges on time in the worst case and up to four months early in the best and I’d like to repeat that this time.

Last time round the Print and Play rewards were the tightest (I was sending emails with the files at 9:30 on New Year’s Eve!). This time around it’s the P&P rewards again that are proving to be the most challenging.

When setting the deadlines I hadn’t banked on running a pledge manager (it finishes next weekend - last chance for late backers to get the Kickstarter discounts and subsidised shipping!), and choosing a platform and setting that up took over a week (of the four I’ve got between the end of the Kickstarter and the end of this month) so things are pretty tight.

There's less than a week left of the Pledge Manager!

I’ve tweaked the base game files and they are ready to go, so I’m now working on the cutting files, instructions and rules. I did some in my lunch breaks last week and I’ve got a night in a hotel tonight to work on them too so I should be ok. But it’s cutting it fine!

FlickFleet Pledge Manager Live!

This week has mostly been about refreshing manufacturing quotes, setting up a pledge manager and getting on top of all things I should have done last weekend when my eye injury stopped me doing almost everything.

The manufacturing quotes are coming along nicely, and with a bit of jiggery-pokery around laying out the ships on larger acrylic sheets to reduce wastage per game and merging orders for expansion and base game to get economies of scale we’ve been able to get the price down to the point where we can include the Civilian Ships expansion (which everyone wanted but we didn’t unlock during the campaign) included in the expansion along with the Objectives.

Included for free!

The pledge manager is now live on Gamefound for late pledges/failed payments and the add-on. We'll be inviting all the Kickstarter backers to complete it in the next few days, once we've tested it out thoroughly. It will run until the end of November.