One of the greatest challenge in the presentation of any Kickstarter campaign is probably the campaign video.
With our Kickstarter campaign planned for a late October launch, we started sourcing for sourcing for video production studios as early as April to help us produce a video that will get our backers on fire to click on the "PLEDGE" button.
With the recent hype on the failure of UK most funded Kickstarter project: Zano Drone and the recent coverage of the troubles by Singapore's most successful Kickstarter project: Pirate 3D , the whole crowdfunding industry is cast in a negative light. The University of Pennsylvania recently published an independent study on the project's failure rate of delivery of rewards on Kickstarter and the results are pretty interesting:
There is so many things to look out for while running a Kickstarter projects and one of the most important skill that every creator must have is effective stakeholder or backer communication. This includes sending individual messages to thank backers, planning status updates during the campaign, doing cross project collaborations with other creators, informing backers on status of manufacturing, shipping updates etc. There has to be constant communication between the creator and backers that the only way to see all these activities going on is to actually back a Kickstarter project.
As Kickstarter started growing from its base in US, the number of currencies which creators can use to set up their project started to grow quickly. With the majority of the Kickstarter backers still coming from US, creating a project using a non USD currency will often lead to confusion and misinformation. As not everybody is savvy with the exchange rate around the world, failure to give a quick conversion rate to backers in US and EU may deter backers from backing your project. We created Wongamania: Banana Economy using AUD and since AUD is a weaker currency as compared to USD, the pledge reward will seem to be more expensive as compared to other projects offering the similar rewards. So a AUD25 pledge will be seen as USD25 when the actual pledge amount is only USD18.
As a blogger, I am used to a wide variety of editing tools the authoring platform allows me to do. Center alignment, highlights, quote marks and if we like, gain access to the HTML codes to work on the layout and format which I will like the blog post to look like.
When I started the creator account with Kickstarter, I was expecting something similar, thanks to the many beautifully crafted Kickstarter campaign pages which I have seen. To my horror, the tools to the Kickstarter authoring tool are way way way too limited...
One of the biggest headache for any creator who wishes to launch their project at Kickstarter is to find a friend who is willing to help you to be the project creator. As of now, Kickstarter limits the nationality of the creators to the following countries:
USA, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Spain, Germany, France, Austria, Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg, and Switzerland.
There is a few ways to do this but I will discuss the simplest way: Getting a friend or helper to help you.
I was on my way to meet my team this afternoon for our Kickstarter Meeting for Wongamania: Banana Economy and I ran into an old friend. She was telling that she would be launching an Indiegogo campaign in 6 months time and I congratulated her for taking the courage to get her card game project funded through crowd funding. However, I was a bit concerned for her after I probed a bit deeper on
the amount of preparation she has made for her crowdfunding campaign. Our conversation sparked off the inspiration for this blog post on what are the essential functions you need to prepare before running a crowdfunding campaign. This is based on my 2 crowdfunding projects I have ran with the latest one being Wongamania: Banana Economy
Learning about how to start and run a Kickstarter campaign is extremely painfully, especially when you are living in a country which is not supported by Kickstarter. We tried to look for online material relevant to an Asian creator aspiring to start a project on Kickstarter but there isn't any dedicated blog or information about it. We had to resort to message fellow Singaporean Kickstarter creators to learn more about the "Hows and Whats" but the information we got were still pretty scarce.
As we embark on our journey to get Wongamania: Banana Economy funded, I thought that it will be interesting to write down my experiences, learning points and key experiences from other fellow Asian Kickstarters creators on my personal blog to help all those aspiring Kickstarter creators around the region.
Wongamania started its roots as an education game in the mid of 2014 in collaboration with the Stock Exchange of Malaysia to engage college students and get them interested in the world of finance and economics. We design the game based on the perception that young adults will be more interested in a quick to play card game designed primarily to be fun with subtle economics and financial concepts embedded within the game. The game was extremely well received and we went on to release the retail edition of Wongamania in Jan of 2015. Wongamania was considered as a commercial success as we were left with less than 30 copies of our 1st print run to date, considering that we are operating in an extremely small tabletop market, which is considered to be commercially unsustainable for any publishers to survive. Most of the game designers went on to design digital game, which is strongly supported by the Singapore government, leaving the tabletop design industry a virtual wasteland. There are currently 4 active Singaporean table top publishers with products out for retail sale, and all of them are less than 3 years old. We were one of the first publishers to be born for this new wave of board game resurgence in Singapore and we have few points of references locally when we first started. There are many concepts which we failed to take into consideration when we first started designing the game and one of which, is the background story and theme of the game.
What is a game convention only without any board games!
Capital Gains Studio bravely ventures into the world of digital gaming and set up a booth at Game Start Asia 2015 to showcase the beauty of cardboard and social interaction via their economic board game, Wongamania: Banana Economy.
Game Start Asia has allocated a business day on Friday to allow media, game insiders and VIP guests to have a first look and try at some of the latest games available. Consumers will be able to attend the convention on Saturday and Sunday. After showcasing the beauty of cardboard games for a couple of hours, we decided to venture to the gaming booths which has a relatively light crowd.
After my experience with Tokyo Game Show whereby there are long queues everywhere, making it almost impossible to play some of the best and innovative games out there. Getting a slot in one of the virtual reality games is mission impossible.
The Crowd at Tokyo Game Show
Thus, the first port of call of Game Start Asia is the Playstation VR Booth whereby we get to pick on of the 6 programs which we can try/ I tried out Summer Lesson which is essentially a Japanese style dating sim whereby you get to be a Japanese Sensei, teaching a hot gorgeous blond chick about Japanese. She sits very close beside you and you stare into her eyes, while you stare into hers. Irresistibly, you will feel like reaching out your hand to.....
A dream to write a book, publish a game, create a comic strip, design a cool gadget, produce a music CD.
Most of them have some sort of blueprint or initial draft scribbled on a
notepad or hidden deep within the recess of their hard drive. The
excuses of not fulfilling their dreams are pretty similar: "I am not
good enough for a publisher to take up my work!"
Now, stop dreaming and start creating because the gatekeepers
(publishers, music labels, editors, producers) are no longer holding
hostage to the creative industry, thanks to the rise of social media and
crowdfunding.
The king of crowdfunding platform, is no other than Kickstarter.
Wongamania: Banana Economy is
slated to be launched on Kickstarter on 19th Nov 2015 but we have
received a ton of question what is exactly Kickstarter and how does it
work. Since Kickstarter projects mosty originate from US and Europe, it
is not surprising that many Asians do not understand exactly how
Kickstarter work. Therefore, I have compiled a FAQ on Kickstarter,
hopefully to inspire dreamers to start creating and to help supporters
understand how it works so that they can help their friends fulfill
their lifelong dream.
What is Kickstarter?
Kickstarter is a US based crowdfunding platform which has successfully
helped to finance some of the most successful creative projects raising
more than $1.9 billion dollars in funds in creative projects, such as
films, music, stage shows, comics, journalism, video games, technology
and food-related projects. Some of the most successful projects include:
Pebble Smart Watch (USD 30 million), Coolest Cooler ( USD 13 million), Exploding Kitten card game ( USD 8.7 million), OUYA video game console ( USD 8.5 million), Shenmue III video game (USD 6.3 million), Pono Music (USD 6.2 million), Veronica Mars Movie (USD 5.7 million).
How does Kickstarter work?
A creator with a project will list their projects on Kickstarter and
state how much they are intending to raise before they are able to
commence on the design and production of the project. The creator than
will decide on how they will thank the backers by delivering to them
either a copy of the product that they are creating, or other relevant
goods and services. Many projects also offer creative experiences:
visits to the set, naming characters after backers, personal phone
calls. Backers who like the project and wish to see the project come to
life, can pledge any amount of funds to the project and they are often
rewarded proportionately to the amount of funds that they pledged.
I have not heard of Board Game Geek or Spiel Essen until a year ago. I have played my share of board and card games but never really dwell too much on the design and development process of game design. All I had was a wonderful idea for a board game, tested the idea with some friends and went ahead to publish the game thinking that I have done my best and came up with a brilliant product.
My best is apparently not enough when the standard of board game design is so much higher internationally than what it is like locally.
A typical sales pitch by a insurance sales person.
"Sir, do you know what is the interest rate in your bank?"
"0.25%"
"What if there is a saving plan, that can give you 4% a year, provides free insurance and even help you pay for your savings when you are sick! Will you be interested?"
"Wow! Sounds like a good deal! Where do I sign!?!"
Let us assume that an investment analyst picks up the same product and he has to present to his boss on the product. How will he present it?
Analyst, "Sir, This product has a guaranteed loss of 10%-100% of capital over a 20 out of 21 years period and has the potential to make 4% a year."
Boss, "What kind of lousy product is this? If I am risking 100%, I will want at least 100% return on my investment! Why are you wasting my time!"
One product and 2 very different presentation, reflecting the difference in the perception between a man on the streets and an investment professional.
It has been 6 months since the launch of Wongamania and many people congratulate me on designing such an interesting game which the game mechanics is able knit closely with economics. One of the most frequently posed question for us is the question of price.
Wongamania is priced at $38.
For the group of players who have been playing other financial literacy board games (priced between $70 - $200++), they came to a conclusion that Wongamania is priced too cheaply, and we should increase our pricing.
For the average group of consumers who are more familiar with Monopoly Deal and Saboteur ($15-$25), they feel that Wongamania is too expensive.
This makes setting the price of Wongamania a pretty difficult affair.
After considering many different factors, we came to a conclusion that packaging has one of the most significant impact on the price perception of the game.
So we decided to perform a little experiment with a few focus groups.
First, we put together a few board games and line them up for the focus group to examine as how it will be like in a retail environment. They are given the retail price of all the board games with the exception of Wongamania.
The result is pretty astonishing. Wongamania is rated on an average price of $18 and the reason for the pricing is due to the perception that the "content of the game" is not as much as other games due to the size of the game. As the size of the Wongamania packaging is on par with smaller card games like mass consumer games such Monopoly Deal or Saboteur, the consumer automatically associate Wongamania as a very light and fun game. On the other scale, the board games with bigger box are associated with "heavy strategic games which requires a lot of thinking"and since designing strategic games are harder, the consumers give the games with a bigger box a high price premium.
What is interesting is that the contents of Wongamania is on par with one very popular card game called Munchkin.
I managed to fit the entire contents of Munchkin into the Wongamania box (excluding the dice)
The price perception of Munchkin is around the $35 - $40 range which is pretty near to its actual retail price of $40.
When we initially designed Wongamania, we imagined the game to be easily portable and can be played on a small table found typically in the cafes of Singapore. We want the game to be a social game and for people able to to bring the game out during travels or meeting a bunch of friends in space scarce Singapore, and that strategy seems to be back firing on us in terms of price perception
So in order for Wongamania to fit the price perception, we have to either increase the size of the box or lower the price of the game in order for it to sell effectively in the retail market when placed with other games on the shelves. We are firmly confident on the contents and the playability value of Wongamania and we feel that we should be reasonably priced at the $35-$40 range.
We have sold 80% of our second run print of 1000 and we are looking for a bigger print run the next time round. Therefore, we are looking to increase the size of the box for our next print of Wongamania. So will Wongamania lose its portability once we upgrade the size of packaging? To help maintain the initial idea of a portable game, we will probably develop a smaller box as an optional choice for people who wish to carry Wongamania around as part of the game accessories, along with a set of easily portable board and token.
At the end of the day, no matter how good your inner beauty is, size does matter.
The blog post "Why Don't People Care About Personal Finance" by Cheerful Egg sparked off a flurry of discussion among financial online world with me contributing another article and Ken'ichi Wealth Management sharing on his own experiences why people don't care about finance. Kenji mentioned that in his blog post that one of the primary problem is that financial education is not thought in school and he proposed that educators should work on more visual aids like Youtube videos to encourage people to learn more about money. I heartily agree on the use of Youtube videos to engage the general public like what some of the top Youtubers like N.O.C, Jianhao Tan, Wah Bananas and Tree Potatoes.All these famous Youtube channels have one similar point... Very pretty Babes in their videos.
1) Most people find personal finance boring
2) Most people think personal finance is complicated
3) Most people wanna get rich fast
I agree with all these three points but however, I believe that there is a deeper problem, at least in Singapore from my point of view. I have been intimately involved in many of my clients' personal finances over the past 12 years and I can see a certain pattern why people do not care about finance. Let me break it down by demographics:
The Student (Age 18-24)
Source: mci.gov.sg
Who cares about personal finance! Getting good grades and getting a good job is my top priority. Getting a boyfriend and girlfriend is my second priority! Besides, I am saving on that graduation trip with my bf/gf. I will think about money problems when I start working.
I was doing my usual news surfing in the evening and I came across this very interesting sponsored post on Yahoo Finance "Facebook Started Hiring in Singapore!"
Wow! I have heard about the legendary work play balance at Facebook and it has been constantly voted as the best company to work for globally. There has been news that Facebook has been expanding their operations in Singapore and their beautiful office has been featured in multiple technology portals in Singapore, no doubt to entice would be bankers to work in Facebook instead.
There has been much buzz about the family life, lineage and early life of Mr Lee Kuan Yew, the founding father of Singapore when he died on 23th March 2015. There is an interesting piece of news whereby Mr Lee's ancestral home at Southern China, Guangzhou, Dabu is going to be turned into a tourist attraction. My ancestral home is just one village away from Mr Lee's village and in the vast land called China, a village away is equivalent of living in an opposite HDB block. The last time I visited my ancestral home in the 1990s to pay my respect to my Grandfather who died in China, the village is still largely a farming community with small acres of farmland all around the village. Looking at my grandma who also the same age as Mr Lee, I couldn't help to think how the fate of the two families are intertwined with each other.
Grandpa and Grandma are both Hakka and they were married just at the outbreak of World War II. My Dad was born as a war time baby and my uncle 2 years later. After the war, Grandpa went back to China to visit his ailing mother and he never came back. He died of an illness and left behind 1 widow and 2 young children to fend for themselves in Singapore. Life was exceptionally hard as a widow during those times and all the extended family help out with my family however and whenever they could. Work was scarce for a single mother during those days as woman was not expected to work. However, my grandma was determined to make it work. She took up sewing assignments and sew day and night, while keeping an eye on two playful boys. Life was extremely hard than and she was scraping by day by day. Politics was the last thing on her mind at that point of time when everyday was a struggle.
If
Lee Kuan Yew is the founding father of Singapore, than Grandma is the
founding mother of the Lye Family. A lesser woman would have broken down
given the situation she was in at that point of time. But she didn't.
With the famous Hakka traits of determination and refusal to quit, she
managed to put both my Dad and uncle through school, allowing them to
have very decent jobs when they graduated.
Celebrating the 91th Birthday of the Heroine of the Lye Family
The ladies of my family are fans of Mr Lee Kuan Yew. My sister wept the whole of the morning Mr Lee died and bought all the newspaper on the tribute for Mr Lee that day. Mum cried along with my sis and was depress for the next two days. My grandma was glued to Channel 8, gobbling every piece of information or tidbits about the life of Mr Lee till she became too tired to go on and fell asleep.
When the announcement for the dates and timing for the lying in state ceremony, my sis and I have made plans to visit Mr Lee's wake at the parliamentary house. However, the old folks seemed to be disinterested to go despite their interest in all the media reporting.
When Wongamania started it's financial literacy tour around the major universities in Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia, I encountered students who were expecting another boring "Education Game" session whereby they attend just to pick up ECA points. After playing the game, quite a couple of them approached me and congratulate me on designing a game that is "Shitloads more fun than Monopoly Deal". I was taken aback by their extremely low expectation on an education game and talked to quite a number of them. The students were telling me that they have been asked to play many educational "games", which are actually a textbook in the form of a quiz, and they were extremely skeptical when asked to play another education game.
I received similar reactions when I tried to invite students from Singapore universities to come try out the game. When the word, "Financial" and "Education" were mentioned, they quickly rejected the invitation. I have gotten the same reception from the board game community when I initially shared the idea of a "financial education" game with them. They were expecting to be bored to death.
Luckily, we managed to get positive responses so far.
As a game designer and an educator, I have to admit that many of the Asian education games are actually badly designed and extremely boring. What is the point of having an educational game when the people we are hoping to appeal to, will not even touch the game with a five-feet pole?
After talking to educators, game designers, gamers and trying out some of the educational games in the market, I have a pretty good idea what went wrong. Here are 4 reasons why I think Asian education games are not fun.
A Wefie after a session of Wongamania with the students
After a huge amount of testing using bits and pieces of paper, Wongamania now moves to another important phrase of the game design process.
Putting a design and face to Wongamania.
There are altogether 54 different card designs on Wongamania and there are many other design considerations which we need to consider too, including packaging, token design, logos, instruction booklet etc. The amount of illustration work to be completed was enormous!
The problem is, my initial entire team did not have any design background and we literally stumbled through the whole graphic design phrase like a couple of blind mice. We were lucky to have engaged 3 very talented young artists, Kaitlin, Olivia, EeLin to help us complete this massive project.
When I met up with the artists, I was bombarded by questions such as moods, colors, styles, themes etc and true enough, I ended up staring blankly at the artists. At that point of time, I was deciding on the theme for Limited Launch Edition. I wanted the game to look fun enough, so as to dilute the traditional mindset that learning about money is boring and tedious while the game must look serious enough, such that it will not deter adults from playing a "kiddy" game.
In order to blend this 2 conflicting concept together, we decided to use a more cartoonish style of drawing, while using a more serious tone in coloring. We decided to pick blue and gold, the traditional color of money and high finance.
Little did I know, that using two colors scheme to color all the different cards was actually a huge challenge for the artists. We were initially presented with a design scheme that focus more on the blue than the gold concept, but I rejected this initial coloring scheme as the cards became too "Batman" dark and depressing. The designers than proceeded to tinker around by adding more gold and yellow into the design resulting in a much brighter theme, though still maintaining the classic colors of gold and blue.That coloring scheme became the basis for the Limited Launch edition Wongamania.
Our Hwa Chong Alumni Entrepreneur Club Kopi session has grown from chilling out at a coffee shop at Jalan Kayu at the end of last year to a 30 men (& women) strong kopi session chilling out at Tuckshop. Thanks to the efforts of Joel Teo, who managed to gather (arrowed willingly) a bunch of ex Hwachongians to put this event together. In the last session, we had Mr Lim Der Shing ex CEO of JobCentral to grace our kopi session at Holland Village. This time round, we have Mr Kenny Yap of Qian Hu Corporation to share with us his entrepreneur journey.
I was recently invited to join a new online networking portal called JobKred which is still in beta testing phrase. They have this very interesting feature whereby members of the network can ask any of the other members of the portal questions, creating an on-going FAQ. I was asked a question on board game in general and I thought that it will be interesting for me to post the answer here.
My Answer (Too Long to SS)
"One of the problems with designers, not just board game designers,
are that they are too focused on product design and spent too little
time learning about marketing. The top selling board game in the world -
Monopoly, is scorned as a very badly designed board game within the
board game community. Catan, is also seen as an old board game, whose
game mechanics has become outdated. However, the hardcore game designers
have forgotten on some important points: What's "fun" to them is not
"fun" to the casual gamers who have to take 1 hr to learn complicated
game rules. "
Monopoly is easy learn. Open the board, pass out the money, roll
the dice and start buying every single property you land on.
After falling victim to a vicious flu bug on Saturday, I am still on a diet of lozenges and coffee bean herbal teas (Lung Ching Dragonwell & Cherry Blossom). Woke up with a dull pain on the right side of my neck. Darn. On top of a sexy voice, heckling cough, now I have a neck ache. Feeling miserable, I went back to sleep again hoping that the pain will go away and all this is just a nightmare. Woke up at 9am. Pain is still there. Dragged my ass off the bed and head off to Bugis where there is a chain marathon of meetings waiting for me.
I reached my usual spot at Bugis+ Coffee Bean while reading a copy of complimentary cosmopolitan magazine from my NUS Bizad Charity Run on the train. The Coffee Bean staff probably sensed my misery kindly offered me (their regular customer) a free upsize on my tea. Cleared my email, scan the financial news, check my clients investment portfolios and time flew by and it's time for my first appointment.
Met up with Made Lidya, one of the talented artists who designed the Limited Launch Wongamania's graphics and we had a good conversation on how artists, programmers and game designers must master marketing and why idealism will not help a person succeed in this competition environment.
After lunch, I went back to my usual spot at Coffee Bean and continue working on editing my Wongamania instructional video. Halfway through, my laptop crashed and I was like "@#$@$@#$". Booted up my lappy and found my efforts for the past 30mins are gone. Cursed some more and went to rework on the video. Went to read and commented on Singapore's Top Toilet Reading Material Blog
My next appointment was with a potential distributor for Wongamania and we ironed out some of the issues we have, with supply chain problem and we talk about the tabletop game industry and some of the problems faced. Went to meet an investment client next, to help fill up the yearly mandatory Client Knowledge Assessment (CKA) form and to share some investment updates with her. By now, I am using my pen as a massage stick to work out the dull ache on the side of my neck.
Traveled to Paya Lebar to meet up with my other Capital Gains partner, Sam Chang to discuss on the agenda of the meeting for tomorrow's quarterly planning session. We went through a new equity sharing idea from slicingpie.com introduced by a fellow Hwa Chong Alumni Entrepreneur Philip Teo and decided that we should implement the model on Capital Gains. Discussed about our US expansion plans and Malaysia supply chain issues.
Went home. Flopped on bed. Dead tired. Uploading new Wongamania Youtube video and while waiting, decided to write on this blog post which has no point.
By now, I was too tired to write what's the point of this no point post and decided to plagiarize from Smith Leong's Post:
"See, so we always talked about how much we miss the olden days
blogging where it is non commercial, where it is personal and you just
read day to day things to know your friends or another blogger/stranger
better. How did you like the above paragraph better over anything else
that is commercial?
Whichever the case, i think blogging is something you should enjoy, you
do not need to care much about what the trend is, what the fashion is or
what other people perceive you as or their expectation. Just like what
you do and just enjoy doing it. If it doesn't make you happy, don't do
it.
You do not have to agree with what I'm saying but I hope you think about it. ;)
In case you really don't like my pointless post. "