Kickstarter - Lessons learned from a 300% funded solo project

Hi, my name is Jonas Manke!

I’m a solo developer from Germany and I ran a Kickstarter campaign for my game as a solo indie dev Omno last year that ended up getting over 300% funded with a pledge total of over $100,000 USD.

Since the campaign I’ve gotten a lot of questions from lots of people, mostly other indie devs, asking me how the crowdfunding campaign went so well. So, in the end, I decided to write up this post-mortem with info, stats and things that went well or didn’t work out for the campaign for anyone out there thinking about crowdfunding for their own projects. Hopefully, people find some helpful content.

So first of all just a short introduction to the game, then I’ll get into the meat of it with “the Omno Kickstarter campaign top 10 FAQ” below :D

About Omno and me

Omno is a single-player adventure, the vibe I’m aiming for is in some respects similar to Journey or Abzu but with more of a focus on puzzles and movement mechanics, as well as some other unique twists. You can watch a trailer of the game here.

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I’ve been working on Omno for over 2 years (the last 8 months of which I’ve been working full time on the project), and the plan is for the game to launch next year. Before Omno I worked as a freelance character animator for 10 years on many movies and games (most recently on the ‘State of Decay’ series) so I already knew how to work on my own, but I did not have former experience working as an indie, or working on my own games. Apart from the soundtrack I do everything on Omno myself, and am also the father of 3 kids so I have quite a busy schedule :)

Top 10 questions about my Kickstarter campaign answered

1: How did you prepare for the Kickstarter?

If you look into GDC talks and blog posts of Kickstarter campaigns that went well one takeaway that many post-mortems features is the advice to prepare WELL for your campaign and I couldn’t agree more with that.

During the Kickstarter it’s incredibly busy, so I would suggest preparing as many assets as you can beforehand (why not have that “20% funded gif” for Twitter prepared ahead of time?).

I had less than a month of really intense Kickstarter preparation before the campaign had to kick off. I mostly focused on getting a nice Kickstarter page ready, made a new trailer, prepared press pitches, set up a Steam page, updated my website and thought long and hard about rewards, stretch goals etc.

In hindsight, there were also a couple of things I probably should have done in the preparation phase but didn’t end up getting around to until the campaign was already live. For example, I finished a demo for the game during the campaign and not before, which probably cost me a good amount of dollars (more on that below).

Aside from working on assets, doing community development to build a small loyal following before the Omno campaign really made a difference, with a newsletter (~1000 subscribers before the campaign started) and Twitter (~2500 followers before the campaign started). Having people ready to support me on day one gave me a boost which really helped build a bit of hype that, in turn, got more people to trust the project and become backers themselves.
Before the campaign, I was quite active on dev groups in general (I wish I still had that much time these days) so many people knew Omno before.

Most importantly I was very successful on Imgur and Reddit (more on that below), there is an element of luck to this but preparing by having “mature” accounts by naturally interacting on the platform is key. I did build up good accounts for both platforms only during the Kickstarter and could have probably got a stronger boost if I had done that before.

2: How much work was running the Kickstarter campaign?

A LOT! That is also something I had heard before but I can not stress enough how much work it is if you want to make the most out of a campaign. I did not sleep a lot.

I often get asked if you can still work on a game in the time the Kickstarter is live and as a small team with answering messages, preparing gifs, joining streams, writing backer updates etc. I would say running the Kickstarter is a full-time job that is very exciting but also exhausting. Throughout the entire campaign, there was not a single day (except for my son’s birthday) where I did work less than 14 hours. Mostly it was much more than that.

Personally I would say the campaign kept me busy 1 full month beforehand, 1 month during the campaign and a couple of weeks after to still answer questions etc. That being said I also had some extra help from a small indie communications agency called Future Friends Games, who helped me through the campaign with advice and ideas, some drafting, and by handling the press side of things. If you’re well prepared and do your homework I wouldn’t say hiring an agency is 100% necessary (though is very helpful if you can stretch to it). But if you’re a solo dev or small team I definitely think having someone outside of the team whose opinion you trust that you can bounce ideas off really helps.

3: How much money do you ACTUALLY make? (Taxes, fees, etc.)

Unsurprisingly, this is one of the most common questions I get asked, and a pretty important one too :) So here’s the rundown:

For Omno, the campaign made roughly 100,000 dollars. There are quite a lot of people who backed without sufficient funds and a few people claiming refunds for no reason. All in all, those things meant a loss of about 9000 Euros. So although it says 100k on the page, the real total is a bit less than that. Then from this real total, there are quite a few costs to be deducted: Kickstarter takes a 5% cut, payment methods (credit card companies, PayPal, etc.) take another 3–5% (many folks don’t know/forget about this one!), I had to pay Future Friends for their support, and the composer for his work on the trailer song and demo music. Also, Epic Games asks for their royalties (5%). After all this, you also have to pay taxes too, which are quite high in Germany!

Considering all of this, I really, really have to stress that you should have someone experienced to help you out with the financial stuff. Crowdfunding tax laws are not fun — at least not in Germany. You not only pay taxes for your ‘income’ but also pay sales taxes for the rewards (between 0–30 % depending on where the backer lives). And figuring all that out took a few days of extra work and extra payment for the tax accountant.

And since you cannot work much for the 2–3 months around the campaign, you have to consider your expenses for that time.

At the end of the day, that means I still got almost two-thirds of the entire cake. One thing to keep in mind is that I did everything else on the campaign myself which of course saved money but again — was a lot of work.

You might read this and think “Maybe it’s not worth it then”, but it is. A successful campaign brings you much more than money.

4: What else did you get from the Kickstarter apart from money?

Money is cool of course but as some of you might know one of the biggest benefits of Kickstarter these days is the community you can build with it in a relatively short amount of time and the attention of potential partners.

So here, in no particular order, other things I gained during the Kickstarter campaign apart from money.

5. Did you have a demo?