My take on using Kickstarter

[Paul Carpenter]

I get lots of questions about the process of making cards, and using Kickstarter, so I wrote an article on medium.com. Hope you find at least a couple useful tidbits in there.

https://medium.com/design-startups/7eaf803b8620

[Alex Willis]

Nice article, lots of valid points.  Here is how I broke it down:

Don't make horrible products
Don't spend money that isn't yours
Plan, plan, plan and plan
Deliver, deliver, deliver, deliver
Kickstarter is not a profit machine (that bit is my own)

Having run very large projects (non-KS), It all starts with a  scope of work.  Into that create a budget plan and a projection.  Develop a deliverable timeline and communication plan.  Manage an issue list and change control documents.  Create an action plan for after market sales and distribution.  And then create a project specific receivables and payables account.  With KS, I never plan a profit, in fact I expect to take a loan from our holding company as the investment on the product creation.  The profit should come from surplus sales on KS or after market sales.  My goal is always to sell 1,500 decks with a balance of 1,000 which is "profit".    A lot of guys who are doing this to create a start up company should understand that they should not expect to draw an income, to profit from the business or to do anything other than to brand and grow their business for the first few years.  After that your strategy is to either sell your business which should have grown in equity or to start paying dividends or if you are successful enough move yourself into a paid position. 

Perhaps if you write a follow up article you can share some of this insight.

[Rob Wright]

Paul, excellent article. You should sell that to KS to put on their home page.

Alex, some great points. I think it's great that you are able to partially fund the projects yourself. I and probably most creators on KS do not have a holding company to take a loan from. Don't get me wrong. I'm not bashing. There are a lot of designer that have the ability to partially fund.  I do not. I also do not expect to make a profit from KS(hopefully a little after), and I do not expect to have an income from it. If I only make $10  on the whole deal. I will be happy. Just the thought of people playing with cards that I have designed would be awesome.
So a few pros and cons as I see it

My con- I get a pledge of 14k with a 15k goal. After spending hundreds of hours on research and design. That would suck a big one.
My pro- It gets funded, I have very little out of my pocket during the project, and I hopefully have a 1000 or so decks to sell at profit after words.

A pro for having a low goal. You usually get funded quicker, and this draws more people because they know the project is going to be produced
The con for this is 3 fold
1 You may have thousands of dollars out of your pocket that may take a year or more to get back(and possibly never get back).
2 Other designers that have not done any research, put out a low goal because they see a lot of projects with low goals. I wonder how many of these dumb dumbs have had
    projects just meet their low goals, and then say Oh shit. I'm f***ed.
3 This one works out to be a con for the break even goal. People bombard you with emails from backers like the dumb dumbs above  "Why such a high goal. Yours is double everybody else, You must plan on making a lot of money off of me" .  Ask Bill(The Other Look) about that, and he only had a 12k goal.

[Don Boyer]

I get lots of questions about the process of making cards, and using Kickstarter, so I wrote an article on medium.com. Hope you find at least a couple useful tidbits in there.

https://medium.com/design-startups/7eaf803b8620

A suggested addition to "pearl" #6 would be something about setting the goal as low as you can, but making certain that you don't go so low that you fail to cover all of your expenses, in the event that you reach your goal by a very narrow margin.  I've seen a few projects cross the line with less than $100 to spare - that's a skinny margin of error, assuming it's your only margin of error.

[Paul Carpenter]

I get lots of questions about the process of making cards, and using Kickstarter, so I wrote an article on medium.com. Hope you find at least a couple useful tidbits in there.

https://medium.com/design-startups/7eaf803b8620

A suggested addition to "pearl" #6 would be something about setting the goal as low as you can, but making certain that you don't go so low that you fail to cover all of your expenses, in the event that you reach your goal by a very narrow margin.  I've seen a few projects cross the line with less than $100 to spare - that's a skinny margin of error, assuming it's your only margin of error.

Very good point, and added.

[Collector]

I made my comment on Facebook

[Collector]

My two obvious cents 
http://playingcardcollector.wordpress.com/2013/06/24/my-modest-advices-on-kickstarter-playing-card-projects/

[sprouts1115]

Encarded - Saw your link.  Words of wisdom there....might want to mention Kickstarter and Amazon together take almost 10% and maybe save 25% for taxes.  Not much of a profit margin after that...