For everyone who checks in on the blog, allow me to provide you with a little insight into our experience with Kickstarter.
For anyone who has never run their own KS campaign before, let me tell you, it takes a successful blending of a lot of different disciplines and areas all coming together to be successful - and a lot of graft.
I would class myself as a competent artist and designer, I know a bit about playing cards, and I believe I knocked it out of the park with the Imported Playing Cards - it's a great deck of cards if I do say so myself. Beyond that, I am not a social media influencer, a marketing or PR guy, a businessman or a financier. Me and my wife have learnt so much just in the past few weeks about what it takes to run a campaign that we are confident we can get our re-launch over the finish line, but we are under no illusions, it's hard work.
We are a small unknown outfit looking to break into a saturated industry with our first product. It was never going to be plain sailing. I believe when you analyse in the cold light of day, we actually did pretty well even though we cancelled due to being on course to under-fund. We had nearly £3000 of pledges from real people who wanted to exchange their cash for our product - the ultimate test! And save for a very small number of friends and family who did it for the love, a vast majority of those backers were real people from the playing card and KS community who wanted to support our project and to whom we are very grateful. Needless to say, none of them knew who we were a couple of months ago.
And this is the first big lesson I learnt: bring a bunch of your own customers to launch day. This is the reason the big projects from established brands get funded so quick. They turn up at the gate with an army of fans waiting to hit the pledge button, like the queue at Wimbledon, or the guys that slept out on the street for days waiting for the cinemas to show the new Star Wars movies (they're still new to me - I'm old). We had 33 followers going into our KS launch - when we hit the cancel button we were over 150.
I have also learned that a majority of our backers are from the USA. And they want cheaper shipping! We have looked into some alternative postage services and methods and will be providing cheaper international shipping in our next campaign. I also admit I didn't fully understand how the add-on items shipping worked when I launched the project - by which time it was too late to change.
We have reached out to a fantastic and very popular photographer in the playing card community as well and we are very excited to get him on board photographing the updated prototype deck for the new campaign to give it that professional finish.
All in all we are happy the way our first campaign went even though it didn't fund. We learnt a ton, made a bunch of new friends and contacts, put the word out there about A. Haines Playing Cards and the Imported deck, and we are confident in the re-launch.
I have added a new button on the side panel, clicking it will take you to our Backerkit landing page where you can subscribe to our mailing list and be the first to hear about the new campaign and Early Bird offers.
We are in the process of making some changes and will be re-launching ASAP all being well at the end of this month or beginning of next. The deck of cards itself is remaining unchanged.
