My First Kickstarter
Last Fall I was lucky enough to join a team that ran a successful Kickstarter campaign.
It was for Z Photo Game, “a clever take on the targeted clues and voting mechanisms that delightfully mixes a photographer’s portfolio with a party game.”
The game’s designer is Steve Zmak, who is himself a fine art photographer and graphic designer. He dipped into his expansive collection to create a 209-card deck using his original photographs.
His game is in the family of judging games, but there’s not a pure “player judge” mechanism. And because the “judge” also participates in the submission but not the voting, the game play is as unique as Steve’s photography.
But he produced a “limited edition” run of 100 games, which set the price point at $85, higher than most gamers would spend. In the fine art world, that’s the normal retail cost of your coffee table book; but the book gets read once and is relegated to the shelf, never to be seen again. Instead, Steve innovated by combining his love of tabletop gaming with fine art photography, ensuring his portfolio gets seen multiple times for years to come.
I accepted the role of admin for social. Because Steve was already an established fine art photographer, he came with a built-in following of photography fans. The challenge was not all of Steve’s photography fans were board gamers, so this would be a niche of a niche.
We weren’t going to use his existing social accounts; we’d start a brand new one. I have started zero-follower accounts before and knew the challenges of building a following from scratch, but I also knew I would have really good content to work with.
I quickly ruled out the Bird site, where the board game world had once thrived. It wasn’t until after the election I would discover that community was slowly migrating to Bluesky at the expense of Threads. If we were launching today, though, I would go with Bluesky (let’s go ahead and do that!).
Facebook was out because the algorithm buries you if you aren’t buying ads, even though Steve’s photography fans were already there. That left Instagram, which has its own challenges but allows you a lot of ways to display great content (i.e. posts, reels, stories, and highlights).
Communications Plan
I went with a combined strategy of embracing our imposter syndrome and piggybacking. I knew I would have 209 unique images to work with because of Steve’s photographs. And I would have access to his studio, the various stages of fulfillment, and any live play events.
I embraced that zero-follower mentality and created a calendar of daily content generation that did not rely on initial engagement. That way when the engagement comes, there’s already something there. You just have to be willing to go on stage and perform when there’s nobody in the audience.
But the social in “social media” requires you to engage, which means you have to comment on other posts in a way that gets you in their conversation. It’s hard to do at parties, too, when you’re the new person and everyone else has their crowd, but you don’t stand out by yelling.
Unlike on Bluesky, hashtags don’t really work anymore on most traditional socials; this is because Gen Z leans towards private accounts and experiences, unless there’s something in it for them. And on Instagram a hashtag is no longer visible in realtime, only algorithmically. So that means you have to social the old fashion way: Value the interactions you get when you present good, original content.
Engagement
I paid more attention to much larger accounts who viewed a story or liked a post, especially without prompting. I engaged with those accounts exclusively to see if I could get more attention, inludingh my own SpielMas account (600+ followers). One even DM’ed a thank you when we were successful in extending their marketing.
But that’s hard work, and the building of a following is slow. Too slow when you have a Kickstarter timeline. The goal was to reach a tipping point where I could engage a following with posts that would ask for engagement based on the game and its play. I don’t think we ever got there, to be honest, but it’s something we might do in the future..
So I fell back to showcasing our own engagement, especially when we played the game live in a public setting. That began to work, because like all judging games it sells itself when you realize how much fun the players are having.
Stories and Highlights
I quickly learned that we were getting more views in an Instagram story than a post. But I needed to ensure the information pathway always led to the Kickstarter campaign page. No matter what. And since you can’t add URLs to a post, the Instagram story was my currency, and thus Instagram highlights (e.g. Rules, Testimonials, Components, Press), where I could save a story, became my bank account.
And that created a convenient pattern for my content calendar: I would only post if, after adding it to a story, it would fit in an existing highlight. This informed every interaction with the rest of the team and often elicited content that fit or revived content that we thought useless or out of context.
But when it was crunch time, and the deadline was near, I had to take the 200 followers we’d gathered to the end with a lot of FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt). Some of those “countdown” posts towards the end were my worst, because I was encouraging very little engagement at the expense of being humorous and creative.
Funded!
We crawled over the finish line, but we did it with Steve’s existing base of photography fans; we didn’t really break in to the tabletop gaming world. And that informs me as a designer to not get over my skis thinking I can jump into a fundraiser on charm alone.
But we delivered a very fun game to the world, and I will ride and die on being part of any effort that encourages people to come together to be creative and laugh.
Published March 22, 2025.
