I know we don't agree on all aspects of this, but I also think that we don't have to agree in life, we have to be able to talk to each other. And so to that end I appreciate not just the conversations we've had but also the fact that you put out this video covering your perspective on it. v
Thanks for explaining this, personally I think it makes a lot of sense. I have put down a dollar a few times and haven't for campaigns I cared less about. I never really had an issue with it xD I think us backers need to have more compassion for creators, I've seen a lot of hate recently for a wide list of reasons that don't seem to warrant the disrespect
I think consumers will find the business tactic less sleazy if they knew that the creators/designers were just a couple people looking to start a career. Marketing strategies that trustworthy companies/businesses use aren't considered sleazy, because they're trusted. Imo, I think a genuine and convincing marketing infographic about the creators/designers at the time of the reservation is more important than the product, especially for first time sellers.
I agree. In many cases, it's first-time creators that are launching so trust is very low. Adding more information about the people behind the project could help build that trust and create more empathy. -Mark
Hey Mark, thanks so much for taking the time to respond to the reviewers and community on this topic! I felt that your video was honest and well laid out and made an undeniable case for this strategy. I particularly appreciated your articulation around the first-time creators' perspective - who are taking some significant risks in this market (like myself)! Many thanks to you and your team for continuing to lead the way in making crowdfunding a better space for backers AND creators. Cheers!
Thanks for the feedback! Yeah, the concentration of risk in crowdfunding is mainly on first-time creators. I'm hoping we can continue to decrease that risk over time. I wish you all the best with your first launch!
As a creator and a consumer, I am on board with this strategy. It is a win-win, refundable, and there is absolutely nothing for the backer to lose. I agree that adding information on the pre-launch page is key to clarifying any issue that arises with this strategy. I am trying to launch a business, to replace my current 40-hour-a-week job, to make game design my career. I need to use the $1 reservation strategy to help achieve this goal. Thank you for this video, I really hope it gets shared and spread around to help combat the negativity around the $1 reservation issue.
There's a lot of creators in your same exact position - trying to transition from their current career to running their board game business full-time. I wish you the best and thanks for sharing your perspective!
Super well thought out and well communicated video and strategy. Tagging along with what someone else said in the comments section, I'm both a creator and a consumer. I know how important it is to validate products properly, and how painful it is to spend thousands of hours and dollars on a project that hasn't been properly validated! I think the $1 reservation funnel is genius as a way of validating and finding your true fans early on in the process. And as a consumer, literally anyone can afford $1, especially for a product or project you want to support! It's a very small price to pay, especially if you get special discounts or benefits as a result. Also, I've seen many products that I genuinely want in my life, but never end up getting past the development phase due to a lack of funding, and it really sucks! That's so much more painful than any hesitancy I would have to spending $1 lol. (I've also given away much more than $1 in my life to causes much less worthy, and I think we all have). This to me is the perfect strategy that honours both creator and consumer, and to be honest, I have difficulty understanding the logic of why anyone would be against it!
Well, your explanation is how I assumed this would work so I was quite surprised by the backlash and didn't really understand why people would FOMO after putting a dollar down as I put a dollar on KS projects I like so I can comment and don't mind losing it if I do not follow through. I never considered that I might get my $1 back if I didn't follow though...😎. Naïve, I guess😁. I think it is this getting a reward that creates a problem in peoples minds but I understand why people are more likely to respond to any incentive. Certainly more information would be valuable so your changes post consultation sound good although I wonder about them being adopted by others as it seems important to establish a consistent approach to this practice across all platforms so as not to spook prospective backers. Cheers for your video.
Appreciate you sharing your thoughts! Standards will naturally form with any strategy because backers will vote with their wallet - meaning the data will show if the way the strategy is being used is being received well by the market and creators will be forced to adapt.
I have a question. How much should a VIP $1 lead cost? I was told that a normal email lead should cost around $2. But not sure how much is cost for a lead that reserves for $1
As a creative, I'd be worried that I didn't present my game well enough in the $1 campaign, and I'd have to spend months refunding people their $1. I don't have 15 minutes spare while running my campaign and my project, let alone 15mins x 500 people. If I pay someone $30 an hour to process refunds, and they can only do 10 in an hour, I'm out $4 per refund. even if only 5% of people refund, I'm out 20% of that funding. If you presented more facts, more stats about this, of the 11,000 backers. how many followed through, how many backed, how many cancelled. That'd be far more pertinent than a few YT influencers feelings. (I patreon these guys, lol)
Yes, it's wrong. It feeds on consumers' FOMO by telling them the only way to get this great deal on a product that you barely know anything about is to put your financial information into another website before a campaign technically launches. If information about a campaign was released and reviewed before the prelaunch investment, that might be a different story, but that goes against the current trend of launching the hype train in tandem with the campaign.
@@launchboom_official many campaigns will treat the campaign launch date as a threshold for when any information for a game can be released. They will have a media embargo for any reviewers or collaborators. Once the campaign launches, the common practice is to release a flood of reviews and info at the start of the campaign and to continue trickling out more news until the close of the campaign so that it continues to be talked about. That's what I would call the "hype train". Expecting an investment on nothing more than a game title and maybe a couple pieces of art before that launch date is really only going to attract people who are in the know, already fans of the designer/publisher/artist, or already hooked by the theme. Honestly, I'm surprised that the conversion figures on that group isn't higher because it sounds like skewed data to begin with. I get that you're collecting the data of those investors to focus where the advertising investment should be spent. It sits wrong with me to charge people money to use their data and to report inflated conversion values to the publishers as a justification of the practice. It feels like everyone is getting used.
It's interesting that you jumped to having people give you money and not just ask the customer how confident they were that they would be backing the product. If the goal is to actually find out how many people are going to buy, why not just ask? Maybe just say thank you or give a small hat tip like put their name in the credits if they fill out a survey. If that isn't enough but making them have skin in the game is, then it is in fact preying on sunk costs and emotional manipulation. Asking people to put their money on the line (on yet another payments platform) before information is available on what it is you're spending money on is wrong. The question you ask about "are they spending money because they want it" is not a useful question in most cases because they don't actually get information about what the expansion is - you address this but I'll believe it when I see it. It may not be dishonest but it is manipulative. Finally, saying a $4m campaign was successful because of the $1 prepledge is such an insanely cherry picked example. That campaign would have been successful with or without the prepledge. What about the companies who pay you for your advice and then end up making 10k-30k? How do they feel about how well their money was spent?
We actually did try out surveys before the $1 like you suggested, but I didn't include that in the video! The issue with surveys that ask purchase intent questions like "would you purchase this product?" is that the responses are misleading. We didn't find a strong correlation between those that said they would purchase on a survey and those that actually purchased. I believe that's because it doesn't cost anything to answer a survey. I'd be curious to know if you've seen something different. I agree that The Crooked Moon campaign would have been successful without the $1 reservation since they had a large audience from streaming for 6 years. I mentioned them for two reasons. First: the amount of people that put down $1 in the pre-launch was so large (over 11,000) and there was virtually no negative pushback. This was to support the point that there are a large amount of people making a decision to pay $1 in the pre-launch to get whats being offered and to support the creator from a place that's not rooted in emotional manipulation / being preyed upon. Second: the $1 strategy helped them know where to spend their marketing dollars in pre-launch, which helped the profitability of the campaign. Because the campaign had enough profit they were able to go full-time. This is part of a public review a Crooked Moon team member, Mikey, left about us on Trustpilot, which speaks to your point and my points: "Simply put, the LaunchBoom VIP system works and provides actual data and the hard numbers to fairly accurately predict initial success levels, which was invaluable in our planning and investments pre-launch That said, LaunchBoom is not a magic elixir that will turn just any campaign into a roaring success. We came into the partnership with our own business experience, clear vision, quality product, and passionate community, and any successful campaign will require all of the above However, LaunchBoom was the perfect catalyst to the fire we had already been kindling, and the synergistic skillsets allowed it to blaze into a huge success beyond any of our wildest dreams." In response to this part of your comment: "What about the companies who pay you for your advice and then end up making 10k-30k? How do they feel about how well their money was spent?" I would never claim LaunchBoom to be a silver-bullet to make any campaign successful. To Mikey's point above, we're not a "magic elixir." I wish every campaign we worked with was insanely successful and profitable, but that's not the reality. We've had campaigns with low profitability and unhappy creators - I'm not happy when this happens either. There's no incentive for us to have poor results. It reflects poorly on us and all I can do is try to learn from it and make the system better.
@@launchboom_official The Crooked Moon is not in the board game space, board gamers are highly intelligent people and you are playing them for fools, having $1 pre-campaign pledges getting actual game play items for the $1 pledge instead of a thank you trinket like Crooked Moon. Then you anger actual people who are interested in the game, because they learn they missed out on game play items that they now have to pay more for because they missed some obscure pledge sign up somewhere or just don't want to have to pay money outside the actual campaign. If it was an actual worthless trinket being presented to the $1 backers, that's one thing. Having it be something related to game play, is entirely another. It just shows your marketing firm does not understand the board game space at all or it's backers and you are doing a disservice to the board game creators you are taking money from. This is most definitely feeding into FOMO and being manipulative within the board game space. Board game creators, if you want to be successful in the board game space on crowdfunding, have a good game that stands out and look for a mentor in those who had successful campaigns without the need for marketing firms like Launchboom. I will not fund anything with a $1 precampaign pledge. Furthermore, I will ask all campaigns going forward if they work with Launchboom and if they do I will pull my backing of them until Launchboom changes it practices in the board game space. For the record, I back approximately 10-20 board game space campaigns monthly and there are plenty more like me who feel the same way.
The fact that your company wrote a paper about “How to create a successful campaign with psychological tricks,” and lists the first “trick” you can “exploit” is that backers are “naturally prone to taking more risks with their purchases” kinda tells me everything that I need to know. Creators should know that they will lose as many customers as they might gain by using manipulative tactics. I for one will not back any campaign that uses the “reservation” practice you are pushing.
You are citing YOUR website (with inflated numbers) where you charge creators for this very service to convince people that it's all good and a "win-win"? The marketing guy is pointing us to HIS website and showing all the adds for his business? And people watch this and buy it? Your job is to MANIPULATE, your own site speaks to "exploiting" backers.
I know we don't agree on all aspects of this, but I also think that we don't have to agree in life, we have to be able to talk to each other. And so to that end I appreciate not just the conversations we've had but also the fact that you put out this video covering your perspective on it. v
Thanks Alex! I agree that we don't have to agree on everything. Also, I'm happy we were able to meet in person at GAMA!
- Mark
Thanks for explaining this, personally I think it makes a lot of sense. I have put down a dollar a few times and haven't for campaigns I cared less about. I never really had an issue with it xD I think us backers need to have more compassion for creators, I've seen a lot of hate recently for a wide list of reasons that don't seem to warrant the disrespect
It's one fucking dollar guys. Calm TF down
I think consumers will find the business tactic less sleazy if they knew that the creators/designers were just a couple people looking to start a career. Marketing strategies that trustworthy companies/businesses use aren't considered sleazy, because they're trusted. Imo, I think a genuine and convincing marketing infographic about the creators/designers at the time of the reservation is more important than the product, especially for first time sellers.
I agree. In many cases, it's first-time creators that are launching so trust is very low. Adding more information about the people behind the project could help build that trust and create more empathy.
-Mark
Hey Mark, thanks so much for taking the time to respond to the reviewers and community on this topic! I felt that your video was honest and well laid out and made an undeniable case for this strategy. I particularly appreciated your articulation around the first-time creators' perspective - who are taking some significant risks in this market (like myself)! Many thanks to you and your team for continuing to lead the way in making crowdfunding a better space for backers AND creators. Cheers!
Thanks for the feedback! Yeah, the concentration of risk in crowdfunding is mainly on first-time creators. I'm hoping we can continue to decrease that risk over time. I wish you all the best with your first launch!
As a creator and a consumer, I am on board with this strategy. It is a win-win, refundable, and there is absolutely nothing for the backer to lose. I agree that adding information on the pre-launch page is key to clarifying any issue that arises with this strategy. I am trying to launch a business, to replace my current 40-hour-a-week job, to make game design my career. I need to use the $1 reservation strategy to help achieve this goal. Thank you for this video, I really hope it gets shared and spread around to help combat the negativity around the $1 reservation issue.
There's a lot of creators in your same exact position - trying to transition from their current career to running their board game business full-time. I wish you the best and thanks for sharing your perspective!
Super well thought out and well communicated video and strategy. Tagging along with what someone else said in the comments section, I'm both a creator and a consumer. I know how important it is to validate products properly, and how painful it is to spend thousands of hours and dollars on a project that hasn't been properly validated! I think the $1 reservation funnel is genius as a way of validating and finding your true fans early on in the process. And as a consumer, literally anyone can afford $1, especially for a product or project you want to support! It's a very small price to pay, especially if you get special discounts or benefits as a result.
Also, I've seen many products that I genuinely want in my life, but never end up getting past the development phase due to a lack of funding, and it really sucks! That's so much more painful than any hesitancy I would have to spending $1 lol. (I've also given away much more than $1 in my life to causes much less worthy, and I think we all have).
This to me is the perfect strategy that honours both creator and consumer, and to be honest, I have difficulty understanding the logic of why anyone would be against it!
Appreciate the feedback Rob!
Well, your explanation is how I assumed this would work so I was quite surprised by the backlash and didn't really understand why people would FOMO after putting a dollar down as I put a dollar on KS projects I like so I can comment and don't mind losing it if I do not follow through. I never considered that I might get my $1 back if I didn't follow though...😎. Naïve, I guess😁. I think it is this getting a reward that creates a problem in peoples minds but I understand why people are more likely to respond to any incentive. Certainly more information would be valuable so your changes post consultation sound good although I wonder about them being adopted by others as it seems important to establish a consistent approach to this practice across all platforms so as not to spook prospective backers.
Cheers for your video.
Appreciate you sharing your thoughts!
Standards will naturally form with any strategy because backers will vote with their wallet - meaning the data will show if the way the strategy is being used is being received well by the market and creators will be forced to adapt.
Thank you so much for this level-headed clarification.
Of course! I appreciate you watching.
I have a question. How much should a VIP $1 lead cost? I was told that a normal email lead should cost around $2.
But not sure how much is cost for a lead that reserves for $1
As a creative, I'd be worried that I didn't present my game well enough in the $1 campaign, and I'd have to spend months refunding people their $1. I don't have 15 minutes spare while running my campaign and my project, let alone 15mins x 500 people. If I pay someone $30 an hour to process refunds, and they can only do 10 in an hour, I'm out $4 per refund. even if only 5% of people refund, I'm out 20% of that funding.
If you presented more facts, more stats about this, of the 11,000 backers. how many followed through, how many backed, how many cancelled. That'd be far more pertinent than a few YT influencers feelings. (I patreon these guys, lol)
is the funding in less than 24 hours a guarantee
Yes, it's wrong.
It feeds on consumers' FOMO by telling them the only way to get this great deal on a product that you barely know anything about is to put your financial information into another website before a campaign technically launches. If information about a campaign was released and reviewed before the prelaunch investment, that might be a different story, but that goes against the current trend of launching the hype train in tandem with the campaign.
I like the idea of adding more info about the add-on and the campaign in the pre-launch. What's the "hype train" you're talking about?
@@launchboom_official many campaigns will treat the campaign launch date as a threshold for when any information for a game can be released. They will have a media embargo for any reviewers or collaborators. Once the campaign launches, the common practice is to release a flood of reviews and info at the start of the campaign and to continue trickling out more news until the close of the campaign so that it continues to be talked about. That's what I would call the "hype train". Expecting an investment on nothing more than a game title and maybe a couple pieces of art before that launch date is really only going to attract people who are in the know, already fans of the designer/publisher/artist, or already hooked by the theme. Honestly, I'm surprised that the conversion figures on that group isn't higher because it sounds like skewed data to begin with. I get that you're collecting the data of those investors to focus where the advertising investment should be spent. It sits wrong with me to charge people money to use their data and to report inflated conversion values to the publishers as a justification of the practice. It feels like everyone is getting used.
@@launchboom_officialWhy has Peters reply disappeared?
Nah its super manipulative.
It's interesting that you jumped to having people give you money and not just ask the customer how confident they were that they would be backing the product. If the goal is to actually find out how many people are going to buy, why not just ask? Maybe just say thank you or give a small hat tip like put their name in the credits if they fill out a survey. If that isn't enough but making them have skin in the game is, then it is in fact preying on sunk costs and emotional manipulation. Asking people to put their money on the line (on yet another payments platform) before information is available on what it is you're spending money on is wrong.
The question you ask about "are they spending money because they want it" is not a useful question in most cases because they don't actually get information about what the expansion is - you address this but I'll believe it when I see it. It may not be dishonest but it is manipulative.
Finally, saying a $4m campaign was successful because of the $1 prepledge is such an insanely cherry picked example. That campaign would have been successful with or without the prepledge. What about the companies who pay you for your advice and then end up making 10k-30k? How do they feel about how well their money was spent?
Bingo.
We actually did try out surveys before the $1 like you suggested, but I didn't include that in the video! The issue with surveys that ask purchase intent questions like "would you purchase this product?" is that the responses are misleading. We didn't find a strong correlation between those that said they would purchase on a survey and those that actually purchased. I believe that's because it doesn't cost anything to answer a survey. I'd be curious to know if you've seen something different.
I agree that The Crooked Moon campaign would have been successful without the $1 reservation since they had a large audience from streaming for 6 years. I mentioned them for two reasons. First: the amount of people that put down $1 in the pre-launch was so large (over 11,000) and there was virtually no negative pushback. This was to support the point that there are a large amount of people making a decision to pay $1 in the pre-launch to get whats being offered and to support the creator from a place that's not rooted in emotional manipulation / being preyed upon. Second: the $1 strategy helped them know where to spend their marketing dollars in pre-launch, which helped the profitability of the campaign. Because the campaign had enough profit they were able to go full-time.
This is part of a public review a Crooked Moon team member, Mikey, left about us on Trustpilot, which speaks to your point and my points:
"Simply put, the LaunchBoom VIP system works and provides actual data and the hard numbers to fairly accurately predict initial success levels, which was invaluable in our planning and investments pre-launch
That said, LaunchBoom is not a magic elixir that will turn just any campaign into a roaring success. We came into the partnership with our own business experience, clear vision, quality product, and passionate community, and any successful campaign will require all of the above
However, LaunchBoom was the perfect catalyst to the fire we had already been kindling, and the synergistic skillsets allowed it to blaze into a huge success beyond any of our wildest dreams."
In response to this part of your comment: "What about the companies who pay you for your advice and then end up making 10k-30k? How do they feel about how well their money was spent?"
I would never claim LaunchBoom to be a silver-bullet to make any campaign successful. To Mikey's point above, we're not a "magic elixir." I wish every campaign we worked with was insanely successful and profitable, but that's not the reality. We've had campaigns with low profitability and unhappy creators - I'm not happy when this happens either. There's no incentive for us to have poor results. It reflects poorly on us and all I can do is try to learn from it and make the system better.
@@launchboom_official I think I would probably approach this from a "how likely are you to back the product" rather than a binary, "are you"
@@launchboom_official The Crooked Moon is not in the board game space, board gamers are highly intelligent people and you are playing them for fools, having $1 pre-campaign pledges getting actual game play items for the $1 pledge instead of a thank you trinket like Crooked Moon.
Then you anger actual people who are interested in the game, because they learn they missed out on game play items that they now have to pay more for because they missed some obscure pledge sign up somewhere or just don't want to have to pay money outside the actual campaign. If it was an actual worthless trinket being presented to the $1 backers, that's one thing. Having it be something related to game play, is entirely another. It just shows your marketing firm does not understand the board game space at all or it's backers and you are doing a disservice to the board game creators you are taking money from. This is most definitely feeding into FOMO and being manipulative within the board game space.
Board game creators, if you want to be successful in the board game space on crowdfunding, have a good game that stands out and look for a mentor in those who had successful campaigns without the need for marketing firms like Launchboom.
I will not fund anything with a $1 precampaign pledge. Furthermore, I will ask all campaigns going forward if they work with Launchboom and if they do I will pull my backing of them until Launchboom changes it practices in the board game space. For the record, I back approximately 10-20 board game space campaigns monthly and there are plenty more like me who feel the same way.
The fact that your company wrote a paper about “How to create a successful campaign with psychological tricks,” and lists the first “trick” you can “exploit” is that backers are “naturally prone to taking more risks with their purchases” kinda tells me everything that I need to know. Creators should know that they will lose as many customers as they might gain by using manipulative tactics. I for one will not back any campaign that uses the “reservation” practice you are pushing.
It's okay though because he changed the article title after he got caught. so we good right?
I don't know what is more sleazy, this tactic or the guy who profits off of it making a video defending it.
You are citing YOUR website (with inflated numbers) where you charge creators for this very service to convince people that it's all good and a "win-win"? The marketing guy is pointing us to HIS website and showing all the adds for his business? And people watch this and buy it? Your job is to MANIPULATE, your own site speaks to "exploiting" backers.