Starting A Kickstarter Is Super Easy… Almost: A Tale Of 3 Campaigns

It’s 12:14PM. I click on the link in Maki Naro’s tweet, which leads me to his Kickstarter for a new comic series called Sufficiently Remarkable and the total is still $0. Naro is a final-three contestant in Penny Arcade’s Strip Search, a web series in which a dozen artists from around the world (although all American; one living in Montreal) competed for a $15,000 prize and an opportunity to be embedded with the massive Penny Arcade empire. Naro didn’t win, settling for an anecdotal third place, but now two weeks after the show’s finale, he’s highlighting a very important trait in a successful Kickstarter campaign: the necessity for exposure.

A Prince Among Emperors

Eight days ago, I launched a Kickstarter of my own with long-time friend, illustrator and FEZ staffer Cody. MANEATER: The Fall of Mankind is an idea I’ve had percolating in my brain for over a year and a half, the culmination of a lot of stray thoughts, then subsequently baked in a lot of childhood science-fiction. It’s about a violent femme fatale terrorist named Deity Marvelous who’s ready to unleash a virus on the populace that will eliminate all human males, paving the way for her ascendance. The story’s protagonist is a risk-taking tomboy named Ram Crasher, a detective for the Metropolis One Police Department who has a lot to prove and definitely gets the opportunity to when a newly-installed Commissioner sets her aside to head up the investigation.

As soon as the idea came down to cast it as a comic and Kickstart it, I immediately began to research every possible thing about how to best handle a campaign. Article after article, blog after blog, I read about Kickstarter successes, failures, best practices, pain points, opportunities, on and on. I wasn’t a stranger to the service, though. I’d help fund a film about indie game development titled, appropriately, Indie Game: The Movie in 2011, a time that may as well be a million years ago now considering how fast the crowdfunding world has changed.