Creating a kickstarter for Hinterland Hills

We knew we had a great product from years of design interactions and tuning. We knew there was nothing similar on the market - high-quality, modular, sturdy terrain - and one day we should do a kickstarter to really kick off terrain as a business. What finally pushed us over the line was a post of our large table on /r/Warhammer - we filmed a timelapse of us setting up the big 4’ x 4’ table (3d Printed Modular 4'x4' Table Winter theme, follow up to Spring theme area hills. : Warhammer) - and we were absolutely blown away by the feedback and comments. We didn’t even think to sign people up - just wanted to show it. The feedback was incredible.

Besides avid gamers, Evan and I are operations people. We are good at taking a goal and breaking it into manageable chunks. We had a rough idea of the steps needed to make a kickstarter a reality, but there were a lot of details we could have managed better. Hopefully, this rough guide / timeline can help.

Create a business - 30-45 days out

We created our business, Hexhog Tabletops, LLC and registered with the state and our city. Once we had our business ID, we could open a bank account with a local credit union, which gave us credit. We selected Xero for accounting, GSuite for email / documents and Wix to manage our website. We also registered a youtube, facebook, instagram, twitter and discord account.

Pre-marketing - 21 days out

We decided to validate the product - and collect some valuable feedback - by posting some of the different terrain features and configurations on Reddit and Facebook. We tried to capture the modularity of the terrain and staged it with miniatures showing it’s use with D&D and Warhammer. We had incredible feedback, and we sent people to register to our website to capture their emails.

My Mini Factory - 15 days out

We decided to partner with MyMiniFactory on the kickstarter for a number of reasons: 1) We had seen them on many other high profile campaigns, 2) terms were good, 3) the team was great to work with, and 4) they would advertise us on their email list - full of thousands of people who would love our product.

Kickstarter - 7 days out

Creation of the kickstarter was a tremendous amount of work - and definitely not the operations work we are used to. We quickly realized that the quick phone videos we shot in the garage with kids bikes and other trash in the background weren’t quite the polished look we saw in other kickstarters, so we needed to reshoot all our marketing images. We commandeered Evan’s garage, hung some black bed sheets to use as backdrops, borrowed a makeup ring light, and took hundreds of photos and videos. I drew the short straw, so I had to learn photoshop and video editing (Photoshop and Premiere) - which was actually quite satisfying to use. Neither of us felt comfortable doing the voiceover, so we looked to Fiverr - and found this guy (Alex Actor Magic) - he’s fantastic, and you should give him some work. He read the script we prepared, and I edited to his voice. Evan built the kickstarter page out - we had to go through many iterations of product renders to get the lighting and color just right. We enlisted friends and family to review our page. We submitted the page to kickstarter for review a week before our go live date, but continued to make changes until hours before we went live.

Launch date - 0 day

We decided on early bird pricing for the first 3 days of the kickstarter. We decided to launch at midnight and had a celebratory drink. We sent emails to our website subscribers and let friends and family know we were live. The first couple days were amazing - truly rewarding and validating of the product. We were so amazed to see people from all over the world back us and make positive comments on the kickstarter.

Lessons Learned - 7 days post launch

Some things we should have done - or done better

If you need 2 minutes of video - shoot 2 hours. Adobe Premiere was fantastic to use for a novice editor.
Iterate with lighting conditions before you take photos - then take hundreds. Photoshop is an amazing product, learn how to use it.
Register for google analytics - and activate eCommerce tracking before you go live. This will help to validate your ad spend - and track how well certain ads work.
Miniature, Tabletop and other blogs weren’t easy to get in contact with. I’d recommend starting your contact with them months in advance to secure advertising space.
Plan for success and prepare for unlocking stretch goals ahead of time! We could have saved a lot of aggravation by having stretch goal imagery ready - and posts written.

Check out our kickstarter here!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hexhogtabletops/hexhog-tabletops-hinterland-hills

Matt Ghent

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