Hello dear wargaming and 3D-printing community,

with the launch of my current kickstarter and the great reception by the community (funded in less than 3 hours, yay!) I wanted to adress the community by a few words, most importantly with a big "thank you!" and a little "look behind the scenes" – on my "road to a succesfully funded kickstarter".

The beginnings

As few of you might know, I have not been a 3D-designer by the start of 2020. Actually I wasn’t even a big part of the community. I had played tabletop games with my little brother and some friends now and then before, but with my job in the event-industry in a leading position I had only very little time to invest in a time consuming hobby like miniature painting and tabletop.

With the start of covid-19 and the heavy impact on the event-industry everything here in cologne/germany (and of course around the globe) collapsed and eventually my company went to "sleep" to try and survive the pandemic. I had to rethink my next years. Instead of profiting from a nice job in an uprising company I was now practically unemployed. Since I have an education as a graphics designer I started doing some webdesign, layoutjobs and logodesigns to get by. In the spare time I scrolled through instagram, pinterest and reddit and learned more and more about the awesome tabletop community. And something catched my eye: Multiple creators and even companies who made a living doing custom bits for tabletop, 3D-printable terrain or even unique miniatures. And naive as I was I thought: You are a graphics designer. How hard can 3D-design really be? (The answer is: Harder than you think. Yes, even harder than that. YES EVEN HARDER THAN THAT. 😄 ). So I started the creation of my first models, including custom effect-bits/weapon effects (my attempt was: start small, go big).

Motivation boosts by the community

And boy did I have fun. Not only was I learning 3D-design, I also flourished in the feedback of the community. Painters reached out to me to get their hands on effects and I was happy to deliver some. My profile grew from 10 to 100 followers. Then to 300 and faster than I could realize the account was at 1k followers, with just some paintjobs, effect-bits and community work. The hype was real! And I had tasted blood...

How to do a kickstarter that does not suck?

My next steps were clear to me: You have set a foot into the scene, you have created some models, you have done research on 3D-printing, you are in contact with several guys across the community who do incredible work - go do a kickstarter with all the cool models you want to create! So I started designing bigger stuff. I did some drones, mech-walkers, turrets, bunkers etc. The models were cool enough that many of you guys responded and subscribed to the kickstarter page even pre launch. But something was missing: I needed humans and human like creatures to include, but my skill level was too low to create something fitting. So I reached out to El Mutanto and hired him to create two infantry kits for me: Ogres and Guard. And they turned out incredible.

But now I needed some advertising material that was cool enough to showcase such incredible work. So I hired some video guys to do a sick trailer. But design is expensive... Even more so, all the testprinting, ads on social media, video-creation, 3D-design consulting etc. very soon brought me to the edge of my seat (and purse). With already ~2.500 € spent on the project I made a hard cut. This was it and this would have to be good enough. I prepared everything for the launched and almost sh*t my pants when I clicked "go live".

How it’s going...

And what do I say: I got funded in less than 3 hours. We are currently at ~4k € wich is enough to cover the expanses I had in advance and still bring me some profit, that keeps me motivated to invest further in the 3D-designing world. I have already planned more future projects and can’t wait. If you want to work with me, please get in touch!

Stay safe, stay healthy, stay hungry!

Josef

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