The Mayday Games Blog

I just wanted to post a quick bit of advice for all you project creators. We have done 25+ projects and here are a few pointers that we believe help us to keep our projects from flat-lining after that initial 3-day burst. 1) Consider a $1 backer level for say the first 5 backers when you start your campaign. Announce it ahead of time and let people know when you will be launching. We have done this on just our last two campaigns and we are getting more than triple the backers in the first hour compared to our previous campaigns of about the same finishing value ($25-$75 k range). I am seeing that this not only helps the first hour but seems to push our funding trajectory for the first several days as the campaign funds faster. Having just 5 of these is quite different from offering say 100 slots at $2 cheaper, that does alienate future backers but the 5 $1 slots go within 30 seconds of opening and it creates an additional interest like a marketing campaign, but without any real cost to us. 2) Link all of your campaign photos back to your BGG page of your campaign. It might just get you on the Hotness on BGG and costs you nothing. You can check out our current project called Voodoo and notice that even the headers link back to BGG. It may not help a ton, but it is FREE and certainly doesn't hurt. 3) After the first three days of a campaign we start hitting our prior 25+ campaigns with legitimate updates about their projects, along with a quick note and link to our latest (already funded) campaign. There is no pressure for those backers to back, but we see nice bumps every day from those prior backers that come over and join in. Be sure and include the video of the project too, we always put the main video on the current campaign on Youtube as well so we can easily link in on updates like that. 4) Consider doing your campaign for something less than 30 days. a 22 day campaign will still have the upswing at the beginning and end of the campaign but will just have 8 days of less flatlining in the middle. You are giving up a very small daily total of funding in the middle but keeping momentum going much stronger during that crucial middle period of the campaign, because it is just that much shorter. These few, simple steps seem to help us to avoid the flat-lining that is so common among projects these days. Caution: you get what you pay for and this advice is free. Here is our current project so far, you can see it isn't flat lining too badly just yet and we have more updates and other campaigns to ping about it in the coming days so we are hopeful. :) Here is how we do our $1 backer reward: