We promised this a while back and we are finally ready to write our post mortem of our failed crowdfunding campaign. We learned a few important things that we believe is of value to all those thinking of running a campaign of their own.
So let’s look at what happened. Back in February, we launched a t-shirt campaign on a nice website called Teespring. The site looked great and had us excited for its prospects. It wasn’t a huge investment like Kickstarter and IndieGogo are which made it seem like a great idea for a first run. One of the reasons we got turned on this site was because a very popular cartoonist used it quite successfully. It seemed pretty easy to do.
Unfortunately, the nature of the site was the primary weakness for our campaign. The site was solely dedicated to selling t-shirts. Most crowdfunding campaigns have far more than shirts to offer. This led to a lot of potential backers being turned away because there were no other easy ways to make a donation. The good news is that we had a few people actually interested in the shirt. Which means that a future campaign would have a fairly successful reward tier.
Another problem with the campaign was that we failed to follow our own advice on what we think makes a successful campaign. The big thing was the lack of a video. We really wanted to add a video, but Teespring does not have that capability. Additionally, it had a short space for describing the campaign. This limited our ability to tell people about the needs of of our site.
So what do we plan to do now? Well, we still have a need to help pay our hosting costs and domain renewal fees. This means we are going to try again. We won’t be doing it on Teespring. We have decided to launch our new campaign on IndieGogo. We will be launching as soon as we have our reward suppliers ready.
We are also going to undergo a bit of rebranding. Nothing major, but something we feel is important for the future of our site and community. From this point forward, we are no longer going to be known as Oklahoma Game Developers. Instead, we will be calling our site and community Oklahoma Game Development. It is a small change, but it has some important implications.
We started this site in the hopes that we could be the primary source of community of game developers in Oklahoma. However, as time went on another group emerged that met that need far better than we were able to. Goldfire Studios launch their own Oklahoma Game Developers community and have successfully organized regular meetups and presentations. Out of respect for their efforts, we are going to leave that effort in their capable hands. Instead, we are going to dedicate ourselves to news, reviews and other coverage of what the game developers are doing. With that, we will be changing our name. The site and url will remain the same, only the associate full name will change.
We are excited to be a part of this community and look forward to following the projects of the many talented game developers in this state.
