Quick Kickstarter Lesson Recaps: #161-165

10. November 2025 um 14:49

In today’s flashback post, we’ll look at articles about announcing project status progress, constantly moving graphics, creating satisfaction through certainty, automated address updates, and videos densely packed with info.

The Power of Public Progress (#161): 10 years ago I started sharing the status of our projects in our newsletter. I’ve continued doing that to this day, allowing everyone to see, and get excited by, our upcoming releases!

When to Use a GIF Instead of a Static Image (#162): In general, I’m really not a fan of constantly moving graphics on a computer screen (it’s hard to read the surrounding text). However, I’ve seen them used successfully when the GIF helped to explain a very specific, potentially confusing aspect of the project in a way that neither text nor a static image could. I used a GIF to explain the difficult-to-grasp extended board for Scythe, which is includes a an additional board that slides next to the back of the game board to increase the size of the board by 50%. If that sounds confusing, you’ll understand why a GIF was useful in this case, and you can check it out in the full article.

The Power of Certainty (#163): Certainty has a strong impact on crowdfunding backers, especially given that we creators put projects on Kickstarter many months before backers get any tangible benefit. There’s a lot of uncertainty there. But we can shore up that uncertainty with: offer a nearly ready-for-production product, predefined costs, third-party reviews, visual examples of your product, money-back guarantee, and of course, a history of successful projects to help create a sense of predictability.

How to Automate Backer Address Updates (#164): With some newer-than-this-article features from Kickstarter and the a plethora of third-party pledge managers, this article isn’t as relevant today. But one key part of this article is that there are likely solutions to some of your problems that may simply take a little research to find. Your backers can be instrumental in this process. And of course, some fancy spreadsheet knowledge, like how to use macros, can be very handy.

The Whiteboard Video (#165): A “whiteboard video” is a dynamic approach to sharing a large amount of data in a short amount of space. As the narrator talks, the concepts they describe are illustrated in real-time on the screen. The visuals are good for both short-term attention spans and long-term memory. For my Scythe Kickstarter, I reached out to a creator to see if he would make a preview video for me. In this situation, I didn’t have to write the script. He is particularly good at condensing a lot of information into a short, visual video. He played the game, wrote the script, and sent it to me for review before he moved on to the illustrations. A video like this creates the opportunity to have friendly, accessible visuals for your potentially complex project.

Also, just yesterday I posted this video with some answers to questions from a university class:

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If you have any questions or thoughts about these topics, feel free to share in the comments!

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