My proudest career moment is a little counterintuitive. It isn’t a SaaS campaign. It’s 800% funding a Kickstarter in 2019 for a board and card game I built from the ground up.
It started as a Christmas present. My wife and I usually do creative gifts, and we both like games, so I thought, I’m going to make a game. I built a super early prototype, gave it to her, and we all started playing it. Everyone kind of went, wow, this is really interesting, what if we built this out a little bit?
I was working a full-time job the entire time. My wife is a physician and was in residency, working 80 to 90 hours a week, so I’d be in work mode all day and then shift gears into Kickstarter work at night.
We started going to local gaming stores, doing playtesting, and building a whole early validation roadmap. We got thousands of people onto an email list and ran thousands of surveys.
That’s where I learned which questions are worth asking. Having someone rate the game 1 to 10 wasn’t that valuable for us. Pointed questions were. Where were you really confused? What was the moment you really got into it? Those answers drove the changes we made.
It also rewrote our ICP. We came in thinking this was for a very specific nerdy archetype that’s into high fantasy. What we found was that it was more of a family-friendly game. It was easy to pick up. People played it with their kids. People told us, my girlfriend never plays games, but she’s into this. When we later ran paid ads, the data said the same thing: product market fit was in a different direction than we’d assumed.
Kickstarter is all about momentum, a lot like Product Hunt. If people show up in the first couple of hours, you land in Kickstarter’s natural algorithms and they start serving you traffic. So the email list and surveys were all building toward getting people to show up on day one: how to follow up, what to ask, what made people come back.
I’d spent years giving playbooks to small businesses as a consultant. Now I was running my own ads, setting up my own networks, and hopping on podcasts myself. I got to pressure test all of it on my own product.
I had two major early learnings worth sharing.
First, our ads taught me how much small setup decisions matter. This will sound silly to anyone with a paid background, but I set my audience to people interested in Kickstarter OR a bunch of other things, instead of AND. It was grabbing tons of people who cared about Kickstarter and could not care less about board and card games. Fixing that one condition cut our cost per acquisition roughly in half.
Second, everyone told me shipping would be my biggest problem and to budget six months or more, not the three our production house promised. I thought that was overkill, but they were right. Delays, holidays in China, rounds of back and forth. Now every timeline I build has room for contingencies, anywhere I'm waiting on something I don't control.
Ultimately, our Kickstarter campaign was a resounding success and funded at 800%. We sold 4,000 copies in more than 100 countries. After Kickstarter we moved to direct to consumer, and then retailers started placing bulk orders.
What I’m proud of is that I had an idea, built it myself, and took it from zero to thousands of people holding it in their hands.
Key metrics
800% funded on Kickstarter (2019)
Over 4,000 copies sold globally
Shipped to 50+ countries
Grew from Kickstarter to direct-to-consumer to retail bulk orders
