A Crowdfunder's Strategy Guide

CHAPTER 2The Crowd Is the New Gatekeeper

You don’t sleep much the night before you click the Launch button for your career.

That was the situation I found myself in the night of March 11, 2014. I had quit my day job three months before to focus on my fledgling board-game company, Stonemaier Games. I had run three successful Kickstarter campaigns at that point and was selling my games to distributors and retailers, but the longevity of my full-time career as a board-game publisher was largely dependent on the success of the Kickstarter campaign I was set to launch the next day for a game called Tuscany (fig. 2).

At 5:30 that morning I woke up with a start, absolutely convinced that it was 8:30 and I had missed my alarm. Eventually I coaxed myself ...