Learning by Doing, and Screwing Up
about 2 years ago
– Fri, May 06, 2022 at 12:04:44 PM
19 of you should have gotten the Smoke test this morning, and when it went out I discovered that none of the add-ons had been properly populated into your check out carts on Backerkit. And I also discovered that for a whole bunch of you experienced weird quirks occurred in the way shipping got calculated, so that many of you were being asked by Backerkit to pay a small amount of additional money (some $2, some $5, a few $10) beyond what was agreed upon when you signed up. That really bothered me because in the last few months I have had several opportunities in my own life to get on my high horse about how wrong it is to unilaterally renegotiate a deal, by just changing the terms previously bargained on the theory its no big deal. So I obviously needed to avoid being a hypocrite, and the only solution I could come up with was brute force.
The good news is I fixed it, mostly.
I created two versions of every add-on. One for Kickstarter backers only, at the original price, and one for Late Pledgers, at the higher price (as I promised during the campaign). I then added the lower-priced version by hand to everyone's cart, based on what you added on in Kickstarter to get your balance to zero. This worked for everyone except for the folks with the weird shipping errors. For everyone with a small error that led to a charge, I figured out how to give you a complimentary credit, and zeroed out the shipping charge. So that solved that. That leaves about 5-10 of you where the shipping error went in the other direction, where for whatever reason, Backerkit is giving saying you have a credit, where you really don't. I don't know how to fix that manually -- generally this was a $10 error. One option would be, if you want, is to think of this as a $10-off coupon on a purchase of a second copy of the game. Another option is you could just add in a $10 tip. Yet another option I suppose is you can think of this as a $10 error in your favor and just take the credit. Your call.
The thing is, I want to make sure that Late Pledgers cannot see the lower priced versions when they are able to log in, so I am going to "hide" these add ons. This means that the ones already in people's carts will stay there but if you accidentally (or intentionally) delete it from your cart, you won't be able to add it back into your cart at the Kickstarter price. So I'd ask you to try to avoid doing that (like seriously, please), but if it does happen, ping me and we'll work it out.
Bottom line: When you get asked to head over to Backerkit, if your add-ons are wrong (but I think i fixed them all!), ping me: [email protected]. If they are right, don't delete anything! Feel free to add more, of course. If there is an error that causes you to be asked to pay $2, $5, or $10 more than you expected (but I think i fixed them all!), ping me: [email protected]. And finally, if there is an error in your favor, consider donating/tipping the error back, or using the credit like a $10 coupon towards a second copy of the game, or you could just pocket the credit, but its your call.
Looking forward to having everyone migrated successfully to Backerkit and I hope only I will have to do a lot of manual work to make this whole process work.
Always be avoiding data entry!
Andy
We did it!! Now what? (A detailed discussion of what happens next)
about 2 years ago
– Fri, May 06, 2022 at 02:46:06 AM
With a day behind us here at EoC World HQ, I am finally facing a moment where I can catch my breath. Of course, I need to say thank you to all of you for your enthusiasm in supporting the game. Nothing could have been accomplished without you, the backers.
What I hope to do as we move forward is keep you informed in the process in a level of detail that lets you understand why each step takes as long as it does, why there is a delay (if there are any – which there will be with a high degree of certainty), etc.
To that end, let’s start with where we are now. Kickstarter takes up to two weeks to charge everyone’s credit cards and then to remit to me ~92% of the funds we raised. (Kickstarter keeps 5% and the payment processing people keep 3%-ish). So you may have already been charged for your pledge, and if not, you will be. If your credit card information has changed since you pledged, I’d ask you to please go and update it, so Kickstarter can collect your pledge successfully. They’ll harass you for two weeks before giving up and telling me you were a no-show, which is a sad outcome I hope we’ll minimize or avoid completely.
Then we go to the Pledge Manager stage. I’ve already signed up with Backerkit, our Pledge Manager, to take over the next step in the process. Backerkit will be sending out a short survey in about three weeks. That survey will confirm that we have your order precisely right, and give you a chance to alert us to any errors (which hopefully will be few and far between, if any!). The survey will verify your best mailing address, though you will also have one more time to re-confirm the address when we’re ready to ship the games. Finally, I will ask you a question or two just to help us understand what attracted you to the game so we can better market the remaining 150 copies we will have to sell.
A thing I do not know yet, but I will fill you in on when I myself learn it, is how long we will be in this liminal “Pledge Manager” phase between the funding campaign that has ended and the manufacturing phase to come. Backerkit needs to wait until Kickstarter sends me the money and send them your order info and address info. Then they will send about 5% of you a so-called “smoke test” which is just the survey I mentioned above, but it’s a way to see if the survey is working. If it is, then everyone will get the survey, and once everyone has replied, I *think* then we can say we’re ready to finish and go to the next phase. How long that takes, I do not know yet. I’ll find out soon and let you know.
However, there is a bit of an incentive on our part over here at EoC World HQ potentially to extend this phase longer than the minimum. For one thing, until all of the custom-made artwork for the cards is finished, we can’t print the games, and until we can print the games, we might as well allow more people to find out about the game and put in an order. We might be covered in two major media outlets in May and June (fingers crossed) and if that were to happen, it might mean we could produce 1,000 copies rather than 500, which would turn the game profitable, which I am told is a nice outcome.
The second reason we’re inclined to hold open this phase as long as we can pull it off is that we’d very much like to get the remainder of the cards adopted. Once I freeze the deck and we go to press, the deck will be frozen in place forever (at least for the first edition of the game). To the extent I can find 10 or 20 or 40 more fans willing to support the game and be the face of the remaining cards, I’d very much like to get them into the game’s first printing. Without that, even if we sell all 500 copies, the game will lose a decent amount of money. With the adoption, we can break even at 500. That loss is not going to stop me from going forward, but I want to give things enough time to have a chance to minimize the losses.
Thus, while I don’t know exactly when the pledges will be collected, when the surveys will be verified, when the illustrators will be finished with their work, I do know that even if they were to all magically finish tomorrow, I would hold out until mid-June to try to get some more customers for card adoptions (and games, if people want to buy those as well) before declaring “pencils down” and going to press. If, on the other hand, one of the other elements takes longer, then whenever the last of those processes is done, we’ll go right to print right away.
Speaking of going to print, as you may recall, we’ve also already signed up with Gameland, our manufacturer. Gameland is based in Ningbo, China, and has agreed to make 500 copies of the game, which makes it feasible for us to produce the game at the relatively small scale of a 350-unit crowdfunded game. I was in the privileged position to be able to put my own money down in a 30% deposit to get us a place in line about six weeks ago, with the hope to speed up production, but now when the Kickstarter folks send your pledge money to me, I will be very grateful to refund the money I borrowed from my own rainy-day fund, and then also to cover a lot of other upfront costs we’ve incurred. And, it will also help us cover the cost of Fulfillment.
To that end, I am happy to announce we’ve agreed to work with Funagain Logistics, a fulfillment company. Funagain’s job will be to actually ship you your games. They’ll work with Backerkit to get your purchase and shipping address info, and work with Gameland to get the games from Ningbo to the United States.
After that, we just let the professionals do their thing. Gameland makes the games, sends me samples, I act reasonably and quickly to approve them unless there is a clear problem, and we hopefully quickly get a high quality game made. Then they get them to the dock in Ningbo where Funagain takes over, shipping them to a West Coast port in the US or Canada. They’ve told me to expect a six week Pacific crossing (up from 10 days pre-pandemic). They will warehouse the games in Medford, Oregon. At that point, they’ll re-survey everyone to confirm the addresses from Backerkit and then ship them. You’ve all paid for shipping already, so unless you choose to add more products to your order, you won’t have to pay anything more for your orders. If shipping costs go up, that’s on me. (If shipping costs go down, I’m keeping the profits, but what are the odds of pricing going down?) And if we’re lucky, you’ll get your games before Big Game (that’s Stanford vs. Cal) or the Iron Bowl (Alabama/Auburn), or at least prior to the College Football Playoff. But other than being responsive to the questions my partners ask me, I will not really have much control over the speed of manufacture, the speed of cross-Pacific shipping, whether the games get unloaded quickly at the port, etc. So all I can promise you all is I will make game-related “to do” items a high priority (except during my 4 weeks away in July) and do everything I can not to be the bottleneck, and the rest of the EoC team will do the same. And when there is a delay for any reason, I will do my best to communicate how long it will be and what the cause is.
My job is to try very hard to make sure everyone talks to everyone else without being a total pain in the ass. Anyone who knows me knows I will probably lean a bit too much to the side of pain, but as long as the net effect is to keep everyone on the same page and avoid miscommunication, I’m willing to have people find me a little bit annoying. I just want to avoid having stuff slip through the cracks, have deadlines get missed because someone forgot to follow up on something, etc.
You may have noticed that I have not mentioned the Adoption process, which I will save for a separate update. And similarly, I have not discussed the process by which we will ship posters for card adopters and for the few of you who did not adopt a card but who did purchase a poster. You will be able to get these much earlier than the game itself – essentially as soon as I declare “pencils down” the cards will be final, and we can print posters almost instantly, though I am going to take a “bucket list” vacation for almost the whole month of July, so it’s possible I can get these out in June, or its possible it will be delayed to August. (I may do an update or two from my trip but if I do it’ll be about tourism in Europe, not Recruiting!) But I do want you Adopters/Poster folks to know I will send a timeline specific to you in a forthcoming update, so you can know how the process is going to go.
That’s probably more than enough for one update. Next time I write I hope to condense this same information into a graphical timeline that I’ll keep in each subsequent update, and I can then use to highlight where we are in the process by crossing out steps we’ve completed. But that all depends on my ability to make the graphics because I do not want to pull even 30 minutes of illustration time from the team who are working on cards, etc., since that is so much more important.
Finally, let me end where I started. Thank you for your support. I can’t really express how gratifying this campaign has been for me, and how important getting my game into the world is as a life goal. The fact you are all trusting me to make my way through the process on your behalf is an honor I hope to live up to.
Thank you and always be crootin!
Andy
