WBWF

After a 45 day campaign on Kickstarter, and over two decades of experience in this industry, I was taught an effective lesson or two through our failed attempt at crowdfunding.

The three most important things I've learned are:

1. Do not invest yourself 100% into a campaign, for a product that has little exposure. Often crowdfunding requires a huge boost within the first week, or your have little chance of hitting the expected goal. Services such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo are not marketing engines to boost your sales, they simply represent the landing page to present your product.

2. Rolling off the last statement; make sure you have a built-in audience. This does not mean simply hitting podcasts within the first week of launching, but make sure that those users (who are potential backers) are present and accounted for; which in our case would have required free access to a completed public beta so that the players can then be lead to support growth.

3. Unfortunately, paid marketing and social saturation is key. This could possibly be overpowered by a built-in audience that's slowly aggregated by loyal users. However, if the need for an audience is immediate, there is very little chance of this being achieved without an investment that's properly scoped and aimed at your primary demographic.

After friends backing me for $400 and two minimal backers at $1/ea., someone backed the project as a "Pro Manager".

I set this campaign up for 45 days, since I felt the extra two weeks would be a good way to test gaining more traction with some social media announcements. Social media is basically a fruitless endeavor though, since no money is being thrown into paid marketing, making the overall saturation scant at best.

So, on Monday, we're basically hitting the ground running on a proverbial 30 day campaign with 4.5% already seeded into it. Some folks have states that it isn't until your last two weeks that you'll see an increase of backers on an independent/unadvertised project. I'll also be posting my first update this week, showing the progress and the features I've been working on since the campaign was initiated.

The reward tiers are:

• Basic Manager ($25)
• Pro Manager ($50)
• A Stable Foundation ($125)
• The Founders Club ($250)

For more information, check out our "Rewards" section on Kickstarter:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hypergeek/the-web-based-wrestling-federation/rewards/

Using a custom framework I've created and refined over the last three years (aka "HTMLcore"), I decided to take the chance and create a web-based game called "The Web-Based Wrestling Federation" or the "WBWF". Don't know if it'll gain enough traction to be worth pushing forward with, but you don't know until you try. I hope it will be.

During the next 45-60 days, I'll be completing the first fully-functional game I've ever created (with 20+ years experience in design and development); using Node.js/Express, EJS, Gulp, MongoDB, Mongoose, Bcrypt.js, MD5, Nodemailer, Multer, and more. All of which I've learned through self-education, alone in a single bedroom apartment. For now, the project URL will point to my Kickstarter page, but the temporary landing page is located at http://www.wbwfwrestling.com (since I'm in the middle of QA and the last few sprints before it goes live.)

Below is from my "Risks and Challenges" section of the Kickstarter campaign:

"Designing, developing and marketing a web-based game from scratch can often be a grueling challenge to achieve single-handedly. In the end, it's been done with the overall purpose of finally delivering a personal milestone to the general public that I can be proud of and enjoy playing with the support of a fan base that I hope will enjoy the results of those efforts even more.

In the distant past, play-by-mail games were the early introduction of a pay-to-win mentality that, unfortunately, we still see in many video games today. As someone who grew up in the financially low end of a middle class family, money didn’t grow on trees. Each match would cost anywhere from $1 to $2.50 each and even though those games were fun, many players would throw $100-$350 a month into it, increasing their records and gaining favoritism from the respective owners. With only about $5-$10 a month to spend on a couple of wrestlers, that was earned by bagging groceries, it often felt like I was being left in the dust.

The technology stack or delivery methods that I’ve decided to use in building this game were never as important to me as something which has always remained a personal concern with the business model for way too long: Affordability. With the majority of websites and apps being subscription-based, I stand firm on the decision that the ability to play any game I create will never go beyond the reach of what I was able to spend on something similar in the past."