Next week on March 15th we are super excited to launch our new Remarkable Guilds campaign, but we realize that many of you are still waiting to get the physical pledges from our past campaign. So why launch a new campaign? Is that even smart? I felt felt this topic need a more in-depth answer to really understand it well, so I made a video dedicated to it. I hope you enjoy this deep-dive into how Loresmyth operates.
When is a good moment to launch a new campaign?
We all experienced that with last year's pandemic, supply chains and shipping really disrupted things. Because of the massive delay in being able to get our books printed and shipping around the world, we actually canceled a Kickstarter (putting our company at risk financially) to not upset our backers who were patiently waiting for their goods. More than anything, we are still bummed out by the fact that people have been waiting such a long time to get their physical pledges. But now in two weeks time we are (super excited) to launch our new Remarkable Guilds campaign, and we hope most of you are happy about that too! This does raise the question though, should creators launch another campaign when the previous one hasn't been completely fulfilled yet? Good and valid question, so I decided to make a really in-depth video about it:
https://youtu.be/c8rquKHRdXc
Crowdfunding Is a Creators' Lifeblood.
Let me pause here and say that you have been the most amazing loyal, patient, and understanding fans a creator could wish. Really incredible. We always try to balance making our customers happy (first and foremost) and second: achieve our business goals. So why continue launching campaigns? Well in part, creators have no choice or to go out of business, because sometimes product sales alone are not enough to survive. Especially smaller creators are still building out their product catalog and they survive from Kickstarter to Kickstarter. In the case of Loresmyth, this is not the reason why we launch new campaigns in the frequency that we do. Or at least not the complete reason. For Loresmyth the motivation to sequence our Kickstarter campaigns twice a year, has to do primarily with our dev teams size and ability to create two new book titles at the same time, every single year. We invested in growing our creative teams to this level and also put in place, professionally operated workflows and processes to effectively create books, on budget and on a schedule. It's quite the feat.
Effective Product Development Cycles.
So? The most important fact for us to launch a new campaign is that we have a sizable development team on the payroll that you don't want to have idling when a product is delivered to the book manufacturer. Once we finished a book and send out the digital version(s) to all our backers, we no longer have anything to do other than waiting for it to get printed and transported. Printing and transportation is completely handled by third parties and we can't speed that process up. So instead of having our teams do nothing until the products are finally in stock, we have them start developing the next product, before any Kickstarter brings in funds. At Loresmyth we really, really pride ourselves in having worked tirelessly the last years in setting up a super professional development workflow, that is very reliable and kind to our teams, as well as being able to produce products all year round.
Taking Big Risks.
Since we start development on products 5 months in advance of their respective Kickstarter launch, this means we are taking a risk. A big, 20.000to 25.000 euro risk, as that is the amount of money we pre-invest in product development before any money is raised through Kickstarter. And this is money that goes into product development alone, it is not even our monthly operational costs. We do things this way because we have grown as a company, and we strongly believe in our products and we enjoy making them immensely. We are able to space out our product development cycles to leave very little "wasted time" in-between, while also giving our team generous holiday periods and time off to recharge the batteries. Trusting that our Kickstarter campaigns will at least fund and recoup some of our investment, we now have the benefit of having a half-completed project ready going into a crowdfunding campaign. This minimizes the risk for the backers as we already have 5 months of development time put into any given product. Once the campaign funds successfully, we work on it until it's done, and in the meantime... start on the next product development cycle.
We get the Greenlight from the Kickstarter Team in Advance.
Loresmyth works in close communication with the team at Kickstarter. We always need to go through them to get the approval to launch a new campaign. While we do our own thinking on when to launch (or not to), we also have to get the blessing from the team at Kickstarter. There is no chance we launch a campaign without Kickstarter believing we are reliable and have a great track record with communication and delivery. Luckily Loresmyth checks a lot of boxes there.
So again I welcome you to watch the video above to really get a great explanation of how we work. In a time pre-covid, it would even have been possible (in most cases) to Kickstart AND deliver the physical goods in that same year. But those timelines no longer work with a globally disrupted supply-chain. Perhaps we return to such a time again, but who knows.
Remarkable Guilds Kickstarter Launches March 15th
Our highly anticipated new book Remarkable Guilds is launching on Kickstarter very soon. If you are not already following the page, please click here to get notified. This is the 4th installment in our popular remarkable book series, and we are HYPED about it.
I really felt it important to get this message across because there are sometimes misunderstandings revolving around this (understandably) touchy subject. Virtually all creators have their customer interests at heart and are super passionate about giving it their all.
We currently live in very extreme times in the world, where it is challenging to run a company. But more importantly, unfortunately, there is a lot of aggression, hate, and turmoil going on. Let's not forget to look out for one another, listen, help each other and be careful with our judgments. Loresmyth has the most amazing customers and Kickstarter supporters, and we feel truly blessed! Looking forward to talking again soon!
Best wishes,
Chris van der Linden / CEO Loresmyth