Founder's Journal #1

I almost cancelled our Kickstarter after 5 days, but then something extraordinary happened.

Many people know 81monkeys had a "successful" Kickstarter campaign (our backers certainly do), but few know how it all went down.

When I first picked our Kickstarter date, we had a good roadmap and runway, including funds for marketing and growing our team during the 30-day campaign. We had around 700k of incoming funds and had recently moved out of my basement into our first office. Things were looking up. But a few months before our Kickstarter was set to launch, disaster struck. The funds we were promised were no longer coming.

We were effectively out of money with about 2 months to go. I couldn’t pay the team, let alone market our Kickstarter campaign. Our Kickstarter dreams looked dead in the water, but I wasn't going to give up that easily (not sure "easily" is the right word here). I spoke with the team, and amazingly, everyone said they would stick it out until the campaign ended. Over the coming weeks, I managed to scrape together a bit of money to help some team members pay bills, which included giving up my family's rent money. Thankfully, I had a very understanding landlord (and wife) who agreed to let us go a couple of months without paying rent. But all of this put way more pressure on our Kickstarter, because now we weren't just raising money for our game, we would also need to cover our growing debt.

Fast forward to our Kickstarter launch day. After many long nights preparing our page, assets, trailer... we started our campaign with a very small following. Day 1 felt promising! People were excited to back us and we managed to hit a modest 18k, but it didn't last. Day 2 our pledges dropped 40% to 10k. I decided to start some FB ads with a tagline I heard a publisher once called the game; "Skyrim with pixel art." I used what little room was left on my personal credit card (maybe 6k) in the hopes of turning the ship around, but it didn't seem to work. By day 5 our pledges were down to 5k and that was when I decided to cancel the campaign. At the rate we were going, I would barely have enough to cover our debt and I believed in the game too much to waste our opportunity on KS. I went to bed that night with a huge pit in my stomach, and spent sleepless hours going over my speech to the team... I fell asleep at some point, and woke up to a notification on my phone; someone on Discord shared a link to a GamesRadar article about World of Anterra. Our pledges jumped up by 200% to $15k that day... the next day, $48k.

It was like waking up to a new world. The campaign ended up taking in almost 400k. Another 12 articles would be written about World of Anterra before the end of the campaign, including a great one from Nintendo Life.

And as an added bonus, some of the funds we were hoping for came in and covered all the debt we incurred and then some.

I believe that tagline, "Skyrim with pixel art", along with the ads that I ran with my last bit of money, became a beacon for the journalists who wrote about our game.

And so it began...

• Stephane, Game Director