Starting Knight Vision Creative

Knight Vision Creative is a game design company focusing on table top roleplaying materials for the fifth edition of Dungeons and Dragons.

Overview

2021 was the big year. I decided to start up a game design company with the goal of launching my first product on Kickstarter. The initial product, the Summoner, will be a 5E class supplement providing all the rules needed to build a character focused around summoning. Check out the landing page if you want to stay in the loop: https://go.knightvisioncreative.com/summoner

Challenges

  • Establishing a social media presence, especially after spending the majority of my life avoiding social media, became an extreme hindrance. I had to start from scratch building a community and getting the word out to people who would like my product.
  • Going hand in hand with social media is the social media marketing. Initially I assumed I would hire a marketing company to help me with this piece, but it turns out that they will not accept you if you don’t have at least 500 leads.
  • Setting the foundation for the company also turned out to be extremely challenging. All the tools available, ideas thrown out, formulas available on the web make it difficult to cut through the noise and figure out what you actually need to do.

Solutions

  • Created a custom Gantt chart solution in Google Sheets to leverage a framework dividing tasks into Have to do, Should do, and Could do.
  • Implementing an automation system for gathering leads, managing them, and sending them emails to keep them engaged and provide additional value.
  • Partner with a couple of marketing teams to do a DIY bootstrap route on the marketing/network development.

Results

  • By implementing a reservation funnel, I was able to reach that 500 lead goal while also capturing 65 pre-orders for my product within the first 4 months.
  • I have a mostly automated system set up collecting leads and reservations daily.
  • The Gantt chart approach enabled me to delegate what was important but was able to be delegated. I was able to focus on only the tasks critical for launch and put the rest in the backlog for future improvements.
  • Our community is growing and we are inching closer to a lunch.
  • We found across the organization that we’d had 15,880 searches in the first 12 months.
  • The duplicates we’d averted so far amounted to more than $1,000,000 in savings.

To see our latest progress, visit: https://www.knightvisioncreative.com/latest-developments/

 

Illustrations for Summoner Project

Pre-Orders Gathered in first 4 months