Podcast Archives - Board Game Design Lab · Gabe Barrett

10 Steps to Go from Nothing to Crowdfunding Campaign with Kyle Sussenbach

·1 hr 40 min·9 clips

How a wrestler's advice to aim for the championship transformed one designer's approach to creating games.

Start with the hard question. How does a game designer move from zero to a live crowdfunding campaign? Kyle answers from inside the process, not from a neat victory lap afterward, which gives the episode a useful unfinished edge. The conversation still has a clear spine: ten steps toward launch, with the host pulling Kyle back to what a designer can do next. Kyle sounds like someone making the campaign real while he talks. That works. When conventions come up, the advice gets pleasantly practical. A booth is not the whole point. Designers can meet fans, publishers, other designers, manufacturers, logistics partners, and fulfillment people face to face, all in a room full of gamers. The episode does not pretend the grind is cute. Burnout sits in the background because a game and a campaign take stamina. Conventions come across as a reset button too: a place to hear encouragement, test whether people care, and make the project easier to remember in a crowded market. It ends with notes a designer can actually use and a push toward making games people love.

As heard by us

A grounded look at the real work between a prototype and a crowdfunding page.

Board game crowdfunding is treated here as a working path, not a tidy success story. Kyle Susanbach talks through the jump from nothing to a campaign, and the useful part is the nuts and bolts: showing games at conventions, meeting publishers and manufacturers in person,…

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Why you'd press play

If you need a plainspoken path from prototype chaos to a live campaign.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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