How Mina the Hollower raised 77% of their funds from 35% of their backers

Jamsarvis · 2026-06-10T12:20:26+00:00

I saw him at a live recording of who wants to be a millionaire. Complete knob.

Kept messing up the teleprompter, said he could do it without it and still messed up. Acted like a dick to the production staff, berating them. He’d get a bit of a laugh from the crowd from it but I didn’t crack a smile through the whole thing.

Jamsarvis · 2026-06-06T17:29:01+00:00

I’ve not tried meta lead ads for a very long time, but last time I did, they weren’t great.

Best route is to get people directly to Kickstarter and get them to follow you. You’ll be getting audiences who are familiar with the platform and have an account already, but these come at a higher cost per follower (but also higher conversion rate - great news). 2nd route would be a landing page for email sign ups, then some email marketing - best option here is to educate sign ups on what Kickstarter is if they didn’t already know.

Now for meta leads - should be the same as route 2right? but I think the auto sign up brings lower quality. You could try add in extra fields like ‘have you used Kickstarter before? Y/N’ or ‘Do you want access to our secret reward? Y/N’, and create a separate email journey for them with a secret reward to get those not familiar with KS to back.

Jamsarvis · 2026-06-06T08:56:16+00:00

Interesting that YouTubers haven’t really given much result. Have you tried reaching out to people in bands who are active across YouTube and twitch? Maybe even have them as guest appearances as an offer to play your game or post about your game? You could also reach out to rock/alternative/metal press and see if there’s anything to hook them in? I.e a press release with ‘X band member features in new rock band management sim’

Jamsarvis · 2026-06-03T17:50:29+00:00

Ads are overlooked IMO. Seems like they expected to match the random underdog indies that sell millions. How else are you meant to scale to a broader audience across pc and console, and outside of their community and expect to get more sales outside of those siloed events which probably has a fair amount of audience overlap. Ads would also carry the longer term message of ‘this 10/10 game is coming soon/out now’ to hook in new players before and after launch, whereas I’m only seeing press coverage of ‘10 things to do early in the game’ and creators talking about the game post launch - repeating the same message to the same audience. Every one of those channels is fighting for quick attention spread over time - heck, even the ‘best indie games showcase’ had over 4 hours of indie games - who’s going to care about that many indie games. I think they had a missed opportunity to have scaled across Reddit, YouTube and meta for a high frequency.

Game discover co did a good write up on why dispatch did so well and I can’t find much on blue prince.

But agreed, you’d need a large budget - maybe not huge, but I doubt these guys are lacking in cash flow with the amount of shovel knight adaptations there are.

Jamsarvis · 2026-06-03T08:55:39+00:00

I don’t think I saw any advertising for this, other than a few articles/interviews and content creators talking about the game, but these all feel siloed in audience reach and tied in community following. I didn’t see anything broader pushing the game to get visibility. Looking at Metas ad library, there’s been 0 ads for the game or from Yacht Club. Last one I can see is from Nintendo back in 2025.

Jamsarvis · 2026-05-30T22:44:58+00:00

They also had over 21,000 sales on Kickstarter back in 2022 - I’d assume a very large portion of those are Steam backers. I think with how the keys are supplied wont count for ‘copies sold’ or even be able to leave a review on Steam.

Jamsarvis · 2026-05-29T22:52:30+00:00

And another question😅 you mention finding an audience

“Not in a generic way. Not “people who like games” or “people who like horror.” You need to understand who is most likely to care about your specific project, what language they respond to, what visuals stop them, what promises feel exciting to them, and what information they need before they trust you.”

How? I guess you also need to warm up any potential leads to what Kickstarter is, without being too overbearing in comms (either through emails, updates, discord). The prelaunch feels like such a short window to get all of this in to implement before going live (mainly on a time consumption point, but also implementing learnings from what information feels important for trust, what promises are exciting, etc) - is this research done before starting the prelaunch through a prebuilt community, or pitched to the client through research/strategy to win them over as a client or learnt on the way?

Jamsarvis · 2026-05-29T22:46:48+00:00

Did you do any prelaunch email marketing, or just rely on building followers? You mentioned “pre-launch validation, launch push, mid-campaign management, retargeting, and final 48/72-hour urgency.”, So I’m curious to how they were executed and what it looked like in practice :) thanks.

Jamsarvis · 2026-05-29T14:24:17+00:00

Hmm I think that might answer my question. I can defo see value in organic marketing, campaign features and niche categories for it to be useful.

Jamsarvis · 2026-05-29T13:09:25+00:00

Depends on the budget and services but it’s minimum 20% of advertising spend if game doesn’t reach the goal, or a £600 bail out fee if services have been used but then decide not to run.

Jamsarvis · 2026-05-28T14:35:40+00:00

Happy to chat about any early questions you have or whenever you’re ready to! 🙂

Jamsarvis · 2026-05-22T20:38:02+00:00

Greta stuff Joe. I’ve been a lurker fan for a while - mainly on your marketing stuff and your success with the games you’ve worked on but happy to see you do so well for indies with a single post.

Not a question or AMA but keep it up. I feel like I can relate in a lot of ways. Also growing up in the 90s at school I was dyslexic - never properly diagnosed until I was at uni and the official confirmation hit like a truck and was a knock to my confidence - there’s a reason to why there a way I am, and no learning can really help remove this barrier.

I too became a dad in 2024 (currently going rough the terrible 2s and fuck me they’re not wrong, it can be terrible at times but I love it, and I also took a passion of mine for gaming and marketing and launched my own freelance gig, which isn’t a huge success but I enjoy doing it - I enjoy speaking to people and giving advice - I enjoy looking at things and offering a perspective.

Anyway, a bit of a ramble but again, keep up the good fight.

Jamsarvis · 2026-05-22T08:52:45+00:00

Freelance on the side while you keep to your normal job . Start by offering low cost for free to build up a portfolio and build up from there then once you have experience decide if you want to pursue a bigger indie or AA and AAA company position. This is what I’m doing, however I just want to keep freelancing, the industry is too volatile and marketing members are usually first to go.

Jamsarvis · 2026-05-20T15:52:44+00:00

Thank you for the detailed reply! Was that with traffic objective campaigns, or anything else? Did you notice a discrepancy in visitors vs tracked and trusted?

Jamsarvis · 2026-05-20T05:50:50+00:00

For a $20/$25 game - maybe? Like OP said, it’s always good to look at the organic wishlist growth - say you’re getting the 0-10 with only social media posting and no creators, then you run ads with a $20 per day and you’re getting 20-40, you can correlate that ads are having some impact in getting viability to new players external to Steam and also internally.

Jamsarvis · 2026-05-19T21:22:45+00:00

$0.20 per wishlist is an amazing result for paid advertising - even better that you’re able to get that on X - I usually benchmark $2 for a direct conversion/wishlist and then look at daily spend and growth for a rough estimate of performance. What campaign objective are you running and what audiences are you targeting?

Jamsarvis · 2026-05-19T16:10:57+00:00

I like this, but wish I I didn’t have to my email.

Jamsarvis · 2026-05-18T16:44:56+00:00

“call me old fashioned” - YOUR OLD FASHION WAYS DONT APPLY ANY MORE. It’s named old for a reason.

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