The other day someone asked us why they should choose Teknaut over Kickstarter to fund their game. Our blogger did an awesome job explaining why in one of his posts. You can read it here:
The Importance of Marketing Support: Why You Should Choose Teknaut Over Kickstarter
If you have more questions for us, please do not hesitate posting them here or writing us at info@teknaut.com.
Cheers,
Teknaut team.
Can you give an example of how you market a particular game looking to raise cash? What type of promotional channels and social media reach do you have?
Teknaut has its own social media accounts: we went from 0 to over 2,000 (real) Facebook followers in about a month. And this is without even having posted any projects yet! However, the main point from the blog post I mentioned above is that the number of followers for the platform itself is not the most important referral source. It is not even in the top three. The thing that really makes a project succeed (so long as it is founded on a great idea) is the project owner's ability to execute a winning marketing campaign. This means leveraging existing contacts in a powerful and engaging way such that the project can quickly explode, gaining exponential momentum beyond the original nucleus. We help our clients do this by setting them up with a highly experienced social media marketer who really has the chops to do that kind of thing, setting up accounts for the project on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc. and using those accounts to engage people and get them excited enough to pledge their money, as well as building their campaign on our platform. We also help with email marketing and pretty much any other tool available, such as video editing and blogging.
Hope this helps clarify your question. Please feel free to post new questions or let us know your comments.
Cheers.
you may find this list of use - pixel prospector actually has a number of other lists which may aid you in your tracking down of available resources/links to help develop your site further - best of luck
Thank you very much sir! It looks very helpful. 
Also, as an update, we are currently working with a client to fund his game. We will be posting his project in a few weeks, since right now we are working on creating his campaign.
We will post the link here for those of you who would like to take a look at his project, to either see how we work or simply to help a fellow developer.
Teknaut is right, I have no marketing and my Kickstart project finished on 3%, then my indie gogo campaign is on 1% with only a week left to go. My main problem is views, on my indiegogo i have just got to 500 views after almost 2 months, Kickstarter finished at around 900. If Teknaught can help with marketing then I am sure it would help the many of us who have had zero success with crowdfunding.
I have had my second bad expereince with crowdfunding, so shortly i will be looking at private investment. I have wasted too much time and resources getting nowhere with crowd funding, but for many other Teknaut could help a lot more than current platforms.
Shaun Williams
Lead developer
Teknaut is right, I have no marketing and my Kickstart project finished on 3%, then my indie gogo campaign is on 1% with only a week left to go. My main problem is views, on my indiegogo i have just got to 500 views after almost 2 months, Kickstarter finished at around 900. If Teknaught can help with marketing then I am sure it would help the many of us who have had zero success with crowdfunding.
I have had my second bad expereince with crowdfunding, so shortly i will be looking at private investment. I have wasted too much time and resources getting nowhere with crowd funding, but for many other Teknaut could help a lot more than current platforms.
That seems to be a common problem with indie developers. Without trying to be harsh, you're basically saying, "I wasted time and resources, but I didn't invest in marketing. I hoped Kickstarter would get enough exposure so that I wouldn't have to bother with marketing, but it didn't. So then I tried IndieGoGo, and again didn't bother with marketing, and I hoped IndieGoGo would get me enough exposure so I wouldn't need to do marketing. But it didn't. So now I hope that Teknaut will get me (or future me's) enough exposure, so I won't have to bother with marketing."
It seems like unintentionally shirking responsibility, because you don't like a specific task (most of us don't like marketing), so you went from one site to another site hoping they'll do your responsibility for you for free. The first failed campaign is understandable. But to fail two for the same reason, and then say, "But maybe the third time would be better... without me doing anything differently...".
I'm sure you've worked hard laboring on all the other numerous areas games require (your game looks way better than mine, that's for sure!) - I'm not at all trying to imply that you're lazy, just that the marketing was a mis-estimated.
If only, "If you build it, they will come" was true! But it's not, so indies do have to have a marketing plan. We can't shift it off onto others. Plus, Teknaut say they'll connect you with "online marketing gurus", not 'do your marketing for you'.
I've also seen enough "online marketing gurus" to make me barf. Alot of them are borderline scams trying to sell ebooks and services to >50 year olds to 'work from home', so I'm just trying to use common sense and a little wisdom here. The advice I see from marketing "gurus", is common-sense advice and marketing information that you can get by doing your own diligence and research online. Alot of the "guru" information is outdated SEO tips that no longer are even relevant anyway, and can sometimes penalize your search engine visibility!
Since you are already sharing yourself as an example of what went wrong, I figure I'd chime in with my thoughts of why I think it went wrong. I'm sorry if this is just rubbing salt in your wounds! 
Your game project already looks fairly far along.
There is a human tendency to freak out that we are going to miss out on some huge deal when some new deal or website comes along, and it drives us to make irrational decisions. I don't think Teknaut is a silver bullet - though I'd love to see the projects they fund become successful, and if they help more than average when it comes to marketing, that'd be great. I don't think they can (or intend to) do all of a game's marketing work.
Well, thank you Shaun for your comments! We appreciate having someone here sharing their story and how it did not work for them for the same reasons we pointed out: lack of Marketing.
Servant of the Lord, we also appreciate your thoughts and comments! However, Teknaut is real and we are really trying to change how the crowdfunding market works (not forgetting that it is a very new market). It is not only that "developers" or entrepreneurs do not want "to do the job." A lot of people have great ideas, but they do not have the means to pay for marketing and everything else associated with that idea. That is why crowdfunding is such a huge thing, because it makes a lot easier to get funding. However, crowdfunding is not perfect yet, and as with any market, we saw a need and we are offering something to meet that need. Also, we assume that developers do not know a whole lot about marketing, so they should really appreciate the help :)
What is the great thing about Teknaut? It is that you do not have to incur any costs upfront to make your campaign successful. You will pay us only if your game or idea gets funded. A developer who tries to run a campaign on his own in Kickstarter or Indiegogo will have to pay for marketing upfront to be able to be successful, because without marketing he/she won't be successful. ALSO, I think we were not very clear: We will do the marketing for you, not only connect you with marketing gurus. It is part of our package: we build your campaign, launch it and market it for you. The developer will of course work with us to help develop the campaign and share it with his friends and contacts, but we will put the rest.
Now, you are right: we cannot make every single game successful, and that is why you must submit your idea to our team first. A game that would never sell to the public because is boring and it lacks creativity won't get funded no matter how much marketing you put into it. But if your game is cool and fun, we will help you get funded.
Now let me share something else. We are currently trying to be disruptive. Our idea is disruptive, and there is a need for what we offer. Yes, we are very new, but we are currently working on a project. And to do so, we are bringing people to our team that do not only have experience in online and social media marketing, as well as SEO, but that have a lot of experience and contacts regarding old media, such as newspapers, talk shows, radio shows, and a whole lot more.
You must be wondering why we are offering so much. The first reason is because we see a lot of potential in this. We want to take Teknaut to the next level and we think that to do so, offering marketing is essential. But we also care. We are a star up and we know what it takes to get things going and how hard it can be. We want to help developers and people with great ideas make them real, and that is why I personally believe Teknaut can be successful.
So, truly, a developer is not really losing anything by trying to get his project funded with us. He can still keep looking for other types of funding, such as angel investors and VCs if he wishes, or even working his full-time job. He will not put any money upfront, he won't have to invest a whole lot of time other than preparing the game, and he will probably end up getting funding for his game.
As always, we love to answer your questions or your comments!
Cheers,
Teknaut Team
Teknaut is right, I have no marketing and my Kickstart project finished on 3%, then my indie gogo campaign is on 1% with only a week left to go. My main problem is views, on my indiegogo i have just got to 500 views after almost 2 months, Kickstarter finished at around 900. If Teknaught can help with marketing then I am sure it would help the many of us who have had zero success with crowdfunding.
I have had my second bad expereince with crowdfunding, so shortly i will be looking at private investment. I have wasted too much time and resources getting nowhere with crowd funding, but for many other Teknaut could help a lot more than current platforms.
That seems to be a common problem with indie developers. Without trying to be harsh, you're basically saying, "I wasted time and resources, but I didn't invest in marketing. I hoped Kickstarter would get enough exposure so that I wouldn't have to bother with marketing, but it didn't. So then I tried IndieGoGo, and again didn't bother with marketing, and I hoped IndieGoGo would get me enough exposure so I wouldn't need to do marketing. But it didn't. So now I hope that Teknaut will get me (or future me's) enough exposure, so I won't have to bother with marketing."
It seems like unintentionally shirking responsibility, because you don't like a specific task (most of us don't like marketing), so you went from one site to another site hoping they'll do your responsibility for you for free. The first failed campaign is understandable. But to fail two for the same reason, and then say, "But maybe the third time would be better... without me doing anything differently...".
I'm sure you've worked hard laboring on all the other numerous areas games require (your game looks way better than mine, that's for sure!) - I'm not at all trying to imply that you're lazy, just that the marketing was a mis-estimated.
If only, "If you build it, they will come" was true! But it's not, so indies do have to have a marketing plan. We can't shift it off onto others. Plus, Teknaut say they'll connect you with "online marketing gurus", not 'do your marketing for you'.
I've also seen enough "online marketing gurus" to make me barf. Alot of them are borderline scams trying to sell ebooks and services to >50 year olds to 'work from home', so I'm just trying to use common sense and a little wisdom here. The advice I see from marketing "gurus", is common-sense advice and marketing information that you can get by doing your own diligence and research online. Alot of the "guru" information is outdated SEO tips that no longer are even relevant anyway, and can sometimes penalize your search engine visibility!
Since you are already sharing yourself as an example of what went wrong, I figure I'd chime in with my thoughts of why I think it went wrong. I'm sorry if this is just rubbing salt in your wounds!
Your game project already looks fairly far along.
There is a human tendency to freak out that we are going to miss out on some huge deal when some new deal or website comes along, and it drives us to make irrational decisions. I don't think Teknaut is a silver bullet - though I'd love to see the projects they fund become successful, and if they help more than average when it comes to marketing, that'd be great. I don't think they can (or intend to) do all of a game's marketing work.
I spent months on marketing with no budget, well i paid 90$ to crowdfundbuzz which was a waste of time. I spent a lot of time posting on lots of games forums, emailing and phoning local and interantional press, messaging lots of facebook pages for games and scifi fans, i also email a lot on youtube. I did 3 interviews and genreally spent a lot of time on marketing. Witrh zero budget that severly limits what and where i can expose on the Ghostship game. I had no replies from local press and almost 99% of all the emails and messages i sent out, i followed a few up and had no reply to those either.
I spent a full month from when it first went on kickstarter and have spent weeks snice while it has been on indie gogo, on average i have spent over a hundred hours a week both developing my game and (trying) to market it.
Marketing is the biggest challenge, I know that now and thats why i will not be putting much more time into the crowdfunding scene. If Technaught can help us out we are willing to give it another try, but realistically I am in talks with private investors at the moment which may be more fruitfull but more restrictive for me as a developer.
