This was a backer only update we sent out after our last Kickstarter. Now we're sharing it with the whole community.

Here's the previous Kickstarter, for reference: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1211458364/brainworth-play-games-that-teach-you-to-make-games
---

Thank you to everyone who backed this project. Each one of you has helped inspire us to continue pushing to bring change to education. Please put your email down at www.brainworth.net if you'd like to stay in touch.

Looking Back

It's been a rather crazy month for us, as we've been pushing to get more of the product out to you and reaching out to the community. We have been surprised both with where we got support from and where we didn't. By far our largest support came from Germany, while major Australian and US publications who we'd met with to arrange coverage in advance did not follow through. We did get a some press though, and some of the smaller publications had particularly insightful questions that have helped better frame our message moving forward.

Most community groups welcomed us with open arms, and we've connected with over 100 groups online. We've been to conferences, user groups and college clubs all over the USA and Australia and found support and new volunteers.

What We Learned

  • Make it much more clear what we are offering. Our biggest feedback was that it wasn't clear what people would get for their money.
  • Offer something with wider appeal. Our technology can teach a lot of different things. We love HTML5 games, but a focus on a broader market segment would have helped.
  • Get the community and press engaged earlier. Keeping everything secret until launch is great for Apple, not so good for everyone else.
  • More Kickstarter updates. We needed a plan for updates during the campaign and someone working primarily on communicating with backers. We prioritised other promotional areas, like reaching out to community groups and press and as a result it may have looked to you like we weren't doing much. Next time we'll give clear updates on what we're doing, and share progress every few days.
  • Do the promotional tour before the campaign, not during it. We've met a lot of great people during the campaign - people it would have been great to connect with and get feedback from earlier. And when the campaign is running, you need all the time you can get, so travelling during the campaign is not a good idea.
  • Have product demos better prepared. As always, there were some last minute technical problems. Unfortunately, these were on the larger side and required us making major changes that prevented full demos being ready during the campaign.
  • Kickstarter is great. There are many people we've met and much advice we've collected that wouldn't have happened without starting a campaign with an ambitious target. Trying to reach our goal and failing has taught us a lot more than waiting till we were more ready would have, so thank you so much for helping us learn. We really are better equipped to change education because of running this campaign. We've connected with many people who we'll be working with ongoing to bring about a revolution in education.

Next Steps

We'll be launching a new campaign when we've made all the improvements that we can with our learnings from this one. If Kickstarter allows us to give you updates on the next campaign we'll be in touch, but please put your email down at www.brainworth.net just in case.

Please feel free to contact us with your feedback on the campaign. We've been getting a lot of diverse opininions, but as a backer your support means a lot and we'll definitely take your views into account.

Thank you again for supporting us, and we hope to see you again soon.

Ben Sand and the Brainworth Team.