I love RPGs, and I love all the beautiful and inspiring books that have been made possible with the help of crowdfunding. However, I see a fundamental issue with existing crowdfunding platforms, and it's tainting the experience for both creators and backers. That issue is one of a misalignment of priorities between the three parties: Creators, Backers, and the Platform.

Creators: Want to get funds to finish their project and print their book.
Backers: Want to buy cool new games.

Okay, we're aligned so far, one wants to make games for money, the other wants to spend money on games, sounds perfect! Except...

Platform: Wants to maximize money passing through their system (and their 5% cut) with as many projects with as many backers at the highest average price points. No part of this equation includes project quality (which is what backers care about and what creators endeavor to provide), only marketing, attractiveness, click-ability, appeasing the algorithm, and so on.

Woah, hey, who spilled all this ruthless capitalism in my cool art scene?!

The platform's priority of maximizing revenue is the root cause of some behaviors that can erode backer trust, create an adversarial backer-creator relationship, and eventually lead to crowdfund burnout. Things like obfuscating how complete a project really is and delivering late, adding tons of tiers for upselling, and understating how much money is needed to fund (trending towards the "funded in 14 picoseconds" banner). I do not begrudge any creators for these, they are what the system incentivizes. But what if the system could be changed?

Killing the Deadline

A core component of crowdfunding has always been the ticking clock, the ultimate FOMO (Fear of missing out) inducer: buy now or you'll never be able to get this again; or get this discounted price; or get this exclusive widget; or maybe it won't exist at all. But nowadays, the deadline hardly even means anything, you can be a late backer until the last possible moment when shipping is locked in. So what's the point of the deadline? It's nakedly artificial. It merely serves to keep the treadmill clear so that new projects can grab more attention. You've got a couple weeks, either pass or fail, and if you fail don't even bother trying to come back with an updated campaign, you'll essentially be starting from scratch. I think the stress of that deadline is part of the source of the problem, remove that conceit and maybe we can have a crowdfunding platform that strictly exists to connect backers to creators and make the experience as pleasant as possible on both sides.

So, wait, what is this?

Jomo.cool is a place for TTRPG creators to write about their ideas, gather a community, fund their projects, and get assistance from tools specifically tailored to their needs. Much like in traditional crowdfunding, projects have a goal, backers can pledge towards it and are only charged once the goal is met, but there's no time limit. The project can grow and evolve take as long as it needs to, making crowdfunding as iterative as game design itself.
On other platforms, you'll get advice to build a community first, to be confident that your project will fund in under 24 hours (to appease the algorithm), but why does all that community building have to happen elsewhere, on social media platforms and mailing lists? Close the loop, get comments on fresh ideas, send out surveys for directed feedback; grow a community, not conversion numbers.

However, I understand that voluntarily giving up on these FOMO-based strategies that have been proven to work is a scary proposition, especially in a niche like this where the money is already tight. So I'd like to provide as much value as I can, here's some Creator focused features:

Take a few moments to set up a Creator Profile, and you've got a pretty well featured blog. Users can follow you as a creator to see all your new Posts and Projects you create, via email notifications or RSS/JSON feeds.
Create a Project, which gets a landing page and it's own blog (which users can follow independently, the same way they can follow creators).
Submit an Application to begin funding. One of the requirements is a cost breakdown: fixed costs for art, editing, etc, unit costs for printing/shipping books, that sorta thing. To help with this there's a budget calculator with some good baselines. You'll also find a Mixam api integration, which allows you to input a few estimates about your final project, page count, paper size, color/black+white, and get back a printing price quote instantly.
Once your Application is approved you can start collecting pledges, and you can continue making Posts and iterating on your idea, or even work on a new Project in the meanwhile. Have you ever been able to hit the "Launch" button on a project before without a hint of dread?
After your Project reaches it's goal, backer's cards are charged, and Jomo.cool charges only 2.5% (plus Stripe's fees) compared to 5% on most other platforms. I mostly just want to make sure I can cover hosting and other costs, but I'd honestly love for this to go even lower if possible, reinvest surplus into cool projects, or transition into a co-op structure and let the group decide.
During the fulfillment phase, Jomo.cool helps with collecting addresses and provides integrations with EasyPost and Shippo (as well as a generic endpoint for custom integrations) so addresses can flow smoothly into your system and then shipping updates can come back to Jomo.cool for backers to keep track of.
More information on these several of these features is available on Jomo.cool/docs, and I'm open to feedback on all of it!

Now, we have time for a few questions

Who are you? My name's Reece, I haven't created anything of note in the world of TTRPGs- aside from lots of fun memories with friends :) But I found myself getting fed up with our hobby becoming increasingly dependent on these companies that are completely uninterested in the humans using them, doomed to follow the same trends of being more extractive for worse service.

Who is this for? Any TTRPG creator who looks at traditional crowdfunding and feels a sinking feeling that "this stinks, but I've got no other choice", maybe because of how stressful, daunting, or impersonal it is. I know quite a few creators have abandoned crowdfunding after being burned by and created their own independent stores, which is fantastic but also difficult and loses the network effect of a platform entirely.

Why's it called Jomo.cool? The naming decision was carefully considered over the span of about 15 minutes. JOMO (Joy of missing out) stands in contrast to FOMO, so it seemed a natural choice. I also think ".cool" is a hilarious domain name, and I grin like an idiot every time I say it out loud, just try it: "Jomo-dot-cool"

You can signup now, either as a creator or a regular user, and I'd love to hear any and all feedback. Thanks!

ReeceNG

Posts

Introduction to Jomo.cool