crowdfunding

Help on backing Kickstarter projects for non-USAians

by Suw on March 13, 2012

This awesome video by Double Fine Adventures, who have just crossed the $3 million mark on their Kickstarter project with just 10 hours to go, provides some useful advice for anyone outside the US who doesn’t have a credit card but still wants to support a project. There are more details on their forum.

Supporting Kickstarter projects requires an Amazon Payments account. For some non-USAians, this can be problematic either because you don’t have a credit card or because bugs in the Amazon Payments system cause problems. For the latter, see if this fix from Jungle Disk works. If you do have problem backing Queen of the May, please let me know!

And, finally, Queen of the May is nearly up to 20 percent funded now, so please do pop over and pledge something and get us heading towards the all important 30 percent mark. Once I hit 30 percent, the project then becomes 90 percent likely to fund, so these early pledges are really, really important!

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Queen of the May Kickstater project launched – please help spread the word

by Suw on March 10, 2012

At last, Queen of the May is up on Kickstarter and ready your support! We have 31 days to raise $10,000, and already have $1071 pledged. Even if you choose the lowest support level, which is $3, please do consider taking part as every little helps!

You can also help immensely by telling your friends about it. No matter how focused your own personal network, every mention of the project helps. Here are a few things you can do:

Use your social networks
Send a Tweet, update your Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn statuses, or leave a message on any other social network you use. Kickstarter provide a Tweet button that allows you to log in to Twitter and send a pre-written Tweet which says:

Queen of the May by Suw Charman-Anderson — Kickstarter http://kck.st/zv4p1f via @kickstarter

If you think that’s a bit boring, you can always try:

I’m supporting @Suw’s Queen of the May on @kickstarter and you should too! http://kck.st/zv4p1f (please RT!)

Or, of course, you can write whatever you like, just remember the URL: http://kck.st/zv4p1f

Kickstarter also has a Facebook Like button, which you can use to post to your Facebook timeline, but again, an original, personalised message will be more interesting to your friends. 

Write a blog post
If you want to write a blog post about the project, you can quote any of the stuff that I’ve written on the Kickstarter page or here to be part of your post. You can also embed the video if you like. The code is:

<iframe frameborder=”0″ height=”360px” src=”http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/suw/queen-of-the-may/widget/video.html” width=”480px”></iframe>

If you want to ask me specific questions or do an interview, please feel free to email me.

Tell your friends
If you have friends that you think might enjoy Queen of the May, why not just send them a quick email to tell them about it? Equally, if you’re on any mailing lists, forums etc. and feel like they might like to know about it, please do let them know. 

Share the link
If you’re a member of social sharing sites like Delicious, Pinterest, Metafilter, StumbleUpon etc. please do share a link to the Kickstarter project page. The biggest challenge for any crowdfunded project is to reach enough people and social sharing sites can be important sources of new supporters.

Every little really does help
It’s tempting to think that you have to famous to have an effect, but that’s not true and there’s evidence to prove it! Buzzfeed’s Jack Krawczyk and StumbleUpon’s Jon Steinberg recently collaborated on a project to analyse how links were shared across their networks. They said:

Our data show that online sharing, even at viral scale, takes place through many small groups, not via the single status post or tweet of a few influencers. While influential people may be able to reach a wide audience, their impact is short-lived. Content goes viral when it spreads beyond a particular sphere of influence and spreads across the social web via ordinarily people sharing with their friends.

[...] Even the largest stories on Facebook are the product of lots of intimate sharing — not one person sharing and hundreds of thousands of people clicking.

In short, lots of people sharing the link with just a few good friends is at the heart of what makes a project like this succeed, however counter-intuitive that might seem. I’ll write more about this in due course.

In the meantime, if you like the look of Queen of the May, do keep an eye out for updates from me on Twitter, as well as here on the blog and on Kickstarter. And here, for your delectation is the pitch video. Enjoy!

 

 

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Lessons from Kickstarter Part 3: Budgeting

by Suw on February 28, 2012

This is Part 3 in my series of blog posts looking at the lessons I learnt doing a Kickstarter project. See also Part 1: Don’t Go Off Half-Cocked and Part 2: Rewards.

Budgeting. For many people, budgeting is the worst part of any project. The tedium of researching suppliers, figuring out numbers, minimum runs, working out overheads, it’s all a massive pain in the neck. It’s also utterly essential if your crowdfunded project is to make, instead of cost, you money. So here are a few tips for making budgeting easier.

1. Use a spreadsheet
I’m in the middle of working out budgets for Queen of the May, which means that I have a spreadsheet with all my costs in one sheet, and three other sheets with my reward levels and backer projections so that I can see how many people I’ll potentially need to reach different targets. The sheets are interlinked so as I refine my reward costs, that’s reflected in my projections. It’s relatively easy to do that in programs like Excel, so if you don’t know to do formulae in spreadsheets then now is a good time to go and find out.

2. Use scenarios
You should explore difference scenarios in your spreadsheet. How many rewards do you need to sell in order to meet your goal? What would happen to your numbers if you saw runaway success? How would that affect the number of rewards that you’d need to make or have made? How would that affect fulfilment and admin costs? If you don’t know what will happen in different scenarios you open yourself up to problems.

3. Know your reward costs
It can be difficult to pin down reward costs without precise order numbers, but you have to do your best. You need to know how much each reward costs so that you set your prices at a level higher than your expenditure. That might seem blindingly obvious, but it’s far too easy to set the reward levels at what you think people will be willing to pay, rather than what you need to earn to make the project at least break even. A miscalculation on your reward costs can end up losing you money, so be very careful.

4. Remember P&P
Don’t just run the numbers on your materials. You need to know the cost of packaging and postage as well, which means knowing how you are going to send your rewards out. In a box? A padded bag? Wrapped somehow?

Many crowdfunded projects ask international supporters to add a certain amount for the extra postage, so make sure you know how much that is. However, please do tell what you mean by ‘international’! You can’t assume that everyone knows where you are.

5. Understand your minimum runs
For many items that you could be ordering, there are either minimum runs or short runs become very expensive. You should know exactly what minimum runs are and how much they cost. Don’t do your calculations purely on the pro rata cost per item.

For example, if you’re buying postcards and the minimum run is 100 for £50, then even if only one person selects the postcard reward you’ll still have to shell out £50.

6. Don’t forget fixed costs
Once you’ve calculated the costs of your rewards, you need to calculate your fixed costs, ie ones that don’t go up depending on how many rewards are ordered. This is stuff like design costs, prototyping costs, or software. Just like your minimum run costs, these costs won’t go down, so you need to make sure that your goal covers them.

7. If you can’t cost something, set a limit
Sometimes it’s impossible to figure out an exact cost. For example, I can’t get a cost for the leather-bound editions of Queen of the May without knowing how many have been ordered and exactly what the design is. I won’t know that until the project is funded and the design completed, so instead, I have set a limit which I won’t exceed. I know I can get them made for less than that limit, but exactly how much they will cost will remain up in the air until the project is funded.

8. Wages
If you want to work on your project full time when your fundraising drive is complete, you’ll want to factor in wages. This does mean having some idea of how long things will take, which is tricky estimate accurately, and then figuring out how much you need to cover your wages for that period. Be generous in your estimates as it’s only too easy for things to take a lot longer than anticipated!

9. Leave some wiggle room
You’ve carefully worked out reward costs, know your minimum runs, understand your fixed costs and have set limits for rewards you can’t cost properly. Sadly, it’s almost certain that you’ll forget something! It’s important, therefore, to leave some room between your combined costs and the reward levels you set in Kickstarter. This wiggle room gives you a cushion in case costs go up unexpectedly, or in case you underestimated something.

With Argleton, my printing costs doubled because the paperback book had to be stitched as well as glued. Luckily, although I hadn’t costed this in, I had over-funded and so had a bit of spare cash. Wiggle room isn’t a luxury, it’s an essential.

As tedious as it is, working out your budget in detail will help you avoid nasty surprises once your fundraising drive has completed. Once the money’s in, you are committed to providing the rewards you have promised, whether you are covering your costs or not. Don’t let a small miscalculation turn your project into a white elephant.

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Lessons from Kickstarter Part 2: Rewards

by Suw on February 16, 2012

This is Part 2 in my series of blog posts looking at the lessons I learnt doing a Kickstarter project. See also Part 1: Don’t Go Off Half-Cocked.

Rewards. These are one of the most important aspects of your crowdfunded project and getting them right is essential to your success. Getting them wrong, on the other hand, can not only mean that it’s harder to find supporters, but also that you might succeed with a millstone around your neck. So, a few thoughts to help you think about your reward levels:

1. Understand how much work is required to create each reward
Coming up with ideas for what sorts of rewards you can offer is the easy bit of planning your rewards. But you also need to know in great detail how you are going to produce each one.

One mistake I made when doing Argleton was that I decided to cover some of the hard-backs in silk. It took something like nine prototypes for me to figure out exactly how I was going to make them. It then took hours to cut and bond the different pieces of silk, then to embroider them and add the backing paper ready for binding. It was a huge amount of work and I hadn’t realised before I added the silk covers as a reward that they would be so time consuming.

I should have completed the prototypes and had my manufacturing plans nailed to the floor before I launched the project.

2. Limit handmade rewards
I was lucky with the silk-covered hardbacks of Argleton: Only 14 people pledged at that level, and that was about the limit of how many I could realistically make in a reasonable amount of time. If even another ten people had wanted this reward, it would have caused significant problems.

I should have limited the number of silk-covered hardbacks OR I should have had another way to produce those rewards.

3. Beware the low value, labour intensive reward
For a while, I toyed with the idea of including a hand-made lace bookmark as a reward level, but when I thought about how much time it would take me and how much its perceived worth would be, I realised that it was a bad idea.

I’ve seen and heard of projects where creators have offered beautiful little hand-made trinkets at a price point that actually jeopardises the project. If you offer something that’s low value but labour intensive, you risk firstly not paying for your time (it’s not enough to just pay for the materials), and secondly also risk annoying your supporters because of how long it takes you to fulfil your promise.

4. Prepare for runaway success
How do you scale up your rewards if your project is wildly successful? With some rewards, it’s easy enough to simply order more. But with others, does a bigger order have an impact on your supplier? For example, with Queen of the May, my next project, I will be offering a leather-bound edition. If I outsource that to a bindery, they will have the same scaling issues as I would if lots are ordered.

Check with suppliers about how bigger numbers will affect their ability to fulfil your order. If they foresee a problem over a certain order size, make sure you limit the number available to your backers.

5. Make use of non-physical rewards
One way to extend your rewards is to add non-physical rewards. With books this might be an ebook version, an audiobook version, or some other downloadable media. If you are working with an illustrator or designer, for example, why not give backers high-rest digital versions of the illustrations as well as using them for a physical reward.

I did this to some extent with Argleton, but I could have done a lot more.

6. Make use of exclusivity
Different reward levels aren’t just about different physical or digital objects, but also about the exclusivity of a reward. Again, thinking about fiction, this might include allowing a supporter to name one or two of your characters, or buying a spot on the dedication page. The nice thing about rewards like that are that they add value without adding cost, so they can dramatically increase the amount you raise without increasing the project costs.

I didn’t do this with Argleton, mainly because I didn’t think of it, but I will with Queen of the May.

7. Add rewards if you overfund
One fantastic project that I find myself inspired by is Rich Burlew’s Order of the Stick reprinting drive. One thing that Rich is doing which is very important is that the more pledges he gets, the more he gives his backers at all levels. By adding new rewards, either by asking people to “add $5 to your pledge to receive $new_thing” or creating entirely new reward levels, he is giving his existing backers an incentive to pledge more money. He’s also encouraging new backers to sign up by offering them more per reward level than he previously could have.

I think this is a very clever tactic, and one I hope to be able to employ with Queen of the May. I already have some ideas in mind for new rewards that I can offer people and will soon be researching costs so that if I overfund, I can add the new rewards very quickly.

8. Pricing
It’s really important to get your pricing right. This isn’t just about understanding your production costs, time and admin, but also making sure that your prices makes sense. I’ll cover budgeting in another post, but here want to talk about how prices make sense.

One important aspect of how human brains work is that comparisons are important. If you go into a shop that sells suits at the £200 price point and you see a suit at £500, it seems expensive. In a shop that sells suits at £1000, on the other hand, a £500 suit looks like a bargain. Make sure you have an expensive reward that positions you as the £1000 suit shop, not the el cheapo market stall.

You also need to think about how backers will view the spread of reward prices. Human babies naturally think logarithmically, and as adults we retain that logarithmic sense, so a reward schedule that goes up in a sort of logarithmic way feels right. Reward levels that go up in regular intervals risk feeling cheap.

Kickstarter has a blog post that looks at funding levels, and $50 and $100 levels both account for a lot of the income. But lower levels are more popular, with $25 appealing to the most people. The valuable thing about low-value rewards is that they bring in more backers which means that you have more people to ask for help in spreading the word. (Again, I’ll go over promotion in another blog post.)

Matt Haughey also has a good post with tips on using Kickstarter from the point of view of an enthusiastic backer. He goes into some detail about prices, and I found it particularly interesting when he said “I fund most projects in the $20-40 range, which I consider a “what the hell” level equivalent to a single visit to an ATM”.

Make sure that you have some ‘what the hell’ rewards that people really want. Don’t just fill up the bottom end of your reward schedule with postcards and wallpapers, make them something that people truly desire and can afford.

 

Next time, I’m going to talk about budgeting, an issue that’s close to my heart at the moment as I’ve spent much of the last month doing exactly that for Queen of the May. (And remember, if you want to be amongst the first to know when that project is up on Kickstarter, join my mailing list!)

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Taking off my overcoat

by Suw on June 15, 2011

I always used to think that blogging was for the terminally under-employed or the terminally not-very-happy-with-life-right-now’ed. Certainly that was true of me when I started this blog and at various stages throughout its history. Indeed, I often combined both conditions into one great big fugue of skint unhappiness, and was verbose with it.

These days, I seem to only blog when I have something to say. Back in the day, I had a lot less to say but seemed to say it more often. The last few years, since ORG really, I’ve busy with work and, since meeting T’Other, my life is several orders of magnitude happier. Somehow this seems to mean that I’m less likely to blog, due to having a lot less to whine about. Indeed, I am in awe of my friends who still blog enthusiastically despite being both over-employed and deliriously happy.

I still have those little moments where I think “Oh, I could write about that on my blog”, but by the time evening has come, my brain and fingers feel like they have had enough and that what they’d really like to be doing is nothing. I write a lot – a 15k word report here, a 35k word report there – and it can be hard to whip up the enthusiasm to find another few hundred words at the end of the day. It’s easier to say, “Tomorrow. Tomorrow I will blog.”

But I can feel an inflection point coming on. Change is in the air. I can smell it. What’s more, I want it.

I’m wary of talking about plans, because the future is one slippery little motherfucker. Kevin and I have made many plans but the ground keeps shifting under our feet. Actually, we keep making the same plan, over and over again, each coming from a slightly different angle, each one falling over at the first hurdle. The nub of the plan never changes, however, and is this: Leave London. But like a psychotic partner who makes your life hell but who’s still just enough fun to make you pause, London is a bitch to break up with.

For the first time in my life, I have a social circle, friends I see regularly and can just go hang out with. Friends within walking distance (a rarity in London). I have clients both here and at the other end of a flight from Heathrow. Favourite restaurants and pubs. Opportunities. Contacts. Cats. A life. (Compare and contrast my time in Reading, where I lived for three years, knowing no one.)

But the one thing that’s missing is the one thing London can’t give me, not on my earnings anyway. Space. Peace. Quiet. A view. A slower, more considered life. Time to write what I want to write and the money to do so. It would take a miracle for that to happen in London. Specifically, a miracle that involved a very, very large deposit into my bank account.

There are other places that are nicer, quieter, cheaper, with better views, although the downside is that I’ll be leaving my friends behind and starting my life anew in a strange land. (Don’t ask me where, because I don’t know yet.) It’s exciting, but nerve wracking. But the decision is made.

Place isn’t the only thing that needs to change, but meaning too: The meaning of me. I’ve always been someone whose self-identity was tightly bound to what I do. Being a music journalist may have broken the bank, but it was a fun persona to try on for a while. Being a musician or a stand-up comic were interesting and sometimes even enjoyable experiments.

Being a digital rights activist or social media consultant connected a bit more deeply with who I am, because ultimately it was a form of story-telling, the sort of story-telling that involves us creating a better world in our imagination and then fighting to make it come true. But who I really am, who I’ve always been, has been the Suw who wrote Argleton and the Books of Hay and Tag. It’s just that at times, wearing these other careers like coats, I might have fooled you. Or maybe I was trying to fool myself.

A few years ago, after Tag but before Argleton and the Books of Hay, I was having dinner with a writer friend. He’s quite good, this writer friend, and I confess I’m still a bit in awe of him, despite us having shared sushi and he having witnessed my meal fighting back in a most embarrassing fashion. I mentioned something about truly, madly, deeply wanting to write and the words he kindly didn’t say were, “Well, get on with it then.”

That night, I lay in bed, thinking about what I would write about if I was going to write something that no one would read but me. At some time around 3am, I realised that it would have magic, and cats, and probably some scenes in Wales, and dragons if I could crowbar them in. The next day, I started writing the Book of Hay. It was supposed to be stupid, whimsical and just for me, but it turned out to be quite good, even though it doesn’t have dragons in it.

Just before I finished the Books of Hay, which was turning out to be 30k words longer than the short story I had anticipated, I had the idea for Argleton. Egged on by friends, I put down the Books of Hay and focused on what was supposed to be a short story but which came in at novelette length instead. Well over a year later, Argleton is nearly done. Not the story – that’s been done for ages – but the project that the story evolved into. And as part of that evolution, something became very clear to me: I can be, and have the skills to be, the kind of writer I want to be.

I’ve always been somewhat put off by the traditional route that writers used to take. The idea of sending of my works into the cold, harsh unknown and waiting weeks, if not months, for a rejection letter, filled me with dread. I just don’t have the patience for it. I’d rather just put my stuff out there and see what people think. Novelettes are a great length for a piece of work – long enough to be a bit meaty, not so long that they take forever to edit. In fact, I’ve fallen in love with that format, with the idea of a little book not so tiny as to be accidentally inhaled, but certainly bite-sized.

And in the years of my procrastination, of wandering aimlessly through the creative desert, the world changed. Pivoted. In a way that is now essential to my plan. Five years ago, I could have distributed Argleton for free quite easily, but whilst free is lovely for readers, it’s tricky for writers who need to do things like eat and sleep under a roof that’s not leaking and wear clothes that aren’t threadbare. But now we have crowdfunding. Now I have a Plan.

The Plan is this: When I have finished making all the Argleton books and have sent them out, and the backers have had their PDFs for a couple of weeks so that they get to enjoy the story that they funded first and exclusively, after all that, it will go up here for free. Then I will crowdfund the prequel to the Books of Hay, which will likely be in the form of a newspaper. Then I will crowdfund the Books of Hay, which is another novelette. And hopefully, by then, I will have my 1000 True Fans, and I will have, with them, a living.

Because I’m frankly shit at doing this thing that other people manage to do where they balance writing and working and get both done equally well. I need to find a way to do that for now, through this transition, so Dear Clients, I still love you and want you and need you. But this is what I need to do to be me, because I’m not happy when I’m not me. I don’t want to wear a coat anymore. I want to feel the sun on my skin, feel the grass between my toes, and feel everyone staring as I dance through the meadow in my white dress like that chick out of the Timotei advert.

Lessons from the TikTok

by Suw on January 6, 2011

Bryce Roberts takes a look at why the TikTok and LunaTik multitouch watch kits were so phenomenally successful at raising money – $941,718 - on Kickstarter. Bryce boils it down to:

  • Strong personal story
  • Strong product story
  • Attractive rewards
  • Progress reports

He concludes:

I believe we’re moving away from the WalMart-ification of everything. People want a connection to the story of the things in their lives. Investors aren’t excluded. Neither are potential consumers of your physical or digital products. I’m certain the companies that are able to tell their stories in big, compelling ways have an unfair competitive advantage as fundraisers and as scalable businesses.

I can only strongly agree. I’d also add that it helps to have your product, whether that’s a watch or a book, as far down the line as you can before even starting to fundraise. The power of having photographs of prototypes is important to understand. Indeed, I think that the TikTok team would have found their idea much harder to sell without the photos and images, which do a lot of the heavy lifting for them.

From my own experience, I’ll add that it’s important not to start funding drives too early. TikTok have shown the importance of being able to show people what you’re doing, rather than tell them (adhering, possibly accidentally, to the old storytelling adage). If Argleton had been farther down the road before I started my fundraising drive, I would have had a much better story to tell about it, as well as more accurate costs on which to base my reward levels (I underestimated). Furthermore, I would have been able to finish the project up and get the rewards out to supporters much more quickly than I have.

As someone who has at least three more crowdfunding projects in mind for this year, I’m keen to find out more about what makes for a successful drive. I know I have a lot to learn, and i suspect we all do, about this new creative model.