Also the project was a weird concept. I think it took a while for people to figure out what the h.e.l.l I was raising money for. There were people who backed it who would ask me two weeks later, so, what the h.e.l.l did I just back?
It really felt like being the show runner for Arrested Development. It seemed like everyone influential in the independent film world was saying, back this campaign, it"s going to be cool. And no one was backing it. I think what happened was that somebody finally took their finger out of the dam, and it was just, boom. It exploded.
But you must"ve really intensified the amount of tweeting and other things you were doing toward the end.
McNelly: Yeah. I got kicked off Twitter, which I didn"t know you could do. We were going pretty hard. For the final three days, we did sleep strikes every day and had blog posts running everywhere.
What"s a sleep strike?
McNelly: A sleep strike is when, say you"re at ninety backers at eleven o"clock at night, and you get yourself and two other people to stay up until you hit one hundred backers. You just refuse to go to sleep. You just keep tweeting it and tweeting it and tweeting it. It"s kind of stupid, because n.o.body"s awake. But people hear about it later. When they get up. It shows a level of dedication. So we were up until like five a.m. each of those nights.
At that late point, were you going back to your friends or trying to find new outlets?
McNelly: My goal was to find new people. I kind of knew before I did the project that I was gonna need an audience anyway. It wasn"t going to do any good to have somebody write a big check. I was telling people I would rather have 12,000 $1 backers than one $20,000 backer, because I needed that audience. My thing was pushing out further and further and finding new people.
How down to the wire did you get?
McNelly: I think we hit the goal with one minute left, two minutes left. I had a friend who had said, Look, if you get to within two grand, I can bail you out. But we were so far behind, she gave up and went to a bar. I texted her with a half hour left, and she was like, Oh my gosh, I can"t get home in time. You were six grand behind when I left. I said, yeah, it"s kind of been busy. It got kind of furious at the end. I think we got about forty-nine backers in the last hour. My tweetdeck was spinning like the wheel on The Price Is Right.
Frantic Finish #2 In May 2011, with seven days to go in her campaign, Aurora Guerrero was $50,258 short of her goal of raising $80,000 for Mosquita Y Mari, a feature film about two Latina teenagers who develop a romantic relationship. With two days remaining, she was still about $40,000 away. She almost gave up but didn"t. Here"s what she did instead.
What were you thinking, being so far behind with so little time left?
Guerrero: In those forty-eight hours, I was an emotional wreck. I was really trying to keep the faith, you know? But at the same time, I"m a strategist, and I"m also a filmmaker. And I gotta be in the real. I was like, forty-eight hours out, forty grand down, man! Odds are against us. What are we gonna do? Myself and my producers were already developing a follow-up Kickstarter campaign with a lower goal. What we were hoping was that, if in the end we got $45,000, we"d launch a new campaign right on the heels of it and say, we know we can raise $45,000, and that"s what our goal is, and we need to recommit. It was scary-to have to ask people to redonate. I knew that we were going to lose people. The momentum is going to feel different. We had the backup campaign already built and everything. We just had to publish it, and my finger was on that b.u.t.ton. I was going to announce it in the last forty-eight hours. I was gonna tell people, Look, let"s not lose hope. We have a backup campaign. I was gonna make that announcement.
But there was a woman who was a part of my team-she was making more personal connections and had a network that was a little more lucrative than mine, bigger donors. In the last forty-eight hours some of her donors hadn"t come through. I told her, We"re just gonna announce that we have a backup campaign, and she was like, No, don"t do it, they"re gonna think you"re losing faith. You"ve gotta hold on, we"re gonna make it. And I listened, and I didn"t do it. And her donors came through.
You really believed you had a chance to make the $80,000?
Guerrero: I knew that word of mouth was spreading. We had already raised $40,000. And I felt that to raise $40,000 was already amazing. That is a big chunk of money that was on the table. I thought, are we just going to let that pa.s.s? I was definitely looking at it as a gambler. I come from a family of gamblers, and I was thinking, no way the community can"t walk away from $40,000. I was presenting it as such: If we don"t make $80,000, we lose $40,000. It was too big to lose.
What were your tactics?
Guerrero: If you have a large network of people you have relationships with, either directly or one degree or two degrees of separation, you know people. That community is ultimately your audience. I knew that I had a big community. I"ve been building this network since I was nineteen and started working in different communities around social justice issues. So, I went out to the communities that I had built, and I sent them e-mails, and I Facebooked them and was like, Hey, this is happening. We"ve raised forty grand and we have a deadline, and I need your support. I need you to not only give but to spread the word to your network of people. I took the time to write a little blurb that talked about me and the film and what we were doing. I put that as part of the e-mail, so they could grab it and put it in an e-mail that they would generate or post on Facebook. I tried to make it as easy as possible for my networks to spread the word.
We had a team built around this campaign. Myself, one of my producers, and another young woman who is very savvy about social media, who worked for an organization called Presente.org. They organize people around social issues that affect Latinos, using online campaigns. She is one of the people behind that, and she is brilliant. I approached her, and said, I need your brilliance. After she read the script for the film, she decided to be part of the team. She helped construct an online campaign for it. She also had relationships with bloggers and press people. So she said, Let"s develop a press kit so they can write about it. We put it out there like, Look, this is newsworthy. This filmmaker is turning to her community for help. We created that sort of media-worthy event, and people picked it up. We had it blogged. La Opinion, a Spanish-language newspaper, picked it up and did a story. We strategized with them about when they would release it.
What happened late in the campaign to turn it around?
Guerrero: I"m Latina, and in communities of color we say that we run on "people of color time." In other words, sometimes, you know, we"re last-minute-type people! I feel like that happened. A lot of people at the beginning of the campaign hadn"t given-they had e-mailed me to let me know that they were gonna give, but they didn"t tell me when. Time pa.s.sed, and next thing it was forty-eight hours left! A lot of reminders went out: All right folks, here it is, now is the time. And then they really went out to their networks and started pitching the project. We had two donors who each donated $5,000. One had donated throughout-she spread it out throughout the campaign. The other was one whole chunk at the very end.
It was hard work, but there is some magic in it that I will never be able to put words to. I felt like it was the universe saying: it"s time. After Kickstarter, we were at full speed. You have to pay attention to momentum. We wrapped the film-we went into preproduction for June and shot in July for eighteen days. Our Kickstarter was to help us get through production; it didn"t include postproduction. We had applied to the San Francisco Film Society for postproduction funds. We were literally writing grants as we were shooting. We got that postproduction grant and went into post in August and were in post through October before we submitted to Sundance. [Mosquita Y Mari was selected to screen at the Sundance Film Festival, and Guerrero sold distribution rights to the film there.]
Frantic Finish #3 On Valentine"s Day 2012, five days before his campaign to raise $12,000 would end, Pete Taylor was getting a little desperate. A restaurant chef from Coeur D"Alene, Idaho, working in Spokane, Washington, Taylor had launched his SAVORx food project on Kickstarter hoping to offer fresh spices and recipes to backers. The campaign gained traction like a truck in mud. About halfway in, when he was about 25 percent funded, his "white knight" big-money donor put in $5,000, injecting that b.u.mp into the middle of the campaign rather than waiting until the end. They hoped it would change the trajectory of the funding curve-and maybe the surge would get Kickstarter to put the campaign on one of its highlight pages. But the big donation was its own blip, and the painfully slow growth resumed.
By February 14, with five days to go, the campaign was up to 83 percent funded-about $9,900-and grinding ahead in tiny steps. "It"s crazy stressful," Taylor wrote in an e-mail message. "We are so close, but I have totally exhausted my resources. Between Facebook/Twitter/local media/YouTube/etc. . . . there is not much more I can do. It already seems spam(ish). I have e-mailed Kickstarter and asked them for help in homepage placement or blog placement, but it is always the same generic reply: *Everyone wants to be on the homepage, sorry."" He even watched as $150 worth of pledges was withdrawn.
Maybe because he"s a spice guy, grinding turned out to be Taylor"s strength. He persevered and did what it took to reach his goal.
Who ended up coming through for you? Did you go to friends and family or kind strangers?
Taylor: Ironically, it seems like friends and family helped out the least. Maybe it"s just me. Acquaintances helped out a decent amount, and then total strangers were great. I guess it"s not a fair comparison, because you have the whole Kickstarter community, and they"re already exposed to what projects are about and are more apt to pledge. I was on Facebook finding foodie groups, attaching links to my Kickstarter project. With all the networking, and all the promotion through Facebook, Twitter, cold calling, e-mailing however many thousands of e-mails I sent, the result was that family and friends are less likely to pledge than people you know just a tiny bit. Maybe you met them, you"re sort of friends on Facebook. Small-business owners, corporate-type individuals, marketers, social media people. They"re the people who really supported the campaign. I didn"t have one family member go to our fund-raising event, but I had probably about thirty people I"d never met in my life show up.
Did anything else help with momentum?
Taylor: Toward the end, we got a bit of Kickstarter action. I think we started to get higher up in the "popular" list in the food category, so pledges were coming from within Kickstarter. There were $100 pledges from people I"m not affiliated with. People I had never met who found out about my project; the more I talked to them they just went crazy over it. One guy originally pledged $25, then he changed it to $75, then $100, and then $150. He also wrote these great comments.
So, things were iffy for a while, but you really pushed through it . . .
Taylor: The moment I pressed Launch, for the next thirty-three days it was pure . . . intensity. Having to work a real job and trying to promote this campaign at the same time. I found out the hard way that it"s a lot of work if you want it to be successful.
Frantic Finish #4 Even when he was tens of thousands of dollars shy of his goal, and with his deadline looming, Bill Lichtenstein stayed upbeat about his campaign to raise funds to make The American Revolution, a doc.u.mentary about seminal Boston rock radio station WBCN. His target of $104,000 was ambitious. About halfway through the campaign, with fourteen days left, he was at only 28 percent of the goal. On December 5, 2011, with five days to deadline, he was more than $40,000 short. But his team kept pushing, and he had one last trick up his sleeve: recruiting the endors.e.m.e.nt of a beloved local athlete.
You were confident all the way through, but how did you pull it off?
Lichtenstein: I can give you ten different theories about why it went the way it did. It"s sort of like Election Day, in that the only thing that matters is reaching people, getting them to donate. So we just kept reaching out to people, seeking publicity. We kept trying to expand the circle. On Facebook. We got a lot of press. We got the trifecta of Boston media, which is a piece in the Globe, a long piece in the Boston Herald, and then Chronicle, the TV show on Channel 5 that covers everything cultural in the city. It became a seven-day news cycle. That started about halfway through the campaign.
What got you to the end? Small donations, one big whale?
Lichtenstein: One thing we learned is that there was no one homerun ball. There was no one thing. Though in the end, I should say, what closed it out was Bill Lee [the fan-favorite former Red Sox pitcher nicknamed "s.p.a.ceman"]. He sent out an e-mail for us telling people to pledge to the project. Obviously, we reached out to him. He had just helped with another Kickstarter-for a film about him. We thought we"d have to explain it to him, but he said, Oh, I just did a Kickstarter; they"re great. That e-mail was on December 16, and our campaign was scheduled to end on the nineteenth. We knew we had to find some way to close it out, because we were heading into a holiday weekend and a potential blizzard; a million things that could happen. His e-mail went out to everybody on my e-mail list for the last ten years. It was like, go for it. About ten thousand people. People on the e-mail list from our old public radio show. Our old FedEx representative in New York, whom I hadn"t talked to in four years, gave ten dollars. It had the right tone to it. You can"t be frantic. It was just the idea of him coming in and saying, let"s close this thing out. [Lee"s message said: "When I played for the Red Sox, I was a "BCN listener, and we knew that together we were helping to change our world."] That created the final $5,000 to $10,000 burst over those two days.
It"s a commitment to hit up everyone you ever knew! You really have to want it.
Lichtenstein: I would say it"s like running for office. You can"t, on Election Day, be going, well, I"m not sure if I really want to be the senator. You have to be out there 100 percent, saying, look, we gotta do this thing, this has to happen, we need your help, please do what you can. Anything other than that, you"re not gonna make it. There are kids now who create a gadget that everybody wants-a bike lock that you can"t steal or something-and they presell them on Kickstarter for $20 apiece, and if people want to buy them, you can raise a lot of money very fast. But for films, or for things that are more mission oriented, you have to approach it in the same way as you would if you were asking people for money the old-fashioned way. Be sincere, be serious, be humble.
We a made a decision-it was right before Christmas, and there was such a good vibe. After we pa.s.sed our goal, we sort of stopped asking people to give. We were happy with what we had. I thought to keep it going at that point would be too much.
SO YOUR PROJECT has been successfully funded. It becomes official when the deadline for your campaign has pa.s.sed. You did it! A Kickstarter update to your backers-with a giant thank-you-is appropriate to post at this moment. And, soon thereafter, an update on what your donors can expect next.
The battle has been won. Dozens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of fans have let you know, with their wallets and their words, how much they want you to push ahead with your dream. They have validated your creative instincts and your talent. A new phase of rewarding work has begun.
Just when you thought the hard work was over comes still more hard work. Issuing rewards to backers is both a blessing and a curse. That you need to do it means that you have succeeded in your Kickstarter campaign. The process of sending out rewards is happily called "fulfillment." But it can also be a serious expense and a logistical challenge. Your goal is to prevent it from escalating into "nightmare" territory. Success has snuck up on some Kickstarter campaign creators, and the results aren"t always pretty. One day you"re an artist or designer looking to fund your dream, and the next day you"re trying to figure out how to manufacture 4,000 alarm clocks. That"s a wake-up call.
What happens after you succeed is simple enough. Kickstarter sends you a message that your campaign has ended successfully. Since you already set up an Amazon Payments account when you launched your campaign (see chapter 7, "The Kickoff!"), you will soon be able to access the money. Amazon charges your backers" credit cards for the amounts they have pledged, taking 3 to 5 percent of the total for credit-card processing fees. Amazon also sends Kickstarter 5 percent of the amount you raised. You get the rest. So if you"ve raised $10,000 in pledges, you might collect slightly more than $9,000. Note that it takes a little while to get the money. Amazon may hold funds for up to fourteen days after payments are collected, and it could take up to another five business days for the funds to transfer to your bank account.
As a successful campaign creator, you will be able to send a postcampaign survey to all your backers requesting their shipping addresses and product preferences, that is, if they have choices to make (colors, sizes, and the like). Kickstarter provides you with a spreadsheet containing all of your backers" information, and you can use that list to produce mailing labels, or hand-address packages, or give the spreadsheet to a fulfillment center that will handle shipping logistics for a fee. You have only one opportunity to send out this official survey, so some campaign creators, instead of sending it out immediately, will wait until their rewards are ready to ship, ensuring that they will have gathered the most current addresses for all recipients and know exactly what the product options will be. You can continue to reach all your backers by e-mail through the Kickstarter website and by posting updates on the project page. Some creators have opted not to use Kickstarter"s survey and instead collected backer information by creating customized surveys using Google Forms that can be e-mailed. Google Forms are free and also dump all responses into a handy spreadsheet.
What happens next is different for each person. The real-life experiences of Kickstarter creators who have encountered the spoils of success speak loudly. You can learn plenty from their reward-fulfillment strategies as well as their miscalculations. Here are their stories.
"The shipping was quite an undertaking."
Chicago artist Joshua Harker received an unbelievable, and unexpected, response to his Crania Anatomica Filigre project in October 2011. Harker creates ornate sculptures that he calls "tangles." Many of his designs had been "unmakeable" using trad-itional sculpture methods in the days before the existence of computers and 3-D printing. As rewards in his campaign, he offered an awesome-looking skull sculpture: $50 for a small one, $100 for a medium size, and $250 for a large. He set a low bar, seeking to raise just $500 total, but then proceeded to rake in $77,271 from 955 backers, becoming at the time the third most highly funded art project in Kickstarter history. After that overwhelming success came the task of getting all those skulls to all those generous backers.
"The shipping was quite an undertaking," Harker says. "You don"t realize during the project that you may get more than you bargained for. You may expect a certain number, but when it"s thousands of times more than that-mine was 15,454 percent funded-where do you begin to organize? I wonder if Kickstarter should offer an option for the creators to end a project after a certain amount of money/backers has been received without canceling it. [Author note: there is a way to limit availability of any reward, which can effectively achieve the same goal of limiting the artist"s postcampaign obligations.] For some, too much of a good thing can sabotage their ability to accomplish the project as designed. For the most part, we"re talking about small-time artists trying to break out. Not many are set up for the logistics of managing a large-scale project that some of these campaigns turn into-manufacturing, shipping and receiving, inventory, quality control, customer service.
"The type of rewards I offered were not difficult for me to fulfill. I had worked with the mediums and the vendors many times, and all the design work was already complete. I have an account [with the fabricator] where I upload my designs to get pricing, in whatever materials they offer. I simply order whatever quant.i.ties of my designs I need, and in about three weeks they show up at my door. Honestly, all I had to do was collect the money, order the corresponding rewards, and ship them out.
"I didn"t get a volume discount, since the company bases its pricing on volume processing. I did get priority attention, as far as project management and delivery. I had a couple vendors lined up, one in the Netherlands and one in New Zealand, but ended up using just one because of some practical matters. So they were printed and then sent to me on pallets. I repacked everything and shipped via the U.S. Postal Service.
"The addresses were provided by Kickstarter via a spreadsheet at the end of the project. I used a computer to print labels, but I had to fill out about 300 customs labels by hand. I also included a personalized hand-written postcard in all the packages. I packed everything manually. I pushed to get everything shipped and delivered before Christmas, including all the orders that came in shortly after the project ended. The post office was a bit of a circus, given that it happened to be the holiday rush. We took the packages in batches, as they were packed. Out of a thousand packages, only three have *disappeared" into post office ether, and one was crushed. I consider that a low percentage. It proved to be a tight squeeze, but we did it.
"I"m certainly making it sound easier than it was. But, considering the corners some creators on Kickstarter get themselves into, I think it went exceptionally smooth."
"A lot of people get overextended."
Jacob Krupnick asked for $4,800 to make Girl Walk // All Day, a high-energy feature-length film showing dancers in public locations throughout New York City.
He raised $24,871 in a 45-day Kickstarter campaign. That would have been one of the biggest dance projects in Kickstarter history (and it sort of is, but Krupnick a.s.signed the project to the Film category). He offered DVDs of the movie to backers at the $30 pledge level and tickets to a New York premiere to $100 donors. He ended up spending more than he raised and encountered one reward that was especially difficult to fulfill because it was so popular. Months after the campaign ended, he gave us a status update: "I feel like a lot of people get overextended with what they promise backers as far as rewards. That"s dangerous territory. For us, it was DVDs and tickets for attending the premiere. In a perfect world, your project produces the rewards. But really the film doesn"t produce DVDs. We have to produce them.
"The biggest issue was that we promised people tickets to the premiere. People could get one or two or four. In my humble mathematics, a great turnout might mean that we"d have 100 or 200 people to show the film to. At that scale, you can find a bar or a rooftop in New York that is pretty doable, or cheap, or sort of free, if you play your cards right. Then you take that money you"ve allotted, and you put it toward a keg, and you rent a sound system, and you have a good old time.
"Since we had really wonderful reaction to the project, there were 577 people who donated. About 500 tickets to the premiere were promised through Kickstarter. But by the time we"d made the film, it was more like 800 people, because so many people had had a hand in it. The unofficial friends list was another 220 or 300. At that scale, nothing in New York is free. We struggled with that. We were running up against the date when we were hoping to premiere the film. For a while we had what looked like a surefire partnership with a great s.p.a.ce, a photo studio. But after a bunch of exchanges, the line went cold and we didn"t hear back from them. s.p.a.ces were several thousand dollars for the night, and the projector that I have wouldn"t cover it. And with that many people, suddenly you need security. You need a big bar. You need insurance. You need lots of speakers. So we were sort of flummoxed. We had really reached an impa.s.se. We would have had to do small screenings, or send apologies.
"At some point, conversations began with Kickstarter [also based in New York]. They were interested in partnering with us to throw a big public premiere dance party. We had 1,200 or more people there. I don"t know how we would have done it otherwise."
"It turned out to be more [costly] than we expected."
Swarm, a design firm in Salt Lake City, had to try twice (see chapter 11, "Learning from Failure") to find Kickstarter success for its Nectar and Elixir bicycle seat clamps that double as beer-bottle openers. They offered Nectar, a bolt-on version, for a $20 pledge, and Elixir, the quick-release version, for $30. The chance to try a second time taught the firm"s three princ.i.p.als enough to reach their fund-raising target, but when the time came to send out rewards, they once again found themselves riding on b.u.mpy terrain. They had offered too many variations of the product and were forced to produce some in small, money-losing quant.i.ties. All in all, they lost money on their Kickstarter campaign, says Wesley Garrett, one of Swarm"s partners.
"Yeah, it turned out to be more [costly] than we expected. We have a lot of experience in manufacturing, both domestically and internationally, so we felt like we had a really good handle on that. But it just kind of escalated. We didn"t lose much. And we had product left over after the production run. We were able to sell it all and recoup those losses. But even if we were selling those products at a profit, we had lost so much-I mean the shipping costs, we hadn"t really thought through. We had a lot of international customers.
"Our product had too many variations. We had four colors and we had four sizes, within two different products, the quick-release clamp and the bolt-on. Which means that we had a total of thirty-two products we had to deliver. The cost to make the green color-we hadn"t estimated that only a few people would want green-we lost about ten bucks per product on that! My advice is: definitely keep the SKUs as few as possible!"
"The math is insane!"
Scott Thrift offered The Present, his colorful one-year clock, for a $120 pledge and sought to raise $24,000 in all. By the end, he raised $97,567 and needed to find a way to make far more clocks than he"d antic.i.p.ated. Here is Thrift"s story, told about two months after his campaign.
"I went in thinking that I was going to sell hopefully 100 clocks. Luckily, it went in a completely different direction and got a lot of press and a lot of attention. And it put us in a place where we have to produce many more than that-we"re looking at producing 2,000 units right now.
"I sold these clocks all over the world. I was really myopic going into it, thinking I was going to sell 100. Thinking that only people in New York would want it. There was no way for me to prepare for that outcome. There"s a humbleness for me to think I was going to sell 100. I was thinking that, in a month, hopefully with friends and family, we"d be able to push past the $24,000 mark. That was what I really believed. And three days later we had already pa.s.sed that. In seventy-two hours, we pa.s.sed the $24,000 mark. I was thinking about this as a market test, to see if there are people really interested in this product. What I wanted to do was take the proof that I"d sold 100 clocks to a gift show, maybe.
"The design of the clock was pretty difficult. We had to find a whiz kid in Brooklyn, through ITP [New York University"s technology arts program]. The idea was to crack open the movement in the back of a regular clock, remove the circuit board that tells it to click every second, and create our own circuit board. That took months. The math is insane! I still can"t wrap my head around it. The plan was to manually swap out the movement for each clock. But once we sold more than 1,200 clocks, that was taken off the table. I had to step back and figure out how to do this in a way that was totally reliable and would last for years on one battery charge. So now we"re having an annual clock movement made. Instead of hacking clocks, I"m actually making one from the ground up."
"So, yeah, we have a lawyer now."
Chei-Wei w.a.n.g and Taylor Levy, partners in the Brooklyn design firm CW&T, got more than they bargained for in their Kickstarter campaign for Pen Type-A: A minimal pen during the Summer of 2011.
As product designers, they were aware of the successes that others had experienced with Kickstarter and were eager to try it. One concept they thought might work was an idea for a sleek stainless-steel pen that could hold cartridges made for the Pilot Hi-Tec-C pen, a writing implement they loved but that was sold in cheap, breakable plastic. They wanted something that would make their favorite pen more durable and comfortable to use. Thanks to a solid design and a great video (see chapter 6, "Lights, Camera, Action"), they won lots of attention and the campaign exploded. They set the pledge level for receiving one of the pens at $50 and put their total goal at just $2,500, which meant that they expected to make fifty pens. Instead of $2,500, they raised $281,989. And instead of 50 units, they attracted 4,449 backers and ended up needing to make and mail around 5,400 pens (some backers ordered more than one). Then came a long process of working to get the pens manufactured. Here"s a conversation with both creators.
How soon did you realize this campaign was getting huge?
Taylor Levy: I guess the first day it got pretty big. The first day we reached our goal. We were totally overwhelmed and happy.
Chei-Wei w.a.n.g: We were so shocked. We didn"t want to push it any further.
Levy: There were a lot of challenges. Manufacturing has been the biggest one. The most important thing we had to do was find a fabricator we could really communicate with, just to make sure we were all on the same page in terms of quality and they would hold themselves accountable.
We started off with the fabricator that made our prototypes, because we figured he can probably make 6,000 of these. But it turns out that making the small changes to improve them just a little bit, and making 6,000 of them consistently, is a whole different ballgame. They really weren"t set up for that process. So we went over to China to figure that out. The manufacturer we"re working with now is an American company with factories in China. To be perfectly honest, they"re great, but they"re also not set up to make something like this product. We"ve had to do a lot of work with them. But it"s just like anything. We"re all doing something new, we"re all doing our best and learning from it.
What will you do with all the extra money you raised?
Levy: Right now, we don"t know how much extra it is. Partly because we"ve made some mistakes. We paid one fabricator that didn"t work out, and we"re still trying to get our money back from that. There are also unexpected legal things that arise. So, yeah, we have a lawyer now and we have to pay him.
w.a.n.g: When we saw our friends Tom and Dan make a hundred-some-thousand dollars [designers Tom Provost and Dan Gerhardt raised $137,417 for an iPhone tripod called Glif], we were, like, whoa, you can retire! But now that we"re in it, it"s like, no, there"s actually a lot of things you have to pay for.
Levy: We"re going to get a bill from a fulfillment company for $70,000. What?! A $70,000 bill? Two years ago we were afraid of our $400 studio rent bill. This has kind of become our full-time thing now.
So you"re still working on delivering the pens?
Levy: We just got our first shipment of 310 pens from our fabricators last week. We went though and did a bunch of quality-control tests. We found one little problem with all of them that we drilled and fixed on every single one. Also, they didn"t properly clean the machine oil off the pens, so we had to wash them all, dry them, and a.s.semble them. But we have about 280 pens now that are ready to ship.
Have backers waiting for pens grown impatient?
Levy: There"s always going to be a couple of pretty vocal backers. Who are you guys? What are you doing with all that money? Why is it taking you so long? It"s really way less than 1 percent of all the people. But it still really stresses me out. Luckily, our friends told us to wait as long as possible to send out the survey to get people"s shipping addresses. You have one opportunity to send out a survey. Wait until the moment you"re about to ship! Because if we had sent that survey out last August, we would have so many address changes.
w.a.n.g: We"ve been thinking about our next Kickstarter project, which is indefinitely on hold, and the idea of having a limited run, so it"s not about trying to get as many preorders as you can. That would be nice.
"We wrote love notes on all our packages."
The folks behind the Freaker did an incredible job making a knit beer-bottle sock seem impossibly cool, and they took the bold step of offering one to anybody who gave even $1. They ended up needing to deliver about 2,400 packages.
"Twenty-four hundred packages is definitely a lot. It took a while, probably a couple months," says project leader Zach Crain. "And then you still have people messaging every once in a while: Hey, I donated, I gave you guys money. They had to fill out their surveys with their addresses. Some people thought that once they put in their credit cards, if it was successful it would just be shipped to them.
"Even on the $1 package, we sent it out in a yellow envelope, and we did a sort of cute little screenprint on it. We painted on all our boxes. We had white boxes and went over the surfaces with a roller. We wrote love notes on all our packages."
"Partner with the right people . . . even if sometimes it"s not the path of least resistance."
David Sosnow and Josh Hartung prepared in advance for the success of their campaign for Loomi paper-lamp-making kits.
They raised $34,123 in December 2011. But even before they were done, the two were already getting ready. They had worked with a manufacturer to create customized tooling that would cut out the 33-piece paper-lamp kits.
"Our goal was to ship everything by Christmas," Hartung says. "David and I funded some production out of pocket, probably a week and a half before we had achieved our funding goal. That"s what I mean about planning for success. We had to take a risk there and plan that we were going to be successful. We had some ridiculous contingencies in case it didn"t succeed, like, I guess we can sell these at street fairs for the next year."
When their project ended successfully on December 17, they needed to send out about 1,000 kits to about 600 backers. Because of the volume of rewards and the haste at which they needed to move, the pair worked with a fulfillment house to pack and ship everything.
"You provide them with the inventory and the address list, and they quote you a fee," Hartung explains. "They will charge you some flat fee to set up and maintain your account, and then they charge you per "touch." Usually it"s like twenty-five cents per touch. A touch being if somebody pulls a unit of something that"s yours and puts it into a box. They usually provide the boxes, and they have a charge for those, and packing materials, tape, all that. They also handle international shipping; they fill out all the customs forms."
Despite the excellent planning, it didn"t go off without a hitch.
"We had sort of a fiasco," Hartung says. "We ended the campaign two days before the Christmas Priority Mail shipping cutoff. I ended up taking all the inventory to the fulfillment house from the manufacturer, and the fulfillment people sort of pa.r.s.ed it all out, but they messed up. They ended up double-shipping to a whole bunch of backers and not shipping to others.
"We shipped out our remaining inventory-there wasn"t much-to the people who had gotten nothing, and our fulfillment company arranged a pickup with each person who had received a double delivery to return the extra inventory. We never even tracked how many we got back, because the company was so difficult to work with. In the end we paid them about a dollar each and moved all our fulfillment activities to another vendor. We were lucky because we had built in some margin that let us soak up that loss, but we still have upset backers who haven"t gotten their rewards. Lesson: partner with the right people . . . even if sometimes it"s not the path of least resistance."
COMPUTER SCIENTIST ALAN KAY suggested that if you don"t fail at least 90 percent of the time, you"re not aiming high enough. That"s pretty brutal math. Even amid those odds, Kay had his share of success. He conducted early work on graphical user interfaces, which every personal computer uses today, and he envisioned laptop and tablet computers before they existed. Given those accomplishments, you have to imagine he poured effort into lots of stuff that didn"t work out so well.
Learning from failure is a reality of the creative process, a productive part of invention and entrepreneurship. All those things are the essence of Kickstarter. But learning from failure can be a jagged little pill, to borrow a phrase from another cultural commentator, Alanis Morissette. In this chapter we offer the next best thing to learning from your failure: learning from other people"s failure.
Statistics released by Kickstarter note that, in 2011, 46 percent of campaigns succeeded. That"s not Alan Kay territory, but it does mean that the majority of Kickstarter campaigns aren"t winners. It means that, in 2011, more than 14,000 projects, in one way or another, crashed and burned. In fact, thanks to Kickstarter"s rising popularity, more people are failing every year!