OurGoods

Kickstarter

Perry Chen came over to talk about Kickstarter, the website he co-founded to help people raise money for creative projects.

Here’s some notes I took:

1. Know your audience. You are driving people to your Kickstarter campaign, so have a sense of who they are. When asking for money and giving incentives for donations, think about what you feel comfortable giving and receiving and what kind of rewards you value. For example, offer music theory if you’re a musician. It’s low cost to you but high value to your supporters. Or, within the film community, giving a supporter producing credits has a lot of value.

2. Tell a good story. Kickstarter is all about empathy. People give to you because they care about you and/or love you work, not because they want a return on their investment or a tax free donation. Kickstarter doesn’t allow investment venture capital, even if you want it, because Kickstarter is about patronage. Videos can really help people get a sense of who you are. Look through the successful projects to get ideas.

3. Be realistic with $. Don’t ask for $200,000 if no one has ever heard of you. Most people will donate about $25 and it would take 8,000 people to make that money. Also, be sure you can afford to give the rewards you say you will! Think about the cost (time and $) of producing and delivering the items.

4. You can do it! You can use kickstarter to gauge demand for your ideas, just be prepared to spend some time putting together your project and spreading the word. Starting a Kickstarter project is a creative project on its own!  You can wait until you think you have enough support, or be bold and dive in and work it.