the kickstarter experience pt 4 - the launch

After all of the prepro, scouting, dealmaking and decisionmaking it was finally time to launch the project.

Kickstarter makes a big deal out of how important it is to produce a video. They give you stats that show how many projects have videos and what the success rate of video vs non video projects have, which is pretty stark, thought that’s all that I remember about it.

The point is, make a video.

Most kickstarter vids are people talking into camera and describing who they are and what they plan to do. I actually cut one of those and then really hated it, so I went more towards what the sound design community has been doing and decided to shoot a little footage and sound of what it was that I planned on recording. I used my iphone and my PCM d50, holding the two together and just getting on the train for a ride. I figured that would be more instructive to potential backers and would have the added benefit for all of keeping me off camera.

I used text on screen to do the talking for me, and let the video just be an immersive experience into what the trolley car sounds like. In the end, I loved the result and felt it was pretty effective.

I’ll note here that KS re-encodes the video before posting, so you can see that some of my text ended up coming off a little lower-res than I would have liked. Just keep that in mind with text on screen.

writing your “about this project” page

In my case, I treated my about this project page basically as a blog post. I put some history up there about the trains, posted a sound clip that I had recorded while scouting, described the agreement that I already had in place with MATA, and stated my goals and needs for the project.

Pretty straightforward, but for those not comfortable with writing such things you may want to get a trusted set of eyes to look over it all before launching. You can edit this page after the fact, but when you launch the clock starts and you’ll want to be directing all of your KS energy towards the awareness push at that point.

I left descriptions of who I am and why I’d be any good at recording this stuff to my profile page, which is also right there on the project home page.

FAQs

I found FAQs to be very helpful on other kickstarters, and I figured the biggest question people would ask is “how can I use the sounds you’ll deliver?” I knew people that would be most willing to pay for sounds will want max licensing freedom, so instead of creative commons I went for the more useful full royalty free usage common with purchased sfx libraries.

I also described my gear, metadata methods, and reiterated the exclusivity of the library.

The FAQ format is pretty good for bullet pointing things that backers will want to know before committing the cash, and the KS software does a great job of formatting.

Launch and push

With everything written it was time to launch and push. I triple checked the things I couldn’t change (deadline, funding goal, rewards and reward levels) and then published.

I had emailed Miguel over at designingsound.org prior to my launch to see if he would be amenable to putting my project up on his page. He was into it, so I sent him a link. I also sent out an email to a small number of individuals in my contacts list that I figured would be interested.

I posted to twitter and facebook as well. (google+ hadn't been launched yet)

In each of these pushes I explicitly asked for the two things I wanted - please back this and please share (or retweet) this.

Really that was it. When I launched I was shocked at how quickly people picked it up and shared it. I think to some degree it was the novelty of the thing, but regardless it was a pretty humbling experience.

I fully funded in 5 hours, and then after that the designingsound post went up and the funding really took off.