Beloved nerd troubadours The Doubleclicks, fresh off their successful, oversubscribed, $80,000 Kickstarter campaign to raise money for a new album, offer some incredibly sensible advice on making a go of it with crowdfunded support for your art.
First and foremost, they attribute their success to all the hard work they did before the Kickstarter — the years of touring and recording and building up an audience (they have data to support this, too). But there's plenty more advice that is of use to anyone contemplating a crowdfunding campaign.
– BE SCARED: If it seems easy, you're doing it wrong. In my experience, if you are doing Kickstarter "right," you should have nightmare-inducing spreadsheets, and you should be having (figurative) heart attacks over every sentence on your project description and video. Once the project launches, you should always be thinking about your next update, and you should be too scared to sleep. (Yes, I'm a very fun person.) Nice people are giving you their money and faith, and you are solely responsible for taking that money and making something GREAT with it. By now a lot of people have heard the horror stories of the teams who, after Kickstarting a successful project, ending up wayyyy in the red or with years upon years of unexpected work. It is way too easy to fall into this trap—and we nearly did. Thankfully, we did enough work and got enough advice before we launched to find and account for the black-hole-of-horror-and-mistakes BEFORE launching. Mostly.
One weird trick for a successful kickstarter project [The Doubleclicks]
(via Copyfight)
