Susan Parker is the director and producer of documentary Loving In Limbo. She launched her project in November 2015, reaching $26,265 of a $25,000 goal. Working with Kat to launch the project, Susan went in with high hopes.
This campaign was a relaunch. The original campaign ended with $24,040 of a $40,000 goal. This early failure was the launchpad for the second campaign, but ultimately, the plan to re-engage previous backers in a revitalised concept proved difficult.
Loving in Limbo, and the emotional rollercoaster that Susan experienced is a great example of what the average crowdfunder experiences when planning, launching, and promoting their campaign. From a technical point of view, the campaign fit well within the parameters of what a normal project looked like, hitting all the key markers along the way.
Data from Kicktraq
But the real lesson here was in the emotional experience that Susan went through. I asked her to put it into her own words, and describe her Kickstarter journey.
So, it has been 2 months to the date since I finished my Kickstarter campaign. I now feel that I can view the whole experience with a calmness that I didn’t feel at that particular time.
I ended the campaign, successful in reaching our funding goal, but generally disappointed with the whole process. It was success that had been tinged with an ongoing month of sheer frustration, tears, anxiety, tears, anger, more tears, loss of sleep, and generally feeling like I had been run over by a steam roller.
Before we launched, I thought that we had a campaign that was slightly different to the norm. Our previous campaign had ended at nearly the level we were funding for this round. As a result, I had extremely high expectations. That were not met.
Hence the tears, anger, frustration, loss of sleep, and anxiety.
So the lessons I would like to have told myself walking into this campaign are what I would like to share now.
Don’t NEED the money you are asking for. Just WANT it.
This will make a whole difference to your mindset and change how you approach the whole process.
Be prepared for every emotional experience
The whole feeling of afraid of failure, afraid of success, afraid of rejection, afraid of asking.
You prep your network, let them know you are doing this campaign, and that you would love them to help you out. Then you launch and send out your email request.
And then you wait.
And then you wait some more.
And then when you have waited for a few days beyond your level of tolerance you start panicking.
They hate me, they hate my project, they hate me, they are broke and too embarrassed to tell me, they hate me, they have every intention of backing but just forgot, they hate me, they already backed the project but I didn’t have any information to know who it was, they hate me.
As you can tell, all your emotional turmoil begins to threaten your beliefs in what people think about you.
If you do not have a willingness to go through a very, very, very large emotional growth experience then this is not the thing for you.
Every element of what you thought about yourself will be under a microscope. Asking for money is embarrassing, and going back to ask people for the third time to back your campaign is difficult.
Sending an email is harder than you think.
Of your first email round, you can expect around 10% of your contacts to back you immediately.
Of the second email round you will get maybe 10% of the remaining contacts (if you are very, very lucky).
Of the third and final round, you will maybe get 10% backing again, PLUS you will get the “bugger off and get out of my face” responses from those you have well and truly thoroughly pissed off for asking 3 times.
DO NOT expect people to come back and tell you that they are not going to back you. If they are not interested then they generally don’t bother replying – they behave like I have done many a time and just delete the email and not respond.
You cannot expect behaviour from anyone else that you don’t do yourself – this was a huge learning to me. Crying my eyes out because people just weren’t letting me know that they were not ever going to back the campaign and I had behaved exactly the same way – what an eye opener that was!
Be prepared for a big success but don’t expect it.
You will save yourself a lot of emotional let down if you can create this mindset.
It’s 2-3 months of hard work
2 plus months setting everything up prior, and then the month of the campaign itself.
You will be thoroughly exhausted by the time your campaign even starts so make sure you have the staying power and the physical and emotional energy to see it through.
In the months leading up you will have been spending time learning about every social media platform there is and getting a presence known. This won’t guarantee success either, but it has to be done. No one likes to be contacted by a complete stranger the day your campaign launches.
You need to create your videos, structure your rewards appropriately, create great and meaningful (yet brief) copy, get your design elements right, read every single website about crowdfunding you can find (and then realise that this is not always enough information), check out the competition, see what other people are doing right, and what other people are doing wrong, and most importantly start a relationship with your crowdfunding coach as soon as you can. They are a mine of information that you are not able to get from any other source, and believe me, you need this information.
Your campaign needs to hit all the right marks as well and this takes time. I would have been completely lost without the coaching of Kat. She helped me shape a fabulous campaign, social media was hitting all the targets, we were getting media presence, we hit the funding milestones and we were fully funded.
Without her we wouldn’t have been funded. And if I had only wanted to reach my funding goal I would have been ecstatic, so my advice is set your expectations appropriately or else you spend the rest of the campaign suffering from it.
And try and enjoy your successes!!
Good luck.
