Lessons

Lesson Info

Plan

And with that, I think it's about time for us to introduce. Our instructor plays an entrepreneur and graduate of Seth Godin's MBA product program. He is a founder of Spin Does and crowdfunding hacks dot com, which has helped over 25 companies raise over $2.4 million total, which, in my opinion, is pretty impressive. I'm sure he has a lot to share with us. Let's go ahead and bring on clay A bear. How you doing today? Wonderful. Thanks. Thank you for being here. I'm gonna just hand this over to you and let you get your awesome sounds great. I didn't everybody, so I'm super excited to be here. Kickstarter and other crowdfunding platforms have completely changed the way creative projects get funded and get brought to the world. Um, a little bit about what this courses on, um, who it's for and just a touch on me. So this course is about strategies and tips and tactics to get your Kickstarter project funded. We're gonna talk a lot about film and photography courses. We're also gonna talk abo...

ut case studies that are not filming photography, But just so everybody knows most of the marketing tactics we talk about today apply not only to film and photography crowdfunding projects, but also to two other marketing projects. If you have a business of you, whatever a lot of the marking stuff we're gonna cover today, it also applies to beyond crowdfunding itself whose courses for specifically photographers and filmmakers. But really anyone who wants to do, um, a crowdfunding project so little about me. I was not always starter expert. As you can imagine, the platform is pretty new. Um, in January of 2012 I was on a beach in Hawaii and doing my best to not work during my vacation. Being entrepreneur were sort of always on always working. But I was the phone. The phone rang and it was a friend of a former client. And she said, Help basically help. She said, I know you know the Internet. I know you know, marketing. I have this Kickstarter project that is live, but it's really struggling, and it's on track to not be funded. And so I said, You know, I'm kind on vacation. I'm not really doing new client stuff right now. Um, she said, Well, let me send you the trailer, Um, and take a look and see what you think. So she sent me the trailer and the movie, the documentary that she was making is called Gold Star Children, and I didn't know the term. But a gold star child is a child who's lost apparent at war. And so I watched the trailer and wipe the tears from my eyes and called her back and said, I'd love to help. Let's do this from Hawaii. And so, um, the documentary was already filmed. She just needed $20,000 for post production. So the documentaries done. She just needed 20 for Post. Um, and I said, Well, you know where you talked about it said I Googled Kickstarter best practices back in January of 2012. There wasn't much out there. And so we're gonna talk about tribes and sub tribes a little bit later. But one of the big components of this course is who are the specific tribes and sub tribes who care about your project not trying to reach everybody trying to reach those specific few people. We're gonna talk about 1000 true fans a little bit later, so I talked to Midian very clearly. One of the very big tribes or sub tribes for this particular project. This particular documentary is military families, right? If the child has lost a parent at certain, you know, at war, military families air clearly a focus for this. So her project only had about 10 days to go. It was far from funded and all we did a sort of reach out to communities that she was already a part of and hadn't really talked about her documentary. And within a few days, she had broken her $20, goal raised 23,000 just in the last few days just by putting it in front of the right people who desperately care, right? She wasn't trying to get unmatchable or tech run. She was putting it specifically where the people care. And she already had a beautiful, gorgeous trailer to Teoh show show to those folks. So I thought that was it. I thought I was done. Um, not, you know, that was a one off project I didn't intend to become. A Kickstarter expert just told a friend about this cool project that we just did. He said, Oh, my friend Slim is doing a Kickstarter project, and Slim wrote the book, realizing empathy that you can see here on stage. Um, he was in the middle of writing that book in doing a Kickstarter, and so he's Frank is a good friend. I said, Yeah, I definitely love to help Help Slim. So I helped him, and then it snowballed and snowballed from there. And so since then, I've helped not like, 28 projects raised over 2.7 million. So friends, friends of friends, other clients and now the, uh, you know, requests for expertise. They're sort of coming fast and furious. So I'm building crowdfunding hacks. A full online course. But we're here today. Teoh, unveil the secrets and tell you guys everything about it specifically for photographers and filmmakers. Um, so now, um, e didn't sort of seek this out, but I'm doing creativelive. I speak about this stuff at conferences and the other day on Twitter. There's a guy Mark Russo, and his thing is, if you follow him on Twitter, he will draw you. That's what his Twitter bio says. Follow me and I will draw you. So I followed him months and months ago, and and I didn't hear anything back, so I didn't really think I thought all Maybe I'm down low in the queue. Well, just the other day, I was sitting here in the hotel room two days ago and I got this drawing back from him. He said, Clay, here's your drawing and says, Kids, I'm going teach you how to kick start your grandma in the next Thursday. And so I thought that would be a fun way to start the course. And thanks to he's at Mark S. Russo, if you guys want your own drawing, feel free to follow him. So I want talk really quickly about Kickstarter and some numbers. The first batch of stats. We're gonna look out our 2012 end of 2012. So this is from this is in the resource guide. This is from a presentation on the Kickstarter website called Best of Kickstarter 2012. They haven't done the year end wrap for 13 cause it's not over yet, but this is end of 2012 stats. As you can imagine, there's already been about 10 more months of funding, um, over two million people $319 million.18,000 projects going to see those numbers are a lot bigger today. $606 per minute. That's a lot, um, 177 countries. So all over the world, 90% of the countries in the world there almost as many countries as watch creative life. Um 10% is interesting for filmmakers. 10% of the films at Sundance were funded on Kickstarter. This platform that didn't exist a few years ago is already funding 1/10 of the films at Sundance. Um, 63 Kickstarter funded films opened in theaters, so people even not at Sundance are bringing their projects and bringing their films to the world. So this is a more recent set. This is just the other day they crossed a huge milestone. Five million people backed over 50,000 projects on Kickstarter, so it's clearly absolutely blowing up. Um, but it's not, you'll see later in the course it's not. It is. These are interesting big stats, but it's better to think about it as a bunch of little tiny projects with specific tribes. So So one thing we're gonna talk about is it. The's big numbers, air flashy and the press loves to talk about Zach Braff's and the Spike Lee's and the Veronica Mars. And that's fine. Um, but you need to think about yours like your little island, like where you standing and the people who desperately care. Um, this link is in in the resource guide, but Kickstarter com slash help slash stats. This is all the current stats updated every day, and you can filter it. It's it's below on the screen, but you can filter by type of project. So if you want to dig deep into photography, you can look at the photography projects. Hominy backed total funding success, etcetera. Another interesting site to research projects is kick track K I C K T R A. Q. Um, if you paste in a project Neymar Kickstarter girl, you are l works better. Um, they will return a graph of backers by day dollars, etcetera, etcetera. So they'll almost show you the kind of data that you would see if you were the project creator inside of the Kickstarter dashboard. So it's a great way to kind of find similar projects to yours, which we'll talk about in a second and research sort of where you know how they're doing, what they're that really interesting thing is, in one second you can see what they're trending towards. Are they training to be 30% funded or 300% funded? So are they gonna get funded or not? So there's four big sections to this course plan, build, launch and promote. There's also some follow up stuff, and we're gonna talk about Excel Reward Level Modelling Tool, which is one of the bonuses for purchase that helps you model out your reward levels, the pricing and the copy Before you do it on Kickstarter, you can do it and Kickstarter. But this Excel tool helps calculate fees, Kickstarter fees, Amazon fees, etcetera, Azizullah's shipping and production. And you can also model conversion rate traffic so you can see, like how many people do you need to see it at what conversion rate to get funded? So plan is by far the biggest section of the course. Kickstarter projects get funded before they watch. That's a very important point. After seeing, you know, 50 some projects, all the ones that did the pre work necessary in the pre planning and the marketing before they launched, um totally blew away their goal and the ones who launched and then tried to do the marketing. You know, struggle. And even if you are able to reach your goal during that, that's gonna be a crazy, stressful month. Because running the Kickstarter project itself is kind of a full time job. So you don't want to be, you know, doing the marketing at that point to build. So your story, your awards, your pricing, all these things determine success. I've seen projects with really great videos and really bad pricing levels not get funded, you know, great story. Great project, great idea. But their pricing levels were way out of whack because they didn't understand the psychology of Kickstarter pricing. And we're gonna get into that then launch. We talk about launch day and how toe really packet and break through the noise on launch day, right? The web, twitter and social media are very noisy places. We're gonna talk about specific strategies to break through that noise and get people to know about your campaign into back it and then promotion. And hopefully it doesn't look like this. This was kind of the joke image. You don't want to use a bullhorn in the square to yellow butter Kickstarter project, but the key point here is that you need to send traffic and backers to your project. One of the biggest misconceptions about Kickstarter and crowdfunding in general is that, like I said, the press loves to talk about, uh, Spike Lee and Veronica Mars and they say, Hey, if they can raise a few $1,000, I can certainly raise 100 grand for my little documentary. And that's not the way it works. Um, you need to send. We'll talk about this more later, but about 90% of the traffic to and backers to your project. So that's why the marketing in the planning is really important. Um, Kickstarter and other crowdfunding platforms will send you some traffic, but it's best to not even count on that and treat it like a bonus. So plan. Before we jump into plan, I want to talk about some key terms. So a backer is someone who pledges money towards your project. It some of these are basic terms, but there's a lot of people on the chat and people that may not know all these terms. And I don't want to be confused as I go throughout the day. So I'm gonna go through this really quick. So a backer is someone who pledges your project. Someone who contributes money conversion rate, which will get into a little more later, is off the people that visit your page, the percentage of people who pledge so pretty simply if 100 people visit your Kickstarter page and you have 10 backers, you have a conversion rate of 10%. The creator is the project creator. That's you. The duration is how How long your project lasts in days, the funding goal pretty obvious. The total amount that you want to raise a pledge or back is kind of to do. That is the act of backing it. So those words are a little bit interchangeable. Um, project is a project or campaign on kick starter, a self contained thing that last for 30 days. And then the reward is what the backer gets for pledging. So if it any point during the day, I use any other terms that aren't clear. Just stop me happy to explain. So like I said some of these examples. I use our film The Gold Star Children, The Total Disruption to Steve Nash movie. But all the advice applies to Kickstarter and also to other crowdfunding platforms. We talk a little bit about some Kickstarter specific stuff, but most of it applies if you're gonna do any go, go or something else. And then a lot of the marketing advice applies to any venture or project that you're gonna do. So I want to talk about riel goals because, like we just talked about, there's the funding goal. Do you want to raise $20,000 or $30,000? But there's the real goal behind every Kickstarter project. There's something riel that you want to happen. So Midi wanted toe raised $20,000 not just to finish the film, but to bring the film to the world and to connect her generation to this new generation of kids who are losing parents at war. So that was her real goal was to connect two generations, which is a pretty big, lofty, important goal. And so I want o pause here, um, and asked the chat room and asked the studio audience What is your real goal? So we're going to talk about your funding goal in a second, but I want you to think about for those who do have projects, what is your reliable? What is your broader goal in doing Kickstarter? Yeah, Uh, So I started working with kids with autism because I found that I had a bunch of skills applicable to these to helping these kids. And the question I get over and over again when I'm particularly abroad teaching workshops is how can I do what you're doing with my child after you've left? I got this question from, ah, group of 50 families in Buenos Ideas Argentina last April, and I'm going back in just actually a couple weeks, like, three weeks. But they so want these tools, and it's just a matter of helping them get access to them. Sure, sure, absolutely. Call it. I think you have a interesting real goal. Pretty big and lofty for me is like raising awareness and empowering women, especially in the Middle East, and having a pearl interview in the Middle East and here in the United States and seeing some issues like domestic violence. It exists in some part of the world will make people in the Middle East, especially women, talk about it and get out of these situations than they were just saying that, you know it happened and I will just have to accept it and live with it. Uh, so it's It's really important for me, and it's a really big issue over there. Definitely, very, very big. Thank you for doing the work you do. You've got a very interesting real goal. Is yeah, Like I said, I did eight years myself in Marine Corps. I only deployed once. My husband deployed twice. We weren't married at the time, but you know, so we both had that experience, and I is a very touching moment for me. I remember when I first was in Rinker, probably less than a year in Ah, we was in the band and we played as a group. Marines was coming home from Iraq. They were one of the first groups out there, too, so it was like a really emotional, dangerous place for less than you know, more than it is today. And there was a mom there waiting, and she had a little tiny tiny baby there and watching that father made his baby for the first time. I just like I cannot imagine how heartbreaking that was for him to be out there, not knowing if he's coming home. No, not knowing if he's gonna get hurt and missing such a beautiful, important moment in his child in his wife's life. And I just I don't want the dads to have to miss that. I want to do whatever I can to get them as involved as they possibly can be in those special moments that they're missing while they're gone. Wow, so amazing and so important. I love it, Thank you. So as you can see, like funding goal is just that. It's just a number. It's just money. There's obviously really huge, important big dreams and big goals behind some of these. We have some real goals from the chatter. Well, you know what? We're having a little lag with the chat room, but it didn't it didn't get me thinking, and I was thinking about a friend's project that I remember hearing about, and their project was about. It's. It has to do with clean water and also formula and encouraging women in developing countries to breastfeed if they're able, so that because sometimes when you're doing formula, they mix it with dirty water and babies were dying. And I think that there's so many. I mean, there's so many causes out there that different people can get behind. And I remember hearing that and just thinking it's so simple, you know how you know it was just simply like to get the word out type of campaign that costs money and they needed to raise. Yeah, exactly. It's funny that, you know, we talked about these dads when we celebrate the stats, and certainly we just talked about them. But I wish we could in a nice, tidy number, like 50, successfully funded projects, those air really 50, rial goals and big dreams, you know that that Kickstarter helped make happen. So, um, that's really wonderful. So there's lots of reasons other than funding to do a Kickstarter beyond your real goal. So market validation, try building. So we're gonna talk a lot today about tribes and the importance of having a tribe. Um, but what a lot of people don't know is if you could ever successfully funded Kickstarter project. You get the emails of everyone who back to you and those are people who gave you your money, gave you money. So it's a great way to develop an initial tribe especially. And we're gonna talk about this, that if you could do cheaper digital rewards, you know, you might have 2000 backers, and now you have emails to start your email list in your blogging, your tribe and everything else. So we're gonna talk about platforms. But try building is really big outside investment. We're gonna look at a couple of projects who every VC in the Valley said no to all those smart folks down on Sand Hill Road said, No, I'm not giving you any money. And then they go to Kickstarter and the people come out in droves and they gave him money. And then they went back to saying that road and guess who had the power in the negotiation. So another another reason potentially to Kickstarter is if you want to raise funding later on, and then just exposure on building your tribe. Come in now and we love to share them with sweets, Melissa says. My real goal is to create a place of dreams by providing photography to cancer patients with a book of moments in time. Wow, just really amazing. So, Lar says, wants to help a 73 year old adventure photographer publish a book from a lifetime of adventures with words of wisdom to celebrate the natural world. Wow, that sounds great. Learn more about that one. One more. 3 18 Media says My real goal is increasing the racial diversity in the Web and graphic design fields. Wow, I mean a huge, big world changing goals. And I love to see that the backers in the dollars are really secondary to this stuff. We're bringing really interesting big ideas to the world. So the format of a lot of these slides for the rest, of course, is when you see and this is true for people online as well. When you see the quotes in a question mark, after helping all these projects, I get a lot of same questions over and over and over. And so I thought, Well, that's a great way to talk about content for the course because I'm sure you guys and the folks online have a lot of the same questions. So I built it in sort of a format where I have a question here with a quote and then the slide after the question is a Twitter length tweet herbal answer. Kind of the short answer, and then I'll often go into more context than more details. So just so So you guys know, um, if you have questions that are related to the question here, you know, feel free to kind of let me know, and we can pause and address it at that point because it kind of fits in the process in the flow and questions at that point, should we go good? So 1st 1 should I use Kickstarter, Indiegogo or another crowdfunding platform? I get this one all the time, and the short answer is, if your project is a fit for Kickstarter, I would use Kickstarter. The reasons are there's more organic traffic. They've got more projects funded, more total funds raised, its just the big whale. Right now, they've funded more crowdfunding projects. Now that said, there is nothing wrong with Indiegogo and ego goes awesome has also funded It's Hon of Amazing Projects, Kickstarter has much more restrictive UM, categories and guidelines like, is your project to fit for Kickstarter? And there are a lot of projects that are not a fit for Kickstarter. Anything that donates money to a cause or nonprofit, like a percentage of profits donated to a nonprofit cause. That's not a fit for Kickstarter. If that's really what your project is about, you need to use a different platform. Um, you can't do anything with real estate. So if you wanted to build ah, building to house homeless, building a homeless shelter and raise funds for that, that's not a fit for Kickstarter either. So we'll get more into the details of that. But, um, I would say, if it's a fit for kicks, are used Kickstarter. But there's nothing wrong with these other platforms. Indiegogo is great. The truth is, on any platform you need to bring about 90% of the traffic and backers through your own channels through your own tribe, through social media, email lists, etcetera and finding the tribes like we did with many mirror finding the military tribes or the sub tribes who care. So you need to bring those people yourself. There's also a niche platforms and plug ins like their specific crowdfunding platforms. For like if you want to open a restaurant and that's where the people who wanna open restaurants go and use those and then the people that visit that site, they know what it's for. Um, and it's, you know, their niche platforms and plug ins. Some of the plug ins are, if you're if you feel like you're bringing 90% of the traffic yourself and just wanted to do it yourself and not pay the Kickstarter fee in the Amazon payments fee, you could host it on your own site. And there's now open source tools and plug ins to run your own crowdfunding project. I know people that have done Kickstarter, and then now they figured it out, and now they host their own on their own side because they have the emails in the tribe. So I say, if it's a fit for Kickstarter used Kickstarter sent home. Next question is, is it a fit for Kickstarter? So the biggest thing here is and this is a little bit basic, but it's really important because a lot of people that reach out to me haven't done this yet. Your project needs to fit kick starters guidelines and fit into one kick starters categories. So Kickstarter, the categories and guidelines definitely read through this. Look at the guidelines Page. Look at the category, so I'm actually gonna read them off because so many people don't fit one of these. And then they ask for help on their Kickstarter project. And the first thing I say is, it's not a fit for Kickstarter. So there's art comics, dance design, fashion film, which were obviously here for food, games, music, photography, publishing technology and theater. So your project really needs to fit squarely into one of these categories. If it doesn't, it's not a fit for Kick Star. Also, please, please, please read the Kickstarter guidelines. Um, this is just a small sampling. The link is in the resource guide, just Google Kickstarter guidelines. There's tons of great links and help on their site can't be used to sell equity or loans, so there's two types of crowdfunding going back up a bit. There's rewards based crowdfunding, so that's Kickstarter, Indiegogo, all those things. Rewards based is just what it sounds like. You get the reward you get the actual thing. Could be a DVD. Could be a download. Could be a backpack. Could be a soma water pitcher. You get the thing. You don't get equity in the company, you don't get anything else. Then there's equity based crowdfunding, usually for larger dollar amounts, sometimes with accredited investors. And then you get a tiny slice so you don't get a water pitcher, but you get 0.1% of the company. And so everything we're gonna talk about today is Kickstarter, which is rewards based. Um, you can't resell or offer awards not produced by your project by you guys by the project creators. So you can't say the $500 level is I'll give you my 1,000,000 American Airlines points, but you can't use it to kind of give away things that you didn't create. You can thats one's a little bit flexible if it's wrapped around this thing that you did create. Sometimes you can do bonuses, so you can say, um, you get the HD download of my film and you get to come to the film's premiere or you get to you know we'll send you. So if the bonuses are related or tacked onto something that you did create, then it could be more flexible. You can't donate a portion of the funds to the cause. You can't offer rewards and bulk quantities. This is not because kicks or doesn't want you to offer rewards in bulk quantities. It's because they had a lot of data that shows the more rewards people offer, the more likely it is that they're not gonna be able to fill them. So for new product design for products that don't exist, it's either 10 or one, um, and for technology. So what they found is, and we'll talk about the pebble watch a little bit later. But when the number of units for products that don't exist yet get really, really high through bulk orders, then the backers often have production issues, no self help material. And I had a friend who wrote a book that was a very interesting creative book on marketing and being an artist and being a creative he does website design and they called it self help. So we had to appeal and eventually got approved. Um, but you gotta be careful to kind of steer clear of anything that's that they might consider self help. No offensive material, obviously nothing endorsing a political candidate. If you're, um, if the project does get rejected, you basically have one appeal. And I would say, um, if they're not, if Kickstarter is not clear, if they reject your project, if they're not clear, sometimes they'll send and say, These are the exact reasons why this isn't a fit. Please fix them. And sometimes I'll just say you didn't meet our guidelines. If they say you didn't meet our guidelines, I would go back and say, Can you please elaborate on what you know We didn't meet because you basically get one appeal to kind of fix the copy, fix whatever didn't meet their guidelines. You have that chance to appeal it. They have so many new project submissions that, believe me, the founders, Yancey and Perry, are not sitting around reviewing new projects emissions there often, you know, somewhat lower level managers. And so, um, if you get a rejection, it's not a death knell. You can, you know, ask for what they want to change and then change it. Um, Kickstarter school. There's tons of gold on Kickstarter itself. They have a lot of great resource is I talked to a lot of people who jump right in and don't read that stuff, so I definitely read through that. So what are the most important steps in planning a Kickstarter? The biggest thing that people need to do that they don't do is research similar crowdfunding projects. It's huge. There is gold in that data and gold in those hills, right? It's an amazing opportunity to have all of these projects. They're still live. Kickstarter does not remove projects. Once there, done that, all the stuff is there, so you can go back and see what worked and what didn't You just have to take the time? So the key is search by category, so we'll show here they're the categories, and then there's sub categories. So under film and video, there's animation. Those projects we're gonna have different rewards and things that worked and things that didn't then documentaries narrative, short film, Siri's So poke around the sub categories as well. And once you get into your subcategory, if you're if you're making a documentary, you can search you know. Hundreds of successfully funded documentaries on Kickstarter So it's really good to find out. Sort of what worked any questions yet? Good. Yeah, yeah. If the platform can only get you 10% of the traffic, why is it such a big deal choosing the platform? Why should I go within each platform if the platform won't get me more traffic? So this is relating back to what you're saying. About 10% of your traffic maybe will come from Kickstarter. But sure, there's a great question. And what I would say is, even though they might Onley drive 10% of the traffic, the conversion rate, which we're gonna talk about in a bit, is probably gonna be higher on Kickstarter because if someone finds your project on Kickstarter, generally people on Kickstarter know the platform. They know what to do. They know what it's about. Maybe they've backed other projects. If you do your own plug in or put it on your own site when they get there, they probably never been to your site before, So you need to kind of walk them through that If someone lands on Kickstarter and their one click away from how does this work? I'm what is backing mean, um, So I think you're gonna have a higher conversion rate on Kickstarter. But I would say if you have the tribe and you have the emails and everything else, then yeah, you don't need to pay kicks for that. Sort of they call the platform tax. Indiegogo actually has two different, um, two different ways to do it. You can do fixed funding, which is all or nothing like Kickstarter. All of Kickstarter is all or nothing. Or you could do flexible funding where you pay and you go go higher platform tax. But you still get to keep the money even if you don't hit your goal. So that would be my answer to that. Thank you. Sure. So research similar projects. Dig into the sub categories and poke around and see what worked for other people again. Kick track is great for doing Mr Can find out a lot. They also have a lot of, um, data and news and blog's and things like that. And you can look into specific categories and read articles about what's working. So who has this question? How much should I try to raise everybody? Awesome. Um, this is one of the most common questions I get because it's this very nevertheless thing, right? It's like I don't know. I see Spike Lee. I see all these huge projects. I see these others that you know, failed miserably. Like what? What should I try to raise? And there is a pretty simple and, uh, about a scientific answer. But it's It's definitely the right thing to do, which is set your funding goal at the lowest amount. That still allows you to complete your project and achieve your riel goals. Right? What we talked about bringing this thing to the world. The reason you want to do this? There's sort of a misconception about if you set a really high goal, that this crowd is Caesar goal and they want to help you get there and there's gonna be all this momentum, that's not really true. Um, they want the thing. Thank you. Start is a bit acts a lot like a very cool, very creative store. People want the thing. People want the pebble watch, um, and so the benefit of setting your goal low as again as low as possible toe actually meet your project goals and get your project out the door. Maybe even if it's break even write your Nobody's getting rich from Kickstarter. Even people watch you raise 10 million. That 10 million was more of a problem with them that good things said, You know, the shit that watches shipped in our area. So a year and 1/2 later, because they had to produce so many of that through, you know, mo money mo problems like that threw a wrench into the production because they didn't expect to create that many units. So figure out what it will take kind of bare bones to get your project out in the world and then set it low. And then I'll show you why. Because the goal is to blow through that. The goal is to get funded in a week or 10 days and then have fun and become the story. So kicks the why his Kickstarter is all or nothing. So let's pick some numbers. Let's say you choose a goal of $80,000 let's say you raise $50,000. You get zero. Alan say you choose a goal of $40,000 you raise $50,000. You get $50,000 very obvious, but a lot of people don't think through this when they said their goal. Um, the funding gives the press and the bloggers a story to write about. So when we see projects get talked about, sometimes it's about how cool it is and how elegant the brittle water pitcher filter is. But often it's this project. Check out this cool project. It's 250% funded in 10 days and without even knowing what it is, really must be cool. Like it's really rocket, right? That's the story that you want about your project is that you blew through your funding goal. That's not going to stop people. People are going to see this cool documentary and say, Oh, he's already funded. He doesn't need my money, do we're gonna structure it to make them want the actual thing, even if it's at a lower level. So he gives the press in the bloggers something to talk about. It also gives confidence for later backers, So I don't about you guys, but I have come across a lot of projects. Where I watched the video, I was like, Wow, that is super cool. And then I look, there's two days left, their 5% funded and no matter how much I wanted it, it wasn't even worth my time to do a couple clicks. Because I know how Kickstarter works. It's not gonna get funded and I'm not gonna get my thing. So why even waste my time once you're funded? If you get fund in the first week or 10 days, then every backer who sees your project sees that you're funded and there are They know that the project is gonna happen. It's important to understand all costs and fees. I know people that didn't do this well in the spreadsheet that we're gonna look at later helps model this. I know people that raised $30,000 on Kickstarter and went home with nothing because they didn't estimate their shipping production, international shipping and then the platform fees. So what I do know about like this is what's fixed, and then you have your own production and shipping fees that can't sort of standardize, but Kickstarter takes 5%. That's the Kickstarter platform fee. The Amazon payments. All funding through Kickstarter has to go through Amazon payments. So that's how you receive the money. That's how the backers give you the money that ranges from 3 to 5, depending on the number and the project. So estimate 8 to 10% off the top, plus production and shipping fees. So that's a big thing. Teoh realize if you're trying to raise $30,000 three grand of it is already not yours before you even talk about production and shipping. So just make sure to remember that how long should my project run? I get this one a lot, and the good news is, is pretty standard. Answer and even Kickstarter themselves tell you the same thing. Except for a couple of very rare cases, your project should be 30 days. The reason is because it's enough time toe execute and to do it and that 30 years is gonna feel like a year because it's crazy. It's It's a full time job during those 30 days, but enough time to execute on the marketing plan, but short enough so that if a backer comes to your project with nine days to go, that there's enough urgency that they need to act. If you come to a project with 58 days to go. You're like, close the tab. I'll see it again. I'll come back and they don't. Right. So And it's also enough to keep you saying while you're jumping through hoops and running your project, we're gonna show how to pack all the marketing in before you launch so that once you launch your really just running the campaign and questions here or in the chat room, I think we're gonna touch on. I believe we may touch on this later in the course, but I'm gonna sweets. Melissa me says that her question is, how does one write the copy she uses for romantic language to get their crowd following? And is that something that we touch on later? Would you like to? Yeah, you can ask her if she means the copy in the reward levels, because we're definitely gonna touch on that later. We'll touch on the copy on the left hand side, but we're actually gonna touch on why. That's not as important, because most Kickstarter backers never even read the left hand column and a copy. And I think she's also addressing just simply to get her crowd following sure to get her tribe? Sure. And so when romantic language. You know, she means chicks. Shakespeare. Romantic. I think that's her term for enticing. Okay. Okay. Yeah, I would, uh I just need to know, Like what? What her projects about like, what's she trying to weaken? Weaken? Definitely dress that. We have another question. Modesto wants to know. What is your opinion on doing both Kickstarter and Indiegogo? Is that an option for people, or should they stick toe one? Yeah, that's a really great question. Actually, that's a question I should put it in here. The way I like to think about that is think of Kickstarter in doing a Kickstarter project as throwing a really fun party at your house. Right? You can your video on your copy and your everything else and reward levels could be amazing. That's like your house. Maybe you have the best, the best guacamole and the best everything. You hold your hosting this party. Um but if nobody comes, then the party's not very fun. It doesn't matter how nicely your places decorated or how great the catered food is. Right. So doing Kickstarter Indiegogo at the same time is like trying to host two different parties in New York and l A. At the same time. So I would say from a sanity perspective, I definitely wouldn't recommend it. You're also. Then where do you drive people? All the stuff we're going to talk about, all the tribe, all that you send him to Kickstarter. You send it to go. So I would say definitely, definitely not at the same time. And the other thing is, I wouldn't even do it at supper times for the same exact project because, like we talked about the platform is only giving you that 10%. People are gonna wonder why you know that you're trying to bring the same 90% of people to another thing. So that question is really from kind of a mind set of the platform's gonna help me do a lot of marketing. What I would do is maybe do one Kickstarter for, like, a phase one of the project, and then maybe face to isn't a fit. Or maybe you want to face to on Indiegogo cause it's a little bit of a different crowd, but I definitely wouldn't recommend doing both at the same time. That's like trying to run to really awesome parties in New York and Holly at the same time, we have just one word. Sure. Pretty interesting question. Come in O. J vest, ask some. Do you get contact information for potential backers as they come in? Already, only get that info if you reach it once it's funded and if a project is not funded when you have that in post that, you can build that tribe only if it's funded, which is another reason to set your funding goal at the lowest amount. Because when you get funded, that flips the switch, and now you have the tribe and you have the e mails. We are going to talk about a lot about launch, talking about landing pages and building your tribe before that, so hopefully you'll have a lot of that information before you launch. But that is even another reason to set the goal at the lowest amount so that you do get funded and then you get on the back of emails. So we go. So what are the main reason Kickstarter projects fail? So there's lots of sub reasons, but they all roll up to two main reasons. Every Kickstarter failure is either a conversion problem or a traffic problem. And that kind of goes back to the conversion rate that we mentioned earlier. If you think about a Kickstarter page and a project as kind of a standalone thing, and let's say 100 people visit it in 10 people, back it 10% of pretty good conversion rate for Kickstarter or anywhere on the Web. Um, if that's the case, you probably don't have a conversion problem. You probably have a traffic problem if you're converting at 10%. If you continue to convert a 10% you don't even need that much more traffic to get your project funded as well show most funded Kickstarter projects have far less than 1000 backers, so we try to think of How do we bring that? You know, we talked about big ideas and big goals and bringing the stuff to the world. What you really want to do is bring it to the 1000 people who desperately care. So, um, we'll get into a little bit deeper. But conversion, the Nash documentary that we're going to talk about in a bit, they did not have they had a conversion problem, not a traffic problem. Their project was talked about all over the place, but the rewards. They made almost every mistake in the book when it comes to reward levels and pricing and what people actually get. And it's funny because I had found it and I'm a Steve Nash man and I'm a basketball fan and I was like, Oh, cool, Somebody's doing a documentary about Steve Nash And then I rather war levels And just as a backer, as a user of Kickstarter, I didn't even back the project cause it was like, you know, $50 for the DVD or whatever, and I don't even have a DVD player. So, uh and so that's what I mean about it's all trafficker conversion. This is kind of a little bit of, ah, heady concept. People who do a lot of marketing on the Web understand this. It's about hits. And then how many people actually convert and funnels? Does this make sense? The trafficker conversion problem? Yeah, Okay, cool. So how do I position my project for success? So there's a really amazing marketing book called Positioning. I highly recommend everybody by it, But I'm gonna give you the five minute version right here and the most important thing. So the idea of positioning is and that this applies that The book was written in the late seventies early eighties, but it was really about the fact that in consumers minds, there's really only one spot for one sort of adjective. 11 brand right When I say the word Volvo, most people's heads think safety. That's because they owned that positioning in the mind for safety for a long time. The brand of Volvo did, and people a lot of people bought a lot of oval is because they assume that they were the safest, safest cars. They owned that, and they spent a lot of money to own that. So it's important not just for big brands like that, but for your Kickstarter project. We went through a few examples. What the first thing you want to do is think of adjectives that describe your particular project and then think of the opposite of that word. So fast and slow, right? If you think of like, maybe FedEx is fast, then maybe the Postal Service is slow. Or maybe asking your friend Jeff to take the package somewhere. It would be slow, right? Those air two opposites, right? Um, expensive or cheap? Right? Walmart owns cheap. Louis Vuitton owns expensive, right, that kind of thing. Exclusive or open, disposable or durable. So think of think of the adjectives that your backers in your tribe care about and how that relates to your project. Maybe it's exposing. You know, privacy, um, fashionable or functional, those kind of things. So if we look at an example, guys like that transition. I stayed up all night on that, um, cheap and expensive, open and exclusive. So creativelive is cheap. Sometimes it's free. And so they sort of own that quadrant. If you compare that to a private university, maybe in Boston may be made out of brick That's exclusive and expensive, right? That's how they marketed its in. Doing this graph is not meant to show a winner and a loser or good and bad. It's meant to say You want to own your quadrant, you want to be in 1/4 by yourself, right? It's okay to be down there. It's okay to be different, but if there's people up here. Now, all those 1000 people have problems, right? So you can keep going back to different adjectives and trying different things. You should change the adjectives until one you're comfortable that they represent your project into that you're in a quadrant all by yourself. It gives differentiation for the backers as they're looking at different Kickstarter projects or deciding where to spend their money. They say, Wow, there is no other picture like the Soma water filter pitcher. Right? Um, it informs your video and copy. So once you know these adjectives, you're gonna you're gonna want to Sprinkle them and almost like you would with a CEO. But it's just gonna help drive. Your story helps craft the press story so it gives the press, doesn't want to write about the same thing they wrote about yesterday. Want to write about something unique they love like a David and Goliath type story. Um, the same without let PR outlets and bloggers look, a couple more examples. Example elegant and functional and ICO friendly and plastic. So Mike Del Ponti was sitting in his home in San Francisco. He was having a dinner party had planned for weeks. He had everything out. He had the runner here. Perfect peanuts. He had, you know, just a gorgeous meal and had, you know, 25 friends over for dinner. He went to the fridge and he got his water pitcher filter the plastic one that we all owned. And he was kind of embarrassed to put that cause it was like one of these things is not like the other, like this gorgeous dinner party and then this ugly plastic thing. And so he was pouring the the water from the pitcher into wine decanter. He had an extra wind in countries like, at least this will be better than the thing. And you tipped it up to the point. And then the whole contraption fell out and spilled water, put out the candles and ruin the table and ruin the dinner party. Right, So it was a terrible situation. And, you know, I think the wine decanter found the floor and broke. His friend said, Why isn't there something that looks like a wine decanter for water filter that you'd be proud to put on the table? And that was like, you could see the label being and and they thought. Well, yeah, that's great. We should make it so over time they figured out the adjectives were elegant and eco friendly vs Functional and plastic. All right, so Soma owns that. There's no other water pitcher filter that's elegant and eco friendly. And there's 50 that air, plastic and functional. There's no growth left in that category, right? So it's important to think about these because not just for you and your project. But look, 25 Most audacious companies in Inc magazine look at the headline Purer than pure, more elegant than Britta Soma is taking on the big guys with an elegant ICO friendly water filtration system. So those adjectives become your press story. They filter through and become how people talk about your project, right? Disruptive innovation. You know things like that. And because of that and a lot of other things they did right. 100% funded in 10 days, 147% funded overall. Um, really, really good