Why Did Our Kickstarter Fail? What Must We Do Better? (pt. 1)

This is a review of the our crowdfunding campaign to raise our entire budget, $50,000 for "The Coward".

1. DESCRIPTION pt. 1 (this post)
2. DESCRIPTION pt. 2
3. ANALYSIS
4. REVIEW
5. LESSONS LEARNED

1. DESCRIPTION (pt. 1)

We looked at three other alternatives - Indiegogo, Seed & Spark and GoFundMe, rejecting each in turn for specific failings:

Indiegogo

PRO - Flexible funding

CON - Product centered site. There is a Film section but it's weaker than Kickstarter. The potential pool of pledgers is smaller. Indiegogo is not as known as Kickstarter.

Seed & Spark

PRO - Creator focussed

CON - It's pool of both content and pledgers leans towards modern political, culturally topical subjects. We were not sure how interested the pledger pool would be to a heavy, historical film like this.

GoFundMe

PRO - No need for rewards etc

CON - Charity/Good Cause focused. Very simplistic project page, a killing weakness for a visually intensive project like this short film.

In the end we used a Kickstarter, 30-day, all-or-nothing crowdfunding campaign. Kickstarter has the large pool of potential pledgers organic to the platform itself. It has good name recognition as it's definitely more known than IndieGoGo (and completely outshines Seed & Spark). Finally Kickstarter has greater social trust simply because it's more known, which makes it appear more trustworthy - no small thing when asking people for money!

Kickstarter has a very smooth project onboarding, good support for visual content, a clear and descriptive process for building the project and excellent analytics (Google Analytics, Facebook Meta, etc). Kickstarter has an extensive and in-depth film section, with a much larger quantity of films and total amount funds generated than Indiegogo, its nearest competitor. Kickstarter is also about twice the size of Indiegogo in terms of unique visitors per month and total amount raised across all campaigns.

There are some CONS though and not all of them were obvious. The message spam was relentless:

That was one of the more cogent ones.

There were at least three supporters who found it hard to log in, either by creating a Kickstarter profile or using Facebook. For some weird reason you cannot use a Google profile to log in.

This is a concern as these were the people who actually told me about the issue. How many others became frustrated and just gave up?

Overall though, the experience of using Kickstarter was quite positive. Its interface is clean and clear, if a little dated. The process is easy to understand and the support is quite decent.

There was/is one potential wrinkle - in the last hours of the campaign we received a $13,000 pledge from one Francisco de Borja de Bella. They've apparently donated to 205 other projects. This gave us a sudden last minute chance at funding (we were now "only" $21,000 away!) and when a family memebr pledged $11,000 we were only $10K away. This was incredible and encouraged a last minute social media storm to somehow raise the remaining monies. That failed, eventually and we missed our target.

The coda to this though, is that sudden, last minute massive pledges are a thing on Kickstarter- for scammers. Searching for Francisco online turns up very little after a thin IMDB profile, where he's listed as an actor/producer. No social media profiles, there's a website of some kid but no working email to contact him.

Is he legit? Was the pledge real? We'll never know because we missed our target - so no one was charged.

I'm still trying to track him down through his collaborators on past projects - if this is our guy, of course!

Okay, enough for now. Part 2 to follow.

~C