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Our Own Dark Helmet Shares Lessons From Crowdfunding Experiment
from the that's-one-dark-helmet dept
Last week, we kicked off our new "case study" series, with a post about musician Jason Parker's experiments with "pay what you want" for his music. This week, we're going in a different direction, as will be explained in a bit. We've received a bunch of suggestions for future case studies, with plenty of good ones, but if you know any content creator experimenting with interesting business models, who you think would make a good case study, please let us know via the "contact us" link at the top of the page.
For this case study, we're actually going to discuss an experiment by someone that regular Techdirt readers may know quite a bit -- especially if you spend a lot of time in our comments. It's Tim Geigner, whose name may not be that familiar to you, but his alter ego Dark Helmet has been one of, if not the most prolific commenters on Techdirt, where he tends to play the role of comment enforcer, keeping people (including me at times) in line, when he feels anyone has spoken without thinking. Separate from that, however, he's been writing a fair amount of fiction lately, which is quite enjoyable.
For one of his fiction books, Midwasteland, he decided to test out Kickstarter, a platform for "crowdfunding," creative works, which has received a lot of attention. His Midwasteland project is still in process, so if you like his work, feel free to jump in and support him. That said, he's not sure that he used Kickstarter all that well, and isn't sure that his project will reach the necessary goal to get funded. I think there's often a lot more that can be learned from what ideas didn't work, than what did, so I talked with Tim about why he thinks things didn't go as ideally as possible. First, however, he pointed out that even if the project doesn't get funded, a few really good things have happened, which we'll get to below. But, he's taken away some important lessons on why Kickstarter hasn't been quite a magic bullet:
Why didn't it go as I'd initially hoped? The onus is all on me. That's the other cool part of this: I'm learning lessons that I can use on my next project, whatever it may be..
Lesson 1: It isn't enough to have a good idea, you have to do your due prep work to make it successful.
Lesson 2: It isn't enough to have people be genuinely interested in you, you need them to want to PROMOTE you.
Lesson 3: There is more to value in a project like this than making money. I got a TON of feedback on my writing. I learned a TON of little lessons from trying this project.
Read the full post on techdirt.com
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