Only Opportunities

"There are no disasters, only opportunities. And, indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters." - Boris Johnson

This blog is here to share my experiences of crowd-funding. It's also a place for me to share (as part of the solution to a problem I've identified) promising campaigns with a focus on crowd-sourcing and user generated content (UGC). But first, a little about my story...

What We Had

When I started Tarradiddle, my crowd-centric publishing platform, I had many things. I had ambition, a comprehensive vision for how the app would fit together, skills enough to get a working prototype ready, an idea of the costs associated with each user, and a clear idea of what was required to build it. Those requirements soon grew, as I realised the scope of the project. That was a problem.

What We Lacked

While I had a lot in the rather nebulous senses explained above, I lacked a lot more. As a student, back in my home town for the long vacation, I had very little money. The four month break was too short to do absolutely anything with, but too long to do nothing. I had no home to call my own, no office space as such, I was sleeping in various spare rooms, and the temptation was to join some voluntary organisation abroad and give up on advancing my career.

I have bipolar disorder. I don't mean to use that as an excuse, but in order to focus, and to achieve, I need a stable, quiet environment and a functioning support network. Relations with one half of my family had become difficult at this point, and I had none of those prerequisites. I felt under siege - I knew that, at 28 and struggling into my final year of studies, this year would be the most important of my development. I wanted to put all of my efforts into something truly educational. Something truly valuable. I started a company to incubate my development work, and we attracted a bit of seed capital. It was other peoples' opinion that I should go back to working in a shop. My mother's partner, in particular, wanted me to learn a lesson about earning money through hard work - somehow missing, or disapproving of, the hard work I'd been putting into the company!

But I carried on. Through all the upheaval and stress I realised that Tarradiddle was too large a project for me to complete on my own. It required dedicated story-reading technology, very secure servers, a presence on all of the popular mobile platforms, and it needed to be launched in good time. I knew I could do the coding, but it might have taken me two or three years. By that time, we'd have established competitors crawling all over us and it would've meant a waste of time and money. Things move very fast in this industry, and good, disruptive ideas are conceived independently of each-other all the time.

No matter the strengths of your idea,
you'll fail if no-one hears about it.

GoGo!

So we launched the IndieGoGo campaign. A lot hard work went into making a punchy, endearing video, and getting our costings right. So much of what we've now learnt would've been useful back then!

For starters, we aren't terribly well connected. We know some people, sure, but more often than not it can be difficult to get your Facebook friends to engage with a crowd-funding campaign simply because (at this stage) you'll likely be the first of your friends to do anything like it. It isn't for charity, and it most likely isn't even related to anything they're interested in. A core of your friends and family will support you because they love you, but they won't be excited enough about the idea to tell anyone else about it.

My initial reaction was to start a modest, targeted advertising campaign on Facebook. This translated into likes - people seemed to approve of the idea - but not into contributions. We fiddled with our perk offerings, to no effect, and kept updating our campaign in order to increase our visibility on IndieGoGo. We emailed press releases, talked to everyone we could think of, and pursued the fabled re-tweets. We climbed through the rankings but, as of today, we're still sitting at 1% of our (admittedly ambitious) $27,600 goal. Private feedback and our Facebook statistics seem to suggest that people like the idea of the project, so what's going on?

It could well be too late for Tarradiddle's current campaign, but I think it's worth analysing for future reference and to help others.

Share and Endure

I've noticed a real reluctance amongst established blogs and social media loci to share what you send them. You're competing for space with hundreds of requests per day, most of them spam. Do your emails read like spam? Are you excited to be sharing "this fantastic opportunity"? Think how your words come across. People also seem to be intrinsically wary of crowd-funding campaigns. Even if they're intrigued by the idea, they are likely to say "come back to us when you're up and running" rather than help you to get there by sharing the project!

Some people even respond with outright hostility. Our project relies on user generated content, and there are some in the world of literature - even bloggers, who you might think would be into this sort of thing - who don't trust the internet to create works of merit. They seem to enjoy and trust the concept of gate-keepers of taste. To them, this doesn't lead to innovation-less, curated catalogues - it's the only way to ensure quality. Anyone who's laughed and cried at xkcd.com, or followed their favourite YouTube Vlogger, knows that's utter rubbish. The internet creates tripe, sure, but so do published authors - the cream always rises to the top, if only you let it.

The easiest and most sure-fire way of getting your campaign to succeed seems to be Already Having a Following. That's about the only reliable way of ensuring you'll reach enough people who "get" you and your project. If that sounds unfair, it's because it is. Your idea might be amazing, but you're going to have to become a new media guru to make it happen. 

Mission Statement

And that's why I'm here. I've learnt a lot about the way IndieGoGo works, and the challenges campaigners face. I want to help. I'm going to be blogging about projects I like the look of, specifically in the sphere of crowd-sourcing and UGC. I will try to be as fair as I can and I'll post when I can. As long as you don't mind me using your campaign logos/images on this blog, tweet me about your campaign: @Shrubhill Or you can find me on Google+

Let's get busy - send me guest blog submissions and tell the world about your project. We'll try to build a community around this singular aspect of the singularity - user generated everything.