Over the past couple weeks I have been talking about the details of doing a soft-launch. This week I want to zoom the lens back out and talk about the emotional roller coaster that is crowd-funding.

Running a campaign takes a lot of work and there is no guarantee that your project is going to get funded. It can be devastating to put so much into a project only to be met with failure. One way I have found to deal with this is by embracing the idea, “this might not work.”

“The joy of art is particularly sweet, though, because it carries with it the threat of rejection, of failure, and of missed connections. It’s precisely the high-wire act of “this might not work” that makes original art worth doing.” ~ Seth Godin, The Icarus Deception

The reality of crowd-funding

The reality of crowd-funding is that most project don’t make it. Of the over 132K projected launched on Kickstarter only 56K, or 43%, have been successful, and only 6K, or 5%, have raised more then $20,000. So from the start the odds of having a huge run away success are not in your favor.

We all want our project to do well but success is extremely complicated. It may take years for an idea to come to fruition. I think it’s better to start with the assumption that your project is an experiment which is being tested with the market. It’s not up to you to decided what they will like.

As I work on our campaign, I’m assuming that it’s not going to be easy and we will have to fight hit our goal. Even though I’ve worked on several campaigns before I’m not taking anything for grant it. My plan is to do everything I can to push the odds of success in our favor and be pleasantly surprised when we hit our goal.

So why crowd-fund?

Hopefully all this talk of failure bring up an important question in your mind.

If crowd-funding is so much work, with a limited pay off, why go through the all the hassle?

In my mind the answer is simple, because crowd-funding teaches you how to package your idea. Something I realized during my first campaign was that there was no way I could have raised the money I did with out Kickstarter. Asking your friends one by one to donate to your project via paypal just doesn’t have the same effect.

What crowd-funding sites provide is packing that we know works. When you first use it, you might not understand why it works but with practice you can get better at it. I always thought that if I could figure out why Kickstarter works so well then eventually I wouldn’t need it.

I like to think of Kickstarter as training wheels for launching ideas. As you learn to ride you fall down and scrape your knee. Eventually you figure it out and before long you are doing tricks.

I really hope this helps you put crowd-funding in perspective. Crowd-funding comes with a lot of highs and lows, but going in with the right mindset can make all the difference.