sbriggman wrote:I think of Kickstarter kind of like Reddit. When you first join Reddit, you think it's this one large community, but you quickly find out that's not the case. Just as there are individual sub-reddits, there are also individual Kickstarter categories and some are easier to do well in than others.
Some Kickstarter projects can fit comfortably under more than one category, and depending upon which category that you place your project under, you might end up making it easier or harder on your own project, due to the respective sizes of the communities that have grown around a particular category.
But, one thing that project creators need to realize is that each Kickstarter project is like a seed for a community, and when you plant that seed (launch your project), a community will either begin to grow around your project or it won't. The grand object is to nurture and cultivate your own community, and not so much to co-opt someone else's community.
A lot of people want to take shortcuts, and commandeer existing communities in whole, and invariably, the run into problems. They see a golden egg, and off they go, trying to steal the goose. In the process, their own project suffers, simply because they are operating on a skewered sense of what "community" is.
This approach opens project creators up to becoming vulnerable to all kinds of nonsense. The problem is not so much that it's wrong to look for shortcuts, per se, but rather, the problem is that people are often willing to invest more time and energy and effort into looking for shortcuts, than they invest in nurturing and cultivating and growing a healthy and vibrant community of their own.
Hence, why people are quick to look for the Magic Voices of Large Numbers, such as people with huge followings on Twitter, just as one example. Instead of seeing these things as mechanisms to give their campaign a nudge, what they often tend to see are just the numbers, without an appreciation for what those numbers actually represent - not to mention what those numbers DON'T represent.
In the old days, it was called deluding one's own self. Even on this forum, people will complain about "scams," even as they are often quite willing to scam themselves. At what point should Kickstarter creators know better? After all, nobody launches a Kickstarter project, not even for the very first time, fresh from the womb. Prior to launching their first Kickstarter, what has life, itself, and the sum totality of their experience in life, taught them about the things that people do?
If you're willing to sell yourself on the concept that for, let's say, five dollars, you can grow an instant healthy and thriving community of supporters for your Kickstarter project, because some other person that you've never met has thousands or tens of thousands of Twitter followers, then what's the real scam? That some guy is investing time, energy, and effort into trying to make five bucks a pop by flashing large numbers around, or that some other guy allows them self to go all google-eyed over the glitz and glamour of pure numbers?
Numbers, absent context, are just raw data. A community that you haven't bothered to actually grow and build and nurture and foster is just a mirage.
Just as there have been tens of thousands of projects on Kickstarter since its inception, likewise, there have also been tens of thousands of communities associated with those very same projects. In a nutshell, your project, your community.
A Twitter following is just, exactly that - a Twitter following. A Twitter following is NOT a Kickstarter community. At best, it is a Twitter community, and a Twitter community is no more a Kickstarter community than a Facebook friend's list is a Kickstarter community. You need the right tool for the right job. If what you need is a Kickstarter community, then why grab the wrong tool for the job? Yet, you tell me, Sal Briggman - How many times do you, yourself, see people continue to reach for the wrong tool for their Kickstarter job?
I already know. You see it every day. Every. Single. Day.
They haven't had time nor made the effort to grow a Twitter community of their own, so they want to borrow somebody else's for a month or so, in order to get their Kickstarter funded. They don't have time to build and grow a community of their very own, because they're too busy spending their time engaging in all kinds of nonsensical antics. So, if the guy with forty thousand twitter followers didn't get the job done, then what they then tend to do is to look for someone with even bigger Twitter numbers, rather than focus upon the core problem with their Kickstarter projects - namely, themselves.
Kickstarter - It starts with YOU! That's what they need to grasp. That's what they need to realize.
You either figure out a way to grow a community unique to your project around your project, or it dies. If you spend all of your time chasing rainbows, or if you spend too much time chasing rainbows, then your project dies, it doesn't get funding. That strikes me as largely being a nugget of good old common sense.
How many rainbow chasers are there on Kickstarter? Thousands of them, with more joining the ranks of the existing rainbow chasers every single day.
They don't do their homework. They don't do the ground work. They don't do the field work. And then, when their Kickstarter project isn't gaining any traction, they don't have a clue as to why.
Go figure!
