KickstarterForum.org

[sbriggman]

Learn how these high school students raised money on Kickstarter without a dime of capital.

Full article: http://www.crowdcrux.com/learn-how-thes ... f-capital/

Introduction
A few weeks ago, this inspiring young music industry businessman reached out to me via email. 17 year old Riley Soward was helping his friend and client Zach Gospe fundraise $10,000 so he could record an album in L.A.

Having done his research, Soward came to the table with a compelling pitch and awesome story. He wanted to share his experience raising $7,676 through grassroots marketing and hard work. I was throughly impressed.

The team’s Kickstarter campaign is still accepting pledges with 11 days to go. I urge you to check it out if you are passionate about music or want to support a team of inspiring music entrepreneurs. I’ve included the video below.

How to raise money without a dime of capital
This is a guest post written by Riley Soward, an up-and-coming 17 year old music industry businessman.

zach and rileyI believe that anybody with a creative passion, ambition, and a unique project can raise money on a crowdfunding website. It’s definitely not easy. Successfully running a campaign requires a ton of work. However, you don’t necessarily have to have years and years of experience in business or public relations or any other fields to lead an online fundraiser.

I’m currently running a Kickstarter campaign for my best friend and client, Zach Gospe, who is a very talented singer-songwriter. We are both seniors in high school and neither of us have any real-world business or public relations experience. We built our campaign on our own and are currently 75% of the way to our goal of $10,000.

How have we done this? We’ve worked hard and taken initiative.
To begin, we researched a lot beforehand. I watched around 50 videos from music projects to get ideas for our video and looked through about 100 music projects to get ideas for rewards.

Although this took time, it’s paid off tenfold. Our video has gotten a lot of good reception, and our second most popular reward is something I never would have considered until I saw it on another musician’s Kickstarter (the reward is two copes of the album $50, which is exactly double the price of the one album reward).

Outside of learning from projects themselves, there are so many online crowdfunding resources that have benefited us. Everything you need to know about running a project can be found on the web, you don’t have to have prior experience. I especially would recommend reading through the articles on CrowdCrux, because there are so many different posts from people who have personally led crowdfunding campaigns.

After we did our research, we spent a week discussing and typing up our story on a word document. At this stage, we had not filmed our video nor created the project page yet. I cannot over-emphasize the importance of spending time thoroughly developing your story. Having a good story helps make the project more than just about taking money from other people’s wallets. Stories make potential investors feel connected to you and your project, thus increasing the chances they will contribute.

Additionally, having a good story increases the chances that websites and newspapers will pick up your story. Unless your project is incredibly unique and revolutionary, writers don’t want to just focus on the fact that you’re running a crowdfunding campaign. They want to write an interesting story.

Knowing our story before we put together our Kickstarter page was quite beneficial. It gave us a strong direction for our video and information section, and also allowed us to send out potential article angles to writers and bloggers before we even launched our project.

This brings me to the next thing we’ve learned: contact people before launching your project–reach out to potential bloggers/journalists and build up hype in your target audience. We had a strong launch and raised $2,500 in our first 24 hours because people knew about our fundraiser before we went live.

Full article: http://www.crowdcrux.com/learn-how-thes ... f-capital/