This week there was an article in the news about Kickstarter looking to put itself on a blockchain. Generally I see a lot of “something something blockchain” articles and think to myself “yeah, that is a hard no”. Kickstarter being on the blockchain actually makes a lot of sense.
I am not here to talk about that today.
Today I am here to talk about t-shirts and why I removed crowdfunding from my bucket list.
Crowdfunding looks exciting. You have an idea that you are too poor to execute, you tell the world about it, and everyone interested gives you some money to build it. People wrote a bunch of articles on how to succeed with crowdfunding. I read them all voraciously, hoping to leverage the Power of The Crowd to build one of my dream projects one day. While there is a definite investment by the crowd into “I wish to back the project of someone who made something in the eighties or nineties that I really loved”, there are also some additional people who will back new projects from creators who have no track record. Online experts published crowdfunding stats about all of this. They tracked the number of people you have as facebook friends and twitter followers and correlated those to successes and failures.
I personally backed about ten projects myself. The outcomes were split evenly between “I got what I paid for”, “I never got anything and I want revenge”, and “I forget what happened—I just wanted to support the creator”.
A half-dozen friends crowdfunded their own projects while all of this was happening. The most recent of these was a fun little tabletop game. In three cases I offered to eyeball their product offerings, and see if I could provide any feedback.
Universally I observed three things in each of the kickstarter proposals.
The first is well written about. Making physical goods is hard and expensive. Put enough profit margin into your physical goods offerings so you do not sink all of your crowdfunding earnings into making rewards. Remember to account for international shipping costs too.
The second is that pricing is really tricky. I had the benefit of working in publishing and platform businesses and I got to learn a considerable amount about pricing. I am by no means an expert at pricing, however, there are some very important prices to support in your Kickstarter. If you have gaps in your price offerings it will make it harder for you to get your project over the finish line. I generally looked to see if there was a 50 dollar offering that made sense, a 75 dollar offering that made sense, and a 150 dollar offering that made sense. These are the levels I would contribute to someone’s kickstarter. Generally speaking I found that one or more of these tiers was missing. If “John-as-potential-funder” does not have a price point that he will invest at, it is hard to move him up into 200 dollar land. If there is not enough interesting stuff lower then he will also not move down. This is a great way to get to zero million dollars quickly.
The last thing was really a personal one for me.
I am a sucker for physical goods. When I see a Kickstarter I want to back, I look at the aforementioned 50 dollar to 150 dollar window to see what has the nicest physical offering I can buy. As an Ultima fan from the eighties, I was stoked that I could get a big box for Shroud of the Avatar. It sits on the shelf next to my Collector’s Edition Ultima Online box.
I am grateful that I was able to talk to a few people early enough in their crowdfunding plans that I could give them some of this feedback. I also took advantage of that to do some help-me-to-help-you kung fu.
I told them to sell me a t-shirt.
I will repeat my earlier statement about not being a marketing guru. I will also repeat my earlier statement that crowdfunding is hard. You can be forgiven for not including an important price point and you can be forgiven for not thinking about selling a t-shirt.
I also think that it is one of the best things to put into your crowdfunding campaign.
For starters, t-shirts are not terribly expensive. There are some logistics on sizing to solve for, and certainly international shipping is a pain, but if you put a t-shirt into a 70 dollar or higher tier, you will be able to make money with it to support your wonderful project. If you price it in the 30 dollar or 50 dollar tiers, not so much.
It also turns your biggest fans into advertising machinery. Before you look horrified, people will also be happy to be your advertising machinery! I wear a Macallan scotch hat sometimes. I also have Justice League t-shirts. People have commented on my World of Warcraft hoodie in the grocery store, even though it is from the Alliance.
[Required Disclosure: The above links are shameless attempts to get you to buy something and generate an affiliate fee. I have less than thirty days left for one of you to buy anything I have linked before Amazon considers me a failure and revokes my as-of-yet-unused affiliate code.]
Coffee mugs are cute, as well as collectible box sets. The challenge with those is that you do not take your collectible box sets out into the world with you and I have questions if you are taking your crowdfunding mug to Starbucks for refills.
People who are better at this marketing stuff than I am will tell me this is some clear “one plus one equals three” marketing. You get your investment from the crowdfunder who is now a walking talking billboard and you might eventually get one or more socially validated customers.
I was glad that each campaign where I gave some feedback was successfully funded. I am also glad that I was able to get t-shirts out of them where it was possible.
If you are about to jump into crowdfunding, I would love to hear about it. I would be willing to stare hard at your crowdfunding plan for thirty minutes and talk about it with you afterwards as a courtesy.
If you do not want to listen to me ramble on about your plan directly, at least try to follow the three pieces of basic advice above. If you do not, you run the risk of losing your shirt.
