It was over 10 years ago now that I did my first and only Kickstarter campaign. The point of it was to shoot a series of screencasts on rebuilding/redesigning CSS-Tricks itself, a WordPress site, and giving the backers access to those videos. Meta, as even building those access controls was part of the series.
I never really wrote a retrospective on all that. It’s so long gone now that most details of it have faded to memory. Except for a few things that have really stuck with me.
- The grand total was $89,697. That was incredible, considering the $3,500 goal and my truly meager expectations. You never know how many real fans you have until you put it to the test. Asking them to open their wallets is a real test.
- I felt like everyone watching was thinking, “Welp, Chris is rich now.” I don’t know if that’s what people really thought or if it was just in my head. That total was a year’s salary for any job I had up to then.
- How it actually played out is that the money disappeared very quickly. Between fees, taxes, fulfilling rewards, and paying people to help make the project better, it was net negative.
- Kickstarter did what it was supposed to do, it kickstarted an idea for a business. It wasn’t the business itself. It’s easy to forget that when backing a campaign.
- The biggest mistake I made was that some time (years?) after this was all said and done, I told the original backers that their access to “The Lodge” (the exclusive access area where the screencasts were) was going to expire. I think there was some technical limitation I was up against (or thought I was), and it felt fair to me at the time. I asked people to help me start a business, and they did, and had plenty of time to watch or download everything I promised. But plenty of people were upset with me when I revoked that original Kickstarter-granted access. I never promised access was forever, but expectations were still broken, which didn’t feel good.
The most memorable feeling of all:
- I really didn’t like the feeling that people had already given me money, and now I owed them something that I hadn’t fully created yet. I’m far more wired to work hard, take risks, and make something, and then if I do a good job, the money comes. I want my motivation to come from the possibility of success, not from debt.