The amazing adventures of Doug Hughes

Posts tagged ‘KickStarter’

My Goal, Revised

A couple of weeks back, while trying to inspire myself, I made a rather bold goal.  My goal was to publish one KickStarter project a month until one was actually funded.  I’m supposed to have published my first project by Febuary 17th.  Well, that’s not going to happen.  Not because of inaction, but because I now realize that this goal is totally ridiculous.

Not long after stating this goal, I submitted my first project proposal to KickStarter.  The way it works is you write up a proposal for a project and submit it to KickStarter.  The KickStarter folks review the proposal and decide if it falls within their guidelines or not.  The following are KickStarter’s guidelines, meticulously copied off of their site:

  • I am creating a project. Kickstarter is for the funding of projects – albums, films, specific works – that have clearly defined goals and expectations.
  • My project fits within one of Kickstarter’s categories. Kickstarter can be used to fund projects from the creative fields of Art, Comics, Dance, Design, Fashion, Film, Food, Games, Music, Photography, Publishing, Technology, and Theater. We currently only support projects from these categories.
  • My project does not incorporate charity or cause funding. Examples of prohibited use include raising money for the Red Cross, funding an awareness campaign, funding a scholarship, or donating a portion of funds raised on Kickstarter to a charity or cause.
  • My project is not a “fund my life” project. Examples include projects to pay tuition or bills, go on vacation, or buy a new camera.
  • My project offers rewards, not financial incentives. The Kickstarter economy is based on the offering of rewards – copies of the work, limited editions, fun experiences. Offering financial incentives, such as ownership, financial returns (for example, a share of profits), or repayment (loans) is prohibited.

The project I submitted was Supporting.us.  Supporting.us is a non-profit that will facilitate making mobile donations to charities.  This is a work in progress created by myself and the rest of the team here at Alagad (Chris Peterson, Liz Hughes, and Randy Miller).  You can visit Supporting.us to learn more about it, but be warned that I’ve not yet completed the content on the site, I’m not happy with the design, and there are a few features left to implement.  That said, I’d love to get any feedback you may have on the overall concept.

What I was asking KickStarter for was funds to complete the development, improve the design, and generally push this app over the finish line.  Unfortunately, I was declined by KickStarter.  For those who wonder how KickStarter rejects you, this is what I received from them:

Kickstarter Staff commented on your Kickstarter submission:

Thank you for taking the time to share your idea. Unfortunately, this isn’t the right fit for Kickstarter. We receive many project proposals daily and review them all with great care and appreciation. We see a wide variety of inspiring ideas, and while we value each one’s uniqueness and creativity, Kickstarter is not the right platform for all of them. We wish you the best of luck as you continue to pursue your endeavor.

Best,
Kickstarter

It’s pretty straightforward.  I can’t say I was terribly surprised either.  Reviewing the guidelines, I think Supporting.us fell into a gray area.  Specifically, Supporting.us does incorporate charity or cause funding.  If Supporting.us itself wasn’t a non-profit (which was our original intent, but won’t work – that’s a whole other story) I think this would have been more likely to be approved.  But, giving us funds would be, well, making a donation to a non-profit.

Another challenge with KickStarter is that they require projects to offer rewards to the people who make donations.  With a physical project this is easier than with a web app, you can simply reward them with the product they’re supporting.  But this isn’t as easy with something intangible like a web app.  For Supporting.us I proposed having Chris Peterson, one of our developers, make a set of one of a kind turned pens to give out as rewards.  While the pens are beautiful, they are unrelated to the project at hand.  Overall, it was an awkward proposal and I understand why it was declined.

This rejection puy my goal into perspective.  It’s going to be hard to get a project onto KickStarter unless it’s for a physical product.  Perhaps open source projects would have better chances.  Pretty much everything I know in this world is web (and now some mobile) development.  Looking through KickStarter, there just aren’t many projects of this type.  I’ll have to be creative.

I’ve decided to update my goal. Instead of trying to publish a new project every month, I just want to publish one project this year.  I don’t care if it gets funded, though I’ll do my best to see that it is!  I simply want to have the experience of publishing a project on KickStarter. Wish me luck and give me suggestions!

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Phoning It In

As someone with ADD, it’s incredibly easy to get knocked off course.  The phone rings, you get an IM, you’re connected to the internet in any way, etc.  Or perhaps like me this morning, your little girl wakes up at 5am and proceeds to throw up.  And then your cat does the same thing 20 minutes later.  Not a good way to start out the day.

There was a part of me that really just wanted to say that the day was ruined and that I should go lay in bed all day and read, or something.  Truth be told, I did go back to bed and sleep for a couple hours and I feel much better now.  It’s times like this where I can’t tell if I’m lazy, being a prima dona, or if I would actually do better by resting.  Today I’m leaning towards it making me do better.

The reason I say that is that I’ve been putting off sending in my first proposal to KickStarter, even though there’s no real reason to.  The Alagad team has been working on a new nonprofit which shall remain unnamed for just a little bit longer.  We need a little cash to push us over the finish line and help it get going.

Honestly, I’ve been putting it off for a few reasons.  Firstly, before you can submit a KickStarter project you have to go through a page where they explain their submission policies.  One of the things they don’t support are donations to charities, causes, etc.  Our nonprofit probably falls under that category, but I emailed them earlier this week and asked for clarification and they asked me to submit a proposal.  Unfortunately, this rule has put me in somewhat of a “why bother” frame of mind.  Another reason I’ve been putting this off is that I’m intimidated by the submission form itself.  I wasn’t sure what rewards we should offer supporters and I wasn’t sure what to say about the project.  The other major reason I hadn’t been doing anything is probably due to wanting to avoid rejection and disappointment.  If this proposal is rejected I’ll feel bad about it.  If I never submit it, it can’t be rejected.

However, after resetting myself with a nap this morning, I decided it’s time to stop talking about it and just do it.  So, just a few minutes ago I submitted my first project proposal to KickStarter! Go Me! I don’t know how long it will take for them to review it and get back to me, but I’ll try to keep my blog updated as I hear things.

Truth be told, I really don’t expect them to approve this project.  And that’s OK.  I’ve got a bunch of other ones up my sleeve.

Wish me luck!

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If You Are Not Doing What You Love, You Are Wasting Your Time

I woke up this morning to see this lovely inspirational quote in my twitter feed:

If you are not doing what you love, you are wasting your time.
– Billy Joel

Don’t you just love quotes like this?  The implication, of course, is that you can always do what you want to be doing.  While I believe this is essentially true, it’s just not that easy.  There’s this pesky thing called “life” which has a tendency to get in the way.  And one also needs to account for self doubt and more practical roadblocks like money and time.

Over the last few days I’ve written about how I want to switch up my life somehow.  Essentially, I want to make a new job for myself as serial entrepreneur.  I am always having ideas for businesses and some of them actually seem good.  Even better, some of them are doable by me. I love developing these ideas and making something out of them.

My question for myself is, if I love doing this stuff so much, why don’t I just freakin’ do it?! My wife would argue that I do.  I spend way too much time in my office working on my idea du jure.  Why don’t I ever feel like I accomplish anything?

I have a particular pattern I follow when it comes to this.  I suspect I may not be the only one who has this pattern.

My Workflow

Basically, something happens while I’m working to make me have second thoughts about whether I should be doing this work or not.  Someone might have a negative opinion that hits a nerve.  Maybe there’s work that I don’t want to do.  For example, pretty much anything not-technical.

Once you run into something you don’t want to (or can’t) deal with, love begins to fade.  That may well be one of the most cynical things I’ve ever written, but there’s truth to it.

So, what can I do about this?  Are all my various ideas and projects doomed to failure, half done?  I sure as hell hope not!

I have to remind myself that it took me about seven years to figure out how to make Alagad, my consulting business, into something worth talking about.  I spent years flailing around more or less randomly until something actually worked.

My wife has a story she likes to tell that probably came from Dr. Phil or someone simular.  There was a man who was lamenting falling out of love with his wife.  He used to love her, but he just didn’t have the feeling any more, though he wanted to.  What did Dr. Phil (or whoever) say to this man?  He reminded him that love isn’t just a noun, it’s a verb.  Love isn’t just a thing you feel, it’s a thing you do.

Since I’m no Dr. Phil, I’m going to have to simply say that in my case I’m going to have to try to love what I’m working on, even if I run into self doubt, naysayers, or whatever.  From experience, I can say this is easier said than done.  I’ve always been a doubter.  Without evidence I am always skeptical.

The thing about patterns, especially behavior patterns such as the one I outlined above, is that they’re hard to break.  Those who have ever struggled with weight loss or addiction know what I mean.  To break a behavior pattern you have to do something different, which I’m trying to do.

Yesterday I announced a goal of mine publicly:

I will publish 12 KickStarter projects in the next 13 months, one a month, starting 30 days from now, until all 12 have failed or one has been funded successfully! I will have my first KickStarter proposal submitted by February 16th!

This publicly stated goal (any actually following through on it) is the first thing I’m trying to do to break my patterns.  I’m hoping that if I work publicly, talk about what I’m trying to do and the challenges I run into, that I’ll find a way to keep working and reach my goal.

I’d like to end this article by updating the Billy Joel quote above with a few edits of my own:

If you are only half doing what you love you are truly wasting your time.
– Doug Hughes

What are your experiences in this area?

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So…. What Now? -or- KickStarting Myself

One of the main reasons I rebooted this blog was to help me work out what I should be doing with myself.  I have a lot of individual goals, but no specific strategy on how to accomplish them.  Right now I’m flailing around randomly, doing a bit here and a bit there, but not making much progress in any direction.

This morning I sat here at my desk for thirty minutes and have nothing to show for it.  Well, maybe that’s not entirely fair.  I did take time to read WordPress’ suggestions on how to focus my blog.  I figured there would be something relevant to me, since focusing on any one thing is next to impossible for me.  Their solution?  Make a set of mind maps that progressively focus you on what you’re interested in and want blog about.  Did I do the exercise?  Nope.  I think I’ve got a pretty good idea of what I want to do on this blog.  That said, I did sit here for 30 minutes before deciding to write about.

Around new years my wife made me sit down and make a combined list of some of our goals for the next year.  The goals fell into three distinct categories: Things to do around the house (make a tree house, shed, etc), travel (go to Alaska), and starting at least two new businesses.  The latter is where I’ll focus for the remainder of this article.

I really like being my own boss.  It gives me the flexibility to work when and how I need to, with a few reasonable limitations.  However, I’ve not been happy with the work I’ve been doing recently I and I feel that I need to move on to something else.  This has become increasingly urgent to me.  Most people who work with me would probably tell you that I have a panoply of ideas that I’ve worked on.  I can think of at least eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve potentially viable ideas off the top of my head.  I’ve already started work on five of them.

My biggest problem here is distractibility and self doubt.  I have at least two projects that are half done because I moved on to other projects that seemed that much more exciting, interesting and promising.  And sometimes a project falls under the weight of self doubt.

Another major challenge is that I’m primarily a technical person.  I understand programming.  So, I naturally gravitate towards technical problems.  I draw mockups, write programs, make web pages, etc, for these ideas.  But when it comes to the tedious or unfamiliar work, I fall down.  For example, I’m not a marketing person.  I really only have the faintest ideas on how to promote and sell most of these projects I’m working on.  Why bother building something new if no one will ever see or use it?  As an example, I released Pan Slam, an very simple iOS app last week. I’ve only sold 18 copies (mostly to friends) so far, which makes me wonder why bothered at all.  If I knew better ways to promote it, I think I would.  But it would be nice to work with someone else who knew what they were doing in this area and enjoyed doing it.

I’ve come up with a long-shot solution to these problems.  There is an awesome website called KickStarter.  KickStarter describes themselves as, “the world’s largest funding platform for creative projects.”  Essentially, the way it works is that if I want to raise funds for a project I can create a proposal to explain the idea, make supporting videos, and then essentially beg the KickStarter community, my friends, followers, and family for a specific amount of money for my project.  If I raise the money I get it all, if I fail I get nothing at all.

I have yet to submit any KickStarter proposals, but I did support KickSat, which was successfully funded!

There are a few things I like about KickStarter.  I love the all or nothing approach.  If the my project is not supported then perhaps it’s not destined to be.  However, if I succeed, then I have funds to pay for the parts of the project that I can’t do (well) myself.  Essentially, KickStarter has the potential to tell me if I really have a good idea and give me the resources to accomplish it if I do.

My latest idea is to throw ideas at KickStarter,  one at a time, until one actually succeeds.  I plan to become a guru of writing proposals and making videos to talk about my ideas!

So, I herby publicly state my goal:  I will publish 12 KickStarter projects in the next 13 months, one a month, starting 30 days from now, until all 12 have failed or one has been funded successfully!  I will have my first KickStarter proposal submitted by February 16th!  Now to decide which one to do…

I’ll update the blog here as I decide which project I’m doing and as I learn more about working with KickStarter.

 

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