After nearly a year of development, it’s time to raise the curtain on The Hawaii Project. Come on in — the water’s fine!

People are drowning in new books (Bowker says the number of books published is up nearly 500% since 2008, and that even excludes the indie books published with no ISBNs!). Some say “the glut is good”, but readers are left adrift on an ocean of new books trying to find the books that matter.

Yet, online book discovery is broken. The US book market is $15 BILLION and the most common discovery method is offline word of mouth. Broken.

Here’s why:

• People are busy. Nobody has time to search & browse for stuff.
• The ratings and review regime is corrupt & broken.
• Social Discovery is the wrong model — my friends don’t read what I read.
• There’s some great curators out there — but their taste and mine only sometimes align. And who has time to keep up with them all?

What if there was something that watched what the curators and influencers wrote about, then brought the relevant things to you? Kind of like Medium or Flipboard, but for books? A kind of Personalized Curation? 

The Hawaii Project watches a curated slice of the books web, figuring out what the curators, influencers and tastemakers are writing about, and then matches it to the books, topics and authors you love — bringing you great books matching your interests. Great books to read, and a highly tailored news feed filled with interesting articles to read about books and subjects you’re interested in. The curation ensures the innate quality is high, the personalization ensures it’s relevant.

In the coming weeks we’ll be exploring this in more detail, but for now, the best news is: it’s available NOW. Just head over to http://www.thehawaiiproject.com and sign up. A basic account is free.

Reading and literacy are powerful forces for good. We started The Hawaii Project to share our love of books and to use entrepreneurship to create an engine to generate cold hard cash that we’ll share with deserving literacy non-profits. So the less fortunate of us can still grow to love books and learning. We generate revenue through our Premium Accounts, and 10% of our revenue goes to fund 3 great literacy non-profits.

Join us and Do Good by Reading Well.

 

(as a reminder in case this is your first exposure to The Hawaii Project: The Hawaii Project brings you books and book news you’d never have found on your own, by tracking hand-selected sources of great books, uncovering things that match your favorite authors, personal interests and current events, and bringing them to you daily. 10% of our revenue goes to 3 great literacy non-profits. Check us out:http://www.thehawaiiproject.com. You can see our Kickstarter page here. This is Part II of the Post Mortem. Part I is here. As before, the TL/DR version is in bold.This is a LONG post with lots of juicy details. You may want to fortify yourself with a cup of coffee or a glass of Scotch. You’ve been warned.)

There’s a million Kickstarter success stories out there. I call it success porn. I wanted to write a post about one that didn’t make it. Failure is often more instructive than success. This post is mostly about how I went about promoting the Kickstarter after the material was developed. We’re going to cover Stakeholder Mapping, a model for Kickstarter goal setting, how to get press, when to launch your kickstarter, how to manage spamming (uh, I mean emailing your supporters), Social Media, Tools and some tactics and final learnings.

Stakeholders

In part I, I made the point that Kickstarter isn’t likely to generate a lot of audience or potential donors for you, you get the audience you create (about 10% of my pledges were generated by Kickstarter, vs. by me). So you need to figure out who all the people are who’ll care about your project, and why they’ll care about it. This will form the basis of how you approach them and why they’ll end up contributing. Some folks call that Stakeholder Mapping. The Stakeholder map for the books space is pretty multi-faceted, books are a big industry. Here’s my set of stakeholders, and a rough pitch I would give them.

• Family & Friends (“Help Mark with his new project – it’s a good cause”)
• Readers (“find great books (and articles about them) to read”)
• Authors & Publicists (“use The Hawaii Project to help promote your author’s books, and keep up with what’s going on”)
• Libraries & Librarians (“Help your patrons find great books”) – and, they just love all things Bookish
• Physical Bookstores (“Create a location-based presence inside The Hawaii Project to connect with book buyers in your city”)
• Publishing Houses (“Promote your books; keep up with what’s going on; who’s writing about what”)
• Startup community (“New startup from Boston / Hawaii entrepreneur Mark, the co-founder of goby”)
• Non-profits (mostly my literacy non-profit partners, but others as well) – “help promote THP and get more money”
• Book Bloggers (“get your blog included in The Hawaii Project”; “your readers may be interested”; and the most avid of readers)
• Book Clubs (“The Hawaii Project can help you find a great next book for your club”).

As you can see, it’s lots of folks and lots of potential angles & pitches. You should build a Stakeholder Map for your company. Think of every person, company or organization who might have an interest in what you’re doing. For almost all of these stakeholders I devised some method of approach to get them interested in the Kickstarter. You can also see it’s a lot of work to try to get in contact with that many people. If you’re a small team or a solo team, I’d suggesting building a stakeholder map but only focusing on the top 3 or so. I was also fortunate to connect up with a program at Emerson College, where a small team of marketing students work with a company on a media campaign as interns, so I had a great team of 6 students helping craft pitches and send emails (thank you!). But I was still spread too thin. Pick a few and focus. I tried to do too many.

Our key channels to reach people were email, press, social media and some online advertising. I’d like to dig into each channel I used and share a few tidbits, what worked, what didn’t, and why.

Going back to the “how much to raise question”, I built a model for how much I’d raise, based on how many people I could drive to the campaign. You can see the spreadsheet here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mEw-_Rso7xU2mswREQMEDn6tP17ALo3fcb_f4ZqWWqs/edit?usp=sharing. The key assumptions are how many people (in a variety of buckets), and what % of them would “convert” – i.e. hear about us and pledge. Your conversion rate is likely to vary a lot based on where these people come from.

My model said I’d raise ~$35,000 so I set that as my goal. I got pledges of ~$11,500. Way short. Here’s why:

Key takeaways: Pledges were uniformly higher than I modeled (average pledge was $77), and generally far fewer in number. I pretty much matched my model on “Friends & Family” behavior, and my extended network did ok too – the place I really fell down was on pledges from people I didn’t have a relationship with – i.e. pledges generated from press to social media. Authors did convert, but at a lower level than I expected. The personal shopper reward surprised me – even though I got less than my model, it was an invented thing at the last minute and indicates to me there might be a germ of a product or business model there.

Press generated about 10% of my pledges – the rest came from direct outreach. My model for press was that I would generate ~50,000 visits to my Kickstarter @ 1% conversion rate. That’s why the campaign didn’t succeed, ultimately. I think the main reason it worked out that way is most of the press I got was either “startup” oriented (“here’s a cool new startup”), or “location” oriented (“cool new Hawaii / Boston startup”). The readers of those articles aren’t necessarily avid book readers, my key target. In retrospect I should have focused much more intensively on book bloggers and press in the literature community, rather than the startup community. But, that community is where my relationships are, and much of my press came from people that I had a pre-existing relationship with. Because I botched the analytics (note above about including Google Analytics tag in your Kickstarter page), and because there’s no real way to know how many people read an article on a 3rd party website, it’s hard to measure conversion here, but the volume was way low.

Lining up Press.

A full tutorial on how to work with press is beyond the scope of this article. This is good starting advice. This is also good, especially: Robert Scoble’s answer. Key: have/make a relationship before you need coverage, be valuable to them outside your need for coverage, and be a nice human being. Just emailing a cold pitch to somebody who doesn’t know who you are generally doesn’t work very well.

To get press, you need to deliver an “angle” for them to write about. Why are they writing about you? I can’t be just “this is cool” – unless it’s INSANELY cool. Like,a Robot Bartender that makes Cocktails via a mobile phone cool. The Hawaii Project is cool but not that cool! In my case, the main storyline was usually location-based. The Boston community wanted to write about it because I’d previously done some very successful startups, the Hawaii community wanted to write about it because there aren’t that many Hawaii-oriented startups. That led to most of my press. You need to find your own angle, and “look how cool/great this is” isn’t enough. You have to connect to something bigger, whether it’s a hot current trend, an upcoming holiday (like an exercise machine coming just in time for New Year’s resolutions or something).

I started working a few press outlets about a month before I launched, but most of them I approached with the story about 1-2 weeks before launch. I’d recommend at least 2 weeks before your Kickstarter launch. These people are BUSY.

Put together a media kit. Key ingredients: Short Overview, Company Logo, Product Screenshots/Photos, Founder(s) Bio and HiRes Headshot photos, and links to any short product videos, and make sure journalists know where to get it. Make it easy for a writer to make an attractive article with some nice media. Video is awesome for this, if it’s high quality. (Here’s my video btw: https://vimeo.com/122595153)

You need to pick a day (and time) to launch your Kickstarter. Don’t do this randomly. If you’re trying to get press to cover your launch (and you should), you’ll want to have some press lined up before you commit to launch. And you’ll want to launch on a press-friendly day. Monday, everybody’s recovering from their weekend; Friday they’re getting ready for their weekend. Don’t launch on those days. Press folklore is that Tuesday is the right day to get press; I’d don’t have any better advice. In my case, I had some schedule constraints making me launch in early April. Couldn’t do April 1 – no end of trouble launching on April fool’s day. So I did Thursday April 2. Facepalm! Duh! It’s Easter weekend! By Friday noon, the internet is empty. Nobody’s home. Crap. Don’t be like me! Pick a good date when people will be able to pay attention! Also: a few folks recommended to me to launch very early in the morning (like, 5am east coast time) – the first 48 hours is critical, and this way you pick up European web traffic on the first day.

If you are able to get press, stay on that article. Respond to anyone who comments. Those comments will often be negative, there’s a lot of snark out there. Be Civil Stay positive, outline your point of view. You aren’t likely to change the mind of the person commenting, but your response will be out there for everyone else to see, and you’ll be In The Arena (my Rule #29). It’s also respectful to the author of the article – they took time to write, you take time to engage their community. And SEND THEM A THANK YOU NOTE!

A last note on press. Press and it’s step-child “backlinks” are critical for SEO(SEO is the art & science of getting your pages to rank well in Google searches). Google uses those back links to determine the importance of a site or page. In my case, when the Kickstarter began, our home page for The Hawaii Project was on page 10 of a search for “the hawaii project” on google. Seriously. After the Kickstarter was over, and the press had come out, linking to our site, we were on the 1st page of results! The Kickstarter page is the #1 result – I’d rather it was my home page, but it’s still us in some sense. This leads to one major difference I have with the Four Hour Workweek / SOMAWater approach. They suggest building a custom bitly link with + sign in it, so you can get analytics – e.g. bit.ly/somawater. I advocate this instead: build your own link on your own domain (I used http://www.thehawaiiproject.com/kickstarter), put google analytics in the page, and then redirect to the Kickstarter page. This way, all those links that get posted around the web link to YOUR site, not BitLY or Kickstarter – and a year after your Kickstarter, they’ll be sending traffic to YOU, not Kickstarter. You get the SEO value. (details: I created a web page with the Google analytics script tag, followed by a javascript call like 

“window.location = “https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/51424615/the-hawaii-project-find-your-perfect-beach-book”; that way the google analytics tracking fires, then the user gets automatically sent to the Kickstarter page).

Your Mileage May Vary.

Email.

I’m old. OK “old” is relative. But I’m over 50 – which means I’ve met a lot of people in my life. I built a master email list as follows: first, you can export every single email address you’ve ever mailed with from gmail. I did that for my personal email account as well as my “goby” account. That added up to about 5000 people; after I removed the random junk and only included people I’d crossed paths with more than once, and combined that with my LinkedIn and Facebook contacts, I had about 2500 people with whom I had some kind of relationship, however tenuous. Yes I did this by hand, 1 by 1. Yes it was a pain in the ***.

That’s why they call it work.

I segmented them into how I knew them, took the email templates from the SOMA water campaign which raised $100k (you can find it here), and customized them for each of my audiences. I did mails on days 1,2 and 9 as they suggested. I also followed their suggestion (and their web templates) for the sharing page. That worked well and I got a lot of shares from that. Make it easy for people to help you.

I also wanted to reach authors, agents and librarians. I found a few websites that listed contact information for literary agents, and scraped them for names/emails. I wrote my own scrapers but if you’re non-technical Import.IO is a good choice for a tool to do it for you. I also found a site listing the email address for every librarian in the state of Massachusetts, so I scraped that too. (In my next life I’m coming back as a spammer). I sent mails to 1300 literary agents (some by hand, mostly by SendGrid, see below), 25% of them opened the mail and 3.75% of them clicked to the Kickstarter. 2 of them converted to pledges, and 10 or so became beta testers. The conversion rate was terrible but I learned a great deal by talking to those who pledged. I sent about 500 mails to librarians, but I botched the tracking (I send plaintext instead of HTML mail) so I don’t know the open rate on the mails, but about 10 librarians turned into beta testers and one looks like they may to license our software for their library. Takeaway: I learned a lot, but open rates and conversion from email that probably seemed like “spam” to the recipient, isn’t the way to get lots of funding, and least for my project.

A note on email tools. Most email providers (e.g. Gmail) will only let you send a few hundred mails a day from a personal account. That’s not enough for this kind of work, and if you’re sending large volumes of mail (aka “spamming your friends”) you may not want to risk your personal email account. In my product I use Mandrill for programmatically generated, personalized emails. It’s a great tool, but the mail mostly ends up in people’s “Promotions” tab in gmail, where I suspect it’s often not even seen, much less opened. I paid $80 / month for SendGrid during the campaign, and SendGrid seems to land the emails right in the primary inbox every time. If you can afford it, I’d use SendGrid. It’s a much less mature tool than MailChimp or Mandrill, especially for developing marketing-oriented (ie. non-transactional) mails, but the deliverability/visibility seems worth it to me. My day 2 mail I sent to all ~2300 people at once and got a 50% open rate; I’ve never seen anything that high with MailChimp or Mandrill, even for recipients with whom I have a good relationship. Your mileage may vary.

Social Media

The Hawaii Project is on Twitter and Facebook. I posted pretty aggressively on Twitter, less so on Facebook. I didn’t see much tangible outcome from that. I’d pick one social media channel as the place where you build your brand and stick to it. Buffer is a great too for making Social Media posting more efficient. If I had 2,000 friends on Facebook the way younger folks seem to, I would have leaned more on that. Center yourself on whatever social media platform you have the most presence on.

A friend suggested I do a daily blog post of what happened each day of the Kickstarter. That turned out to be a really good idea. I did that and posted on bothmy personal blog and LinkedIn. LinkedIn turns out to be a great idea. Over the course of the Kickstarter I picked up ~1000 followers on Linkedin, and gained 6% of my pledges from that source alone.

Online Advertising

I ran ads for the Kickstarter on both Google and Facebook (at small $ levels, to test).TL/DR: it didn’t work for me. you might be able to “arbitrage” your way to Kickstarter success I suppose (i.e. where the cost of the ads is smaller than the pledges received), but I wasn’t able to. On both Google and Facebook I used targeting to select only either bookish sites or people with bookish interests. Stats:

Facebook:

Cost: $50
Clicks: 161
CPC: $0.31
Reach: 14,432 views/impressions
Effective CPM: ~$3.50
Conversion rate: 0.

I got “likes” on Facebook, but no pledges.

Google had a lower CPC and more reach, but also didn’t convert. It’s possible that my spend was too small and that if I’d kept going I would have started to see conversions, but I wasn’t encouraged by my initial results and didn’t try any more. Another potential approach might have been to go to a Sponsored Content provider like Taboola or Outbrain; I didn’t try it.

Tools & Costs

Here are the key tools you shouldn’t run a campaign without:

SendGrid  for sending high volume email campaigns (Mailchimp or Mandrill are fine, I just found SendGrid has solved the gmail “tabs” problem, for significantly higher open rates)
Buffer for automating social media posting & analytics
Text Expander – typing automation. You’re going to find yourself doing a lot of repetitive typing during a Kickstarter, sending mails, responding, typing out links and stuff. Text Expander is a life (and wrist!) saver.
KickTraq – Kickstarter 3rd party tracking tool – multiple folks recommended I embed the link to this in my campaign on Day 1, claiming it lends higher credibility (not sure about this) and good analytics (true). YMMV. My Kicktraq page is here.
VistaPrint – for printing physical marketing material – I used it to print branded Bookmarks and distribute them at local bookstores and libraries. Can’t track any pledges to it, but can track beta testers to it.
Google Analytics – or other web tracking tools like MixPanel, etc. Make sure all your web pages are instrumented and tagged so you can track performance and see what’s working. Make sure you put a Google Analytics tag in your Kickstarter page configuration.
Prefinery – if you’re going to be providing beta access and need to manage your beta tester list, Prefinery is awesome.  You may want to try a marketing landing page generator/optimizer like Optimizely or LaunchRocket or ….. etc. I didn’t.
Import.IO – you may find you want to collect a large volume of semi-structured information from other people’s web pages, for example to collect email addresses. Import.IO is a great tool for that if you don’t want to write your own scrapers.

Costs: I spent about $1000 on the Kickstarter – for video production, stock photos, costs for various tools like SendGrid, and for custom bookmarks I gave out at bookstores. Obviously if the campaign had been successful I would have had more cost involving in delivering the rewards.

What I learned about my product

Running a Kickstarter is a great way to get feedback, even if you don’t get the $.

I heard from a lot of people that they have trouble finding great books to read and are hungry for a solution. And that Amazon, GoodReads et.al. weren’t the solution. That was encouraging. I also heard from people that Amazon and Goodreads were just fine for that, so continued sharpening of the pitch is called for. And getting it out there so they can just try it. I am thinking of playing up the “news / content” aspect of The Hawaii Project – i.e. it’s not just book recommendations, it’s also a sort of “bookish magazine” that gets you fun books-related content –  as further differentiation.

“The Hawaii Project” as a name is a double-edged sword. It got me a lot of attention and fun stuff, but it also caused a periodic “Why is it called The Hawaii Project” question. In the end it gave me something to talk about, and adds some color to the project, so I don’t regret it. I may consider rebranding at some point in the future. (dangit – right after I built up that SEO value in the domain name). But not sure yet. I’m emotionally attached to the name.

I had trouble gaining pledges from outside my personal circle. That could either be because a) there isn’t demand in the market for this, or b) I didn’t get to the right people in the campaign. Option a) deserves due consideration and evaluation, but I lean towards b) as the explanation. In retrospect I wish I’d spent far more time getting book bloggers to write about the service, because their audience is my audience – people who want to read about interesting books. And I wish I’d found a way to energize authors more to evangelize the platform to their readers. I plan to spend much more time on book bloggers between now and my public launch. The authors I spoke with were enthusiastic, but the question is whether I have enough users to actually help them. Authors, I think, will come along once I have more of an audience.

Finally, and I’ve said this in previous posts, the project will go on even though the Kickstarter wasn’t successful. I hope you’ll join me along the way.

(as a reminder in case this is your first exposure to The Hawaii Project: The Hawaii Project brings you books and book news you’d never have found on your own, by tracking hand-selected sources of great books, uncovering things that match your favorite authors, personal interests and current events, and bringing them to you daily. 10% of our revenue goes to 3 great literacy non-profits. Check us out:http://www.thehawaiiproject.com. You can see our Kickstarter page here)

This is a long post. And there’s another one coming. If you want the TL/DR version just look for the stuff in bold.

Why Crowdfunding?

I decided early on in my project that I wouldn’t try to raise venture capital, even though I’ve done it before and I think I could get angel-class funding. Why? A few reasons: first, it’s not clear if this is a “venture scale” business – i.e. one that has a rational path to $100M in revenue (that’s a rough benchmark for real VCs to invest). Second, I want this to be a vehicle to raise money for literacy, and I don’t want to have to “exit” the business – i.e. sell it to someone. That’s the expectation with VC-backed company, and I didn’t (don’t) want those expectations hanging over my head just yet.

A successful consumer web/mobile/app company needs press like a fire needs oxygen. One way to get press is with funding announcements. Raise a big round of funding and you’ll usually get some press, although perhaps not the press you really need (i.e. you’ll get people interested in startups, not necessarily people interested in your product). But more and more, people are using crowd funding as their company launch vehicle, or to validate there’s demand for the product. I decided to run a crowd funding campaign, less because I wanted the money (although I did), and more as a launch vehicle to generate awareness and press, and as a forcing function for myself to sharpen my marketing. We succeeded in getting a variety of press, including Hawaii Public Radio,Xconomy, BostInno, PJ Media, Beta Boston (part of the Boston Globe) and Hawaii News Now, so on that front we did ok.

One complication I hadn’t though of was the challenge of trying to get press on a consumer product not available to consumers (The Hawaii Project was (and is, for the moment), in private beta). That makes it tougher on journalists because they’re writing about something people can’t try yet. (and they may not be interested enough to become beta testers themselves, although in my case many did). For example, I really wanted to get covered by Lifehacker, and have a contact there, but they don’t write about things that aren’t available yet. Something to keep in mind if you are going this route.

Why Kickstarter?

If you’re going crowd funding, you have choices. Kickstarter and Indiegogo are the main ones, although there’s newer options like Patreon and others with various models. Kickstarter’s model is all-or-nothing – you meet your target and get all the money, or don’t meet the target and get nothing. IndieGoGo lets you keep all your pledges. I went Kickstarter. I didn’t want to spend a lot of time researching the different platforms. Kickstarter has the brand recognition and it’s a recognizable term. You can say “I’m doing a Kickstarter” and people know what you mean. I don’t think the same is true for the other platforms. Your Mileage May Vary.

I’d advise considering carefully whether your project is a natural “fit” for Kickstarter. Mine wasn’t. Kickstarter seems to be dominated by gizmos and games. My product, book recommendation engine, which is currently only on the web, not even an app – isn’t a “usual” Kickstarter. You may find other platforms work better for what you’re up to.

Getting started – preparing for Kickstarter

First, Kickstarter is a LOT of work. It’s effectively the same as launching your product/company. So you’d better have all your marketing ducks in a row. Positioning. Features. Benefits. Brand. Logos. Elevator Pitch. Competitive Analysis. Target customer demographics. Social Media Presences. A bunch of pre-written blog posts. If you don’t know what I mean by all that, Mike Troiano’s startup marketing 101 is a great place to start. If you have visions of spending a few days writing a fun page, posting it up and getting your $10k or $100k, forget it.

I read a lot about other success stories. For better or worse, my bible was from Tim Ferris’ blog, based on the SOMA water campaign which raised $100k:http://fourhourworkweek.com/2012/12/18/hacking-kickstarter-how-to-raise-100000-in-10-days-includes-successful-templates-e-mails-etc/. That article has a variety of useful email templates, which I took and customized. With one major exception I’ll cover later, I followed their advice to a T. I studied a gazillion (that’s a technical term) other Kickstarters, trying to see the patterns and what worked and what didn’t. There are other great articles are out there. google them and read them.

Here is the article I wish I’d found months before I even thought of running a Kickstarter: http://crowdfundinghacks.com/how-kittyo-gathered-13000-opt-in-emails-in-only-5-months-part-1-includes-successful-templates-strategies-etc/. The key to winning at Kickstarter is to have won before you launch the campaign. Seriously.

I networked to people who’d run campaigns to get advice. I learned many things from those folks. I consistently heard three things:

1. Have a GREAT video. (more on this later).
2. Kickstarter itself will not bring you much audience. You’ll get the audience you bring/create.
3. Don’t try to raise too much money. It’s harder than it looks. Better to over-raise, than under-raise and get nothing.

One other bit of advice I got was to have some stretch goals lined up in case the funding goes really strongly, so you can put something out there to keep the momentum going. And put up the stretch goals when you hit 75-80% of your target. In my case, I never got to that level so that became irrelevant, although I had some in mind.

The most important thing I learned was not to expect the platform (e.g. Kickstarter) to generate much audience for you. You get the audience you bring. Unless you get featured by Kickstarter (I didn’t), your project is actually pretty hard to find on Kickstarter and people aren’t just sitting there trolling through Kickstarter looking for places to spend money. You need to marshall your community and get them there. And the conventional wisdom is that the first 48 hours set the pace and establish you as something hot for Kickstarter’s ranking algorithms, so get your community to show up and contribute early.

In my case, I did well on #1 and #2 and botched #3. More on that later.

Building the Kickstarter Page and Materials

Kickstarters have a few key components: the title, the video, the story, the desired raise ($ goal) and the rewards.

The title is important. That’s what people will see in the Kickstarter pages (along with a picture). Getting people to click through is important. Here’s a little trick I pulled. I used $50 worth of Google ad spend to A/B test 6 different titles and 6 different images to pick the one with the highest CTR. (here’s a contact sheet of some of them). They were designed to look like a card in a Kickstarter result page. What I found was interesting. In an ad where the only variation was the “title”, the CTR (click through rate) could vary by as much as 3x! (i.e. the best had triple the click through rate of the worst). And I saw similar CPC variations. I chose the best and ran with it. Depending on how much you’re trying to raise and how good you feel about your tagline, this might be worth trying.

The video might be the most important thing of all. I looked at many Kickstarters and the video length varied from a minute to 8 minutes, but the sweet spot seems to be between 1 and 2 minutes long. I hired an animator and spend nearly $1000 getting it put together, and it was worth every penny. The video came out great and I’ve already used it for any number of things besides the Kickstarter. It’s worth spending money to get it right. I felt I needed to be “on camera” for at least part of it, to establish a human connection, and I found that the most difficult part of all. I must have recorded my on-screen script 50 or 100 times on camera until I got something I was happy with. (Well, I’m still not happy with it 8) but it was good enough I could stomach watching it. You’ll want music for your video. If you want to be legit you should license it. You can get “stock” music (as in “stock photos”), here’s a couple of places: http://rumblefish.com/ or http://www.premiumbeat.com/, for not much money. But I know a musician named Will Weston, I dig his music and he’s from Hawaii, so I approached him about using something of his, which he graciously allowed me to do. Check his music out here:https://willweston.bandcamp.com/

I spend weeks crafting the language of the project. Writing high quality stuff is hard work and I’m not sure I got to high quality. Polish that writing! As soon as people hit poor writing they lose confidence in you as a serious entity. That work will be repaid – again, I’ve used the language in that Kickstarter for a million other things.

I initially put the project in the Publishing category, and after a few weeks switched it to the Web category. It didn’t seem to make much difference from what I could see.

How much to raise is a key question. Set the target too high and you don’t get any money (which is what happened to me). Set it too low and you don’t get much money, and people may not feel the pressure to contribute if it’s clear you’re going to make your goal. I struggled with how much to raise. I wanted to raise $100k because that would allow me to bring on a full time partner. But I knew I wouldn’t hit that number. So I thought I’d do 50k. Then I talked to some folks and got cold feet about how much I could raise. I built a model for how much I could raise, and eventually settled on a target of $35k (I’ll talk about the model and it compared to reality in the “Promoting the Kickstarter” section). In retrospect, since my primary goal wasn’t money, I wish I’d set the goal very low (like, $5000) – most of the people who contributed probably would have anyway, and I’ve have gotten the money. Hindsight: 20/20.

Finally, the rewards. I studied a lot of Kickstarter projects, and there’s a lot of material out there about how many rewards to have, what price points and such. I built a Stakeholder map of the various people and organizations who might be interested in The Hawaii Project (e.g. readers, authors, bookstores, etc – more on this later). I designed 10 rewards, some with “bookish” things like bookmarks for rewards, and targeted some of them at particular kinds of Stakeholders. For example, I had a reward designed just for Authors. I targeted a variety of price points: $10, $25, $40, $50, $75, $100 (multiple different awards), $250 and $1000. At $250 I let people request specific features. As soon I’d pushed the launch button, I remembered I wanted to test a product idea, the idea of a personal shopping service where I bought books and sent them to people based on their profiles. I introduced that feature at $200 and 5 people chose that too. You want a good spread of price points so people can spend as much as they would like, but not so many they get confused. Some asked if there was a way to do “gift” subscriptions to The Hawaii Project, so I added that as a gift, and a number of people ended up choosing that. Here’s how my pledges broke down by value:

One last bit of advice on rewards. Naively, you might think that people are funding your Kickstarter because they want to back your vision and see it come to fruition. And that may be true. But I’ve heard from many Kickstarter vets that a better way to think about it is that people are buying early in hopes of a discount. Think of them as early customers rather than as “investors”. This means you should price your product! In the story, call out what you’re selling the product for. Make it up if you have to. Then, in the rewards, identify the price discount you are giving. I.e.

$50 Reward
Get your Frobulator (a $100 value) at 50% off with this reward!

One detail to be careful of. Kickstarter has a place to put a Google Analytics tag on your page – use it! Like a bonehead, I didn’t do that. I have a branded url I used (more on that later), so I know how many Kickstarter page views I got through that URL, but some press used the native Kickstarter URL, and those views were invisible to me, so I can’t do good conversion tracking.

OK that’s enough for one today. In my next post, I’ll cover how I promoted the Kickstarter – how I generated press, how well it worked, how I did email outreach, and the various tactics, tips and tricks I used. See you there/then.

Well, it’s over. The Kickstarter’s done. We didn’t make our funding goal of $35,000, but we did receive $11,470 in pledges, about a third of our goal, from 147 people. While I’m disappointed we didn’t hit our goal, and won’t have those funds to work with, I’m incredibly grateful for all the encouragement I got, pledges received, and the number of old friends I reconnected with and the new friends I made. To those of you who backed me: Thank You. And stay tuned. The project will go forward, just a little bit slower.

My main goal with the Kickstarter wasn’t to raise funds per se. It was a forcing function to clarify my marketing messages and to raise awareness for my project. Crowdfunding is the new company launch strategy, and we were fortunate to get a lot of coverage of The Hawaii Project as a result. I’m very appreciative of all the folks who took the time to write about The Hawaii Project, including Hawaii Public Radio,Xconomy, BostInno, PJ Media, Beta Boston (part of the Boston Globe) and Hawaii News Now.

I learned a lot throughout this process, both about The Hawaii Project and about running a Kickstarter. I’m grateful to everyone who took the time to chat with me, email me feedback, or otherwise assist. In the coming days I’ll publish a bit more on the process I used for the Kickstarter – what I did, what worked, what didn’t work, what my metrics were, and what I’d do differently, in hopes it’s useful to others contemplating a campaign.

As for The Hawaii Project, that will go forward. This isn’t the end, this is the beginning. I’ll launch the product publicly early this summer, and I hope you’ll join me for that! In the meantime, if you’re interested in being a beta tester, just head to http://www.thehawaiiproject.com/ and hit the “request Beta invite” button.

I spend the rest of the morning learning to tie a bow tie. 52 years old and never done it. But, my daughter’s getting married next week, and I’m wearing a bow tie for the wedding. Now THAT is something to celebrate!

Music: Why, the soundtrack for Skyfall, obviously. Bond does the best bow ties.