It’s day 24 of the Kickstarter for The Hawaii Project, Saturday, April 25.

OK, in yesterday’s post, I’d pretty much given up on the Kickstarter’s chance of success. But. I got a well-needed kick in the pants from some old friends, not to give up. That led me to re-read some things I’d written to myself a few years back, especially lessons learned from reading Gates of Fire, about the Spartans at the battle of Thermopylae. (you can read that here: https://www.viking2917.com/leadership-lessons-from-the-ancient-greeks/). Takeaway: back in the arena. 5 more days. Going down swinging.

Brief Commercial Interruption: If you’re reading this, you may not know what The Hawaii Project is. 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. If this resonates, back us on Kickstarter: 

http://www.thehawaiiproject.com/kickstarter

The project is going forward in any case – perhaps more slowly than if funded – so, I’m going to spend the last week driving the Kickstarter but with a focus on learning things I can take into the next phase, either way. My two targets: Facebook and Authors.

I’m going to explore more fully whether Facebook is an effective marketing channel, whether that’s via Facebook groups or ads or something else, and I’m going to get in touch with authors, who are natural sponsors of The Hawaii Project as they have books that need to reach readers, and I have a prototype of an Author page where people can follow their favorite authors, that needs cleaning up and sharing around (if you’re an author looking to connect with readers, please get in touch!). I spend a few hours dusting off that page and getting it running again so I can share it around.

I take the evening off and go see Ex Machina, a movie about how search engines might become the basis of AI. Intriguing premise, actually pretty plausible. The movie is stylish but slow. B+. But it’s a good few hours not thinking about Kickstarter (Rule 12: One hour a day, one day a week, don’t think about work. – I’m not going a great job of following this rule…).

Thanks for following along.

It’s day 23 of the Kickstarter for The Hawaii Project, Friday, April 24.

OK. I have 1 week left. $8,615 pledged, 24% funded, 119 backers.

My average donation so far is $72. I have 115 backers. To hit my goal, I need 370 more backers at my average donation. That’s 45 donors a day @$72. I’m getting about 1 a day on average. Game over, thanks for playing 8).

Here’s the questions I’m asking myself: do I just give up and stop trying to manufacture pledges? Or do I go down swinging? I HATE sending out more begging letters to friends and family, but that’s where most of the donations are coming from. And it’s likely wasted effort – if I double the number of friends & family donations, it doesn’t get anywhere near the goal. Do I go after some big ticket donations, try to get a James Patterson or Neil Gaiman to get excited and cough up a really big donation? That seems equally unlikely.

For that matter, do I really care if I make the goal? My primary objective with the Kickstarter wasn’t really to raise funds – it was to have an event to talk about and effectively use as a product launch. Raising funds was a secondary objective. I’ve been successful at getting a reasonable amount of press (Bost Inno, the Boston Globe’s Tech Site, Hawaii Public Radio, PJ Media and Xconomy), and setting up other press for the eventual “real” public launch of the product. But, it would be ideal not to have to explain away why the Kickstarter failed.

Let’s do a quick analysis of the effectiveness of the channels I’ve tried. [Before I do this, friends & family, please don’t feel like this is a transactional relationship or you’re just a number or I’m judging you by whether you contributed. I truly appreciate each individual I’ve been in contact throughout this process! This is just how the sausage gets made 8)].

For the non-initiated, “conversion rate” means the % of people I invited to contribute that actually did so (mostly through email or social media). My joking label for this is “Spam” – any mail I sent “en masse” to a group of people, I call spam.

• Friends & Family ( a few hundred people) – Pledged $2340 at a ~17% conversion rate (note: most of these mails were hand sent)
• Endeca spam (a few hundred people) – Pledged $885 at a ~6% conversion rate.
• goby spam (about a thousand people I crossed paths with, when I was at goby) – pledged $1025 @1.5% conversion
• Acquaintance Spam (~800 people I am acquainted with from various life activities) – pledged $280 @ 1% conversion
• Beta testers (~150 people in my beta test) – pledged $1785 @ 8.5% conversion
• Librarian spam (I emailed every library in Massachusetts!) – pledged $0, no conversions, but about 2% of them converted to beta testers
• Literary Agent spams (I crawled the web for about a thousand literary agents’ email addresses, and mailed them either personally or through a bulk email) – pledged $210 @ .15% conversion rate – not a lot of money but I made some great friends and got some deep insights, so well worth it.
• Press: I’ve been reasonably successful with press, 4 or 5 high quality articles in high quality outlets. It’s generated roughly ~$750 or so, so far as I can tell. It’s valuable coverage, but more of it isn’t likely to move my $ in the near term.

For comparison, I have friends who run marathons or do bike races for charity. They report that ~40-50% of their “list” converts into a charity donation. So my numbers don’t feel that off, considering I’m not a charity, I’m asking for donations to a for-profit enterprise.

So. The top three out of that, based on volume + conversion rate: Friends, Beta Testers, and Endeca folks. So I guess the data’s telling me to hit them up again. Sorry guys. Inbound tin cup headed your way one last time. Spending more time on press or libraries or agents seems contra-indicated at present, as the short-term ROI at least doesn’t look worth it. I am intrigued by the Librarian community as a longer term customer acquisition channel, and have a visit to a few set up in the near future.

It won’t take too long to update my big 3 with an email, and I should do it anyway – but I’m left with the calculation that even if I double my contributions from those sources, I barely crack $10k out of $35k. It’s not going to get me there.

Today’s music: The Crystal Method’s soundtrack for the movie London. Half EDM, Half Soundtrack. Perfect working music.

PS. I send the mail to friends, family and beta testers. There’s a fair contingent of folks who got distracted and hadn’t backed yet, and do so now. That raises another $1,000, for which I am very grateful! But the hill to climb still feels too high…..

So: After sleeping on it, I’m going to let nature take it’s course, and mostly go back to work on product. It doesn’t look like making the goal is in the cards right now, unless events outside my control kick in. I’d rather invest my time now in making the product better, clarifying the market differentiation, and getting it actually finished and on the market.  I don’t look at this as “giving up”, I look at it as a rational investment of my time given the current situation.

Those of you who pledged, THANK YOU. Rest assured the project will move forward, just without some of the things the $ would fund.

It’s day 22 of the Kickstarter for The Hawaii Project, Thursday, April 23.

OK. I have 8 days left. $8,615 pledged, 24% funded, 119 backers.

The last major piece of press coverage I was hoping for has landed. Yay! We’re covered in Beta Boston, the Boston Globe’s tech-focused website. I’d targeted The Globe/Beta Boston as one of my original desired media outlets for coverage. Ironically, the coverage doesn’t come from journalists there I know and pitched, it comes from a freelancer who found me on her own and thought it would be good to cover. The world is funny sometimes. Today is World Book Day (http://worldbookday.com/), so it seems appropriate!

Duh. I forgot to ask the journalist to use my special link for the Kickstarter,http://www.thehawaiiproject.com/kickstarter. So all the traffic is routed direct to Kickstarter, where I have no way to track how many hits I got. I realize this about 4 hours later and ask them to update the link, which they graciously do, but I think I missed most of the immediate hits. Still, I’ll get long term SEO value from the link to my site instead of Kickstarter. (Side note: The Hawaii Project has never been on the first page of Google results for “The Hawaii Project” searches. I notice today it’s on the first page now – no doubt a result of all the backlinks I have been getting from press. I am now outranking the Hawaii Meth Project, thank goodness….although btw that seems like a great organization fighting meth use in Hawaii.)

Based on my google analytics tracking, looks like I got about 10 hits to the Kickstarter page *after* they changed the link. No way to tell what happened before. Mistake on my part….However, I see the outcome. I’ve gotten 4 pledges totaling $270. Not the “geyser” of donations I was hoping for 8). But every little bit…..

Side note: I get one comment on the article from a reader – the first comment I’ve gotten on any of the articles on The Hawaii Project. It’s slightly snarky and suggests Goodreads already does all the things I do. Hard to see how they’d know that as they’ve not used the product…but: Rule 29: Be (civil) In The Arena). (I have a set of work rules, somewhat analogous to Gibb’s Rules. I’ll publish them someday). In the meantime, Rule 29 is Be (civil) In The Arena. The Arena is The Internet. Be In The Arena. Put up a comment on any article written about you, even if it’s just a thank you, and even (especially!) if the article is critical of you. Respond to every single person who takes the time to comment on your work, even if you don’t agree with them. And be respectful. So, I respectfully respond to her criticisms, I think we end up agreeing to disagree. Which is fine. The dialog is there for anyone coming to the article later, and hopefully I build a reputation as being thoughtful, responsive and “not a jerk”. I may not win her over, but I may win over someone coming to the article later.

I spend the rest of the day analyzing where I stand on the Kickstarter, and paths forward. I’ll publish that tomorrow, on Friday.

Today’s music: Philip Glass piano music. Contemplative, non-interruptive, thought-inducing.

It’s day 21 of the Kickstarter for The Hawaii Project, Wednesday, April 22.

Today is a travel day, returning home from my parents house. I don’t get much done, other than contemplating where I stand. No wifi on the plane and it’s crowded, so I content myself with reading more of Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero, Nero of the “fiddling while Rome burned” fame. It’s really quite interesting how much Seneca reminds me of Thomas Cromwell (most recently described by Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies. Both were from very modest backgrounds, rising to the heights of power as Kingmakers, and struggling with balancing their nobler instincts with the darker requirements placed on them from the political realm. Plenty of lessons there for you corporate folks near the top of the ladder.

Late in the day a reporter pings me, she’s trying to get an article on THP placed and written. She needs a quote from somebody from the books world from outside the project for some “validation”. Turns out my daughter’s fiancee’s mother is a librarian, and one of my beta testers, who really likes what I’m doing. I connect the two of them and voila a quote is born. That’s how the sausage gets made, people.

Tomorrow: Essentially one week left. I need to regroup and figure out where to focus in the remaining week. Absent some form of miracle, I won’t hit my target, and I need to figure out whether and how to try to make it, or just take my learnings and move on to the next stage of my project.

$8,345 pledged,  23%, funded, 115 backers.

It’s day 20 of the Kickstarter for The Hawaii Project, Monday, April 20.

If you’ve been paying attention, you probably noticed some days are missing from the diary. Sorry about that. Life has a way of getting in the way, as they say, and reminding you of what’s really important. Had a family situation that requires some attention, so I’ll be back on the job tomorrow, hopefully with more insight into how to jump start this stalled campaign. 8).

111 backers. $8,030 pledged of $35,000 goal, 10 days to go.

In the meantime, I have some plane time and I am discovering James Robb’s wonderful Dying Every Day: Seneca at the court of Nero, an account of the philosopher/poet/ethicist’s time as kingmaker to the mad emperor Nero, and how he reconciled his Stoic philosophy with his time wading through the mud to the height of Roman politics. Highly Recommended.