SUCCESS!!! TEN is funded!!!
Our Kickstarter campaign is over. Thank you all so much for being part of it. We’re totally blown away by how many people (258 in fact!!!) supported our endeavor to make our first feature film.
It has been a very moving experience and it means a huge amount to us that so many of you believe in us and helped to make this possible.
We were $1001 over the goal, which will help us make an even better movie! We celebrate! We promised to do something stupid if you all came through and put us past the 250 backer mark! As you can see from this photo (a reference to this famous NSFW classic) and video here (a reference to how insane we are), we did not break that promise.
I will try and write some kind of recap of our experience sometime in the next few weeks (similar to my halfway thoughts), but until then, here are all of the stats in case you are interested. We didn’t game this at all (i.e., no one contributed money from the inside to push us up or over the limit). Still, I have no real idea how these stats compare to anyone else’s experience.
I did a very rough breakdown of the populations from which contributions were drawn. More than half was from people we’ve met through music. I am not 100% certain that “strangers” does not include friends of the cast, but we did our best to sort through that. Also, there is a pretty large overlap in friends of the cast and our friends/acquaintances, so it’s likely that some of our “friends” category includes people contributing because they know multiple people involved with the project.
Update: I’ve heard horror stories of massive payment failures with Kickstarter, but I must say, although some took a few weeks to clear, with 258 backers and $12,001 raised, we only had 1 backer at $25 whose payment ultimately failed. We received, in total, after fees, $10,957.48.
We wanted to make sure to say thanks along the course of the campaign and so, we sent a thank you video to every contributor (and sometimes several when they raised pledges, etc.). Overall, we sent about 270 videos to contributors. Our intent was to just make sure that everyone knew how much it meant to us, but we did have a lot of people respond to the videos with pledge raises and additional enthusiasm (a nice bonus for us!). I wonder if our number of bid adjustments during the campaign was greater than average.
We saw 41 pledge adjustments, for a total increase in pledges of $1710.44 (a surprisingly significant 14% of our total funding). We only had one dropped pledge for the campaign (a $30 pledge). We also had a couple of pledges dropped and then re-added (one $50 and one $100). I know in one case, it was simply a transfer of payment method and dropping and re-pledging was the best way to handle it. I suspect the other may have been something similar, or maybe it was just a temporary question about the pledge amount.
[…] run two modest Kickstarter campaigns – both successful – for our films TEN (stats on TEN) and MAGNETIC (I never wrote up my analysis, but Kicktraq summary of stats). In preparing […]