Kickstarted!

I am back in San Francisco for the next few weeks. If you look below you will see my Kickstarter video. I decided to do a Kickstarter project because my upcoming photo show got bumped up from January 1st to December 1st, and I had yet to get any prints made... and I had no money to make said prints.

For those of you who don't know what Kickstarter is, it is a great website where people can post up projects and ask for funding to help "kickstart" a project. In trade for donating, or backing as they call it, you receive rewards. Rewards vary project to project. A musician might give a reward of a CD in exchange for funds to help record the cd. Essentially you can pre-sell or promote your project before it exists in order to bring it to life. It is pretty great way to see if your project will float and if people are interested in it.

With Kickstarter you have to set a dollar amount that you would like to raise by a deadline. If you do not raise all the money by the deadline, the project is a wash- no one has to donate any money and you don't have to provide rewards. One of the projects that was recently completed was a tripod for an iphone. The two guys who came up with the idea were asking for $10,000 to manufacture this product and one of the rewards was a pre-ordered iphone tripod for $20. By the time their deadline came they had raised $137,000 instead of $10,000. This is an extreme example but it is a great way to "test market" an idea or product with minimal overhead. Brilliant.

I had no idea if my project would succeed but I set a goal of $3000 in 8 days.
I asked my friend Chad help with the editing. He agreed and suggested that he help shoot the video too, which was awesome. I sat down the day before Halloween to brainstorm what I wanted the video to look like and what I would say. Then I opened up imovie and began sort of roughly piecing it together. Next thing you know it was 5am and I was totally obsessed. Chad and I were supposed to meet the next day to shoot the video but I let him know that I thought I had it handled. He said to send it over to him if I needed any help.

I ended up completely pitbulled onto the project for about 30 hours, missing all Halloween festivities. I had never made a video with imovie though I had recorded a few clips with the built in camera. Immediately after I finished it I posted the video on Kickstarter and Facebook and people started sending in donations. At first a few friends donated, then some friends of friends, then some complete strangers who found me through Kickstarter. It was incredible. Then people began posting my video on different pages and it all sort of took off.


Within 3 days I had reached my target goal of $3000 and by the deadline it had totaled at $4450 which is very exciting. Because the project went over the target, by quite a bit, I was able to hire my friend Livia from NYC to come and assist me. Which is really exciting. Right now we are waiting for the funds to come through Amazon. It is sort of a hurry up and wait situation. I am loading all of the photos up to get sent to the lab and Livia is assembling a database and organizing things for the show. Once the funds clear we will be sent into turbo mode.

I am really excited and grateful about all of this. I feel blessed. It is very humbling to feel so much support from the people around me. I feel as if I am community built. I am community built.