Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Reflections on Kickstarter, After One Week


As soon as we launched our Kickstarter campaign, we started getting emails from helpful consultants and companies offering to boost our showings with the Kickstarter algorithms that determine whether a project will be prominently featured on the company's site. Naturally we reported these messages as spam and deleted them, but they did provide food for thought.

Fundraising isn't for the faint-hearted. You throw yourself at the mercy of close and distant friends and associates with the humbling and often distasteful mission of asking for money. Then you ask again. And again.

The internet makes it possible to reach more ears, at least in theory. More people receive your message, but they receive it in the context of a sea of messages that they have to filter for information worthy of giving a damn.

Before launching our project, we read quite a few blog posts and articles about how to get the word out. They mostly cautioned that Kickstarter support comes primarily from networks that are already in place by the time you launch: friends, family, and friends of friends of friends who have been quietly admiring your work. They advised anyone interested in starting a Kickstarter campaign to start creating a network months ahead of time by building a strong social medua platform and commenting prolifically on sites and feeds that attract like-minded would-be patrons.

We approached the process differently. Patty Pan is a business that meets customers face to face. We don't advertise and we couldn't care less about Yelp reviews: people don't buy our tamales and quesadillas because they've seen an advertisement or read a review. They buy our food because they're at the farmers' market and the vegetables smell good.

So we're bringing our Kickstarter campaign to our customers face to face. Instead of profiling the type of customer most likely to support our project and courting the websites and bloggers most likely to cater to that theoretical customer, we're asking support directly from those most likely to benefit from quesadillas made with tortillas pressed from local, organic, whole grain flour: people who already enjoy our quesadillas week after week, at market after market.

Whenever someone orders a quesadilla, we tell them about our plans to make those awesome quesadillas even better. We're bringing tortilla prototypes to the markets and sampling them. We're getting an enthusiastic response and we're on track to meet our goal.

Thanks so much to everyone who has pledged so far. Many of the names aren't familiar, but we suspect many of those names go with familiar faces and we look forward to putting the two together, after years of feeding you.

And if you haven't yet checked out our project, please do. Thanks again for listening.