So we've got 24 hours left on our campaign and here's a list:
'5 Things I Learned Crowdfunding in Reverse'.
1) PRESS - blogs of all types and news sites seem to have a blanket "NO CROWDFUNDING ARTICLES". At least that's the story we got. There's too many campaigns; they let one through, then they're inundated with even more requests. There's exceptions of course - if something is monumentally breakout, the blogger knows an artist personally, a project has a celebrity attached or is reinventing crowdfunding...then that's okay - it runs.
No matter how many times I told bloggers and press that the film was finished and pledges translated to instant downloads...even after they complimented the content, they didn't care to go further. Until Twitch came forward, which still took considerable time to crack with emails over weeks back and forth, nobody else seemed impressed enough to act. And now there's more interest in this method and it's being talked about, it's a bit late. We've only got 24 hours left.
2) STAKES - every good story should have them, it's 101. when a film is completed and finished, the usual rhetoric of "please support or this simply won't happen" doesn't really fly. we got some stakes late in the form of distribution interest and now they're being allocated to that plight, but it was still too little too late. that doesn't mean there isn't any stakes for reverse crowdfunding, i just didn't do a good job of finding them and finding them early.
3) PLEDGES - this is probably obvious, but I feel worth mentioning: friends give generously, strangers get it out of curiosity. The price point is low - $1. This was done purposefully as a tempting low risk bet and I never really expected I'd hit my goal giving it away at this price. I'm still surprised how many people have given $1 anonymously. Maybe they felt like guilty cheapskates? Maybe they were bored and wanted it right now? Who knows, hopefully they'll stick around and pay $2 for my next project. It's all audience building.
3) CONTENT RELEASING & MILESTONES - your trailer is the biggest asset of a finished film. There's only so many times that can be shared and recycled before you dig into actual scenes from the movie to share and entice pledges. We didn't have meaningful behind the scenes footage, it wasn't that kind of project and usually stuff like that is a reward for pledges.
The only other milestones to talk about are press and status of attracting a distributor. The exciting milestones and constant flow of news as a film builds from the ground up in traditional crowd-funding just don't exist or seem as relevant when it's completed and packaged. Finding milestones and things to talk about over 2 months is hard, there's room for improvement, maybe I could've found more.
4) PARALLEL CONTENT WORKS - I had some footage laying around from freelance shoots I'd done, I edited it into an unofficial music video for Ta-ku. Though the music video had nothing at all to do with the film, releasing it and having the trailer be featured near it on my Youtube & Vimeo channels helped tremendously to bring people that were interested in that kind of music my way and buy the film because it was available instantly.
5) DELIVERY - this was the hardest and is obviously the most important, I didn't want to have a torrent (you can guess why). A password protected Vimeo or Youtube wouldn't cut it. Mediafire etc. could have been good, but would have been hard to track and keep a lid on. Also, I heard you can create original one-time-only use passwords like on You-sendit (unverified), but that seemed like a crap shoot too.
So I went with Dropbox. Some people are new to it and tech illiterate, so I'd have to walk them through it, many people didn't know you could stream it out of the browser too. The advantage of it for me is I could drop extras in like deleted scenes and announce it without doing any further work and everyone could grab it. Also, the ability to pause a download is a real plus for people with slow connections. Dropbox is still a little clunky for my liking and I'm looking for better ways to deliver the goods.
Thanks for reading, hope you gleaned some wisdom and if you decide to try and distribute this way, good luck, no doubt there's plenty to think about. If you want to check out the film & the article they're linked below.
[1]
YES NO YES YES GO
[2]
Twitch article
[3]
Facebook 
