What am I doing wrong here?

Perhaps demand or appeal?

Not everybody out there is looking for stock footage, perhaps. Not sure.

Those hippies that are making kites might appeal to adventurous people who like to go outdoors maybe. Not sure.

I think it's a great campaign! Very professional and you are offering a lot in return. Thumbs up.

Per your question about traction, I am totally not the guy to offer any advice on that as both of my campaigns are flagging. I'd have to defer to PaperTwinProductions, Kohli and Nick Clapper *and a few others who I can't think of at the moment*. Those guys seem to know how to make it work.

Good luck, Nate!

I'm surprised it hasn't gained the attention it deserves especially given the content, and the length at which you've went to push it so far.

However, it's only a few days old. It's finding new bloggers, new podcasters, new radio stations.

Just got to keep trucking! We'll all do our best to help you.

This is an AMAZING opportunity for filmmakers, hopefully they'll see that.

I saw your video and it looks like a great idea to me. Like you said, it'll benefit a lot of people. As to why you're not making much, I don't know but some projects gain a lot during their final days apparently, so maybe your project will get thousands of dollars a few days before it ends. And I've noticed this trend in a variety of areas, once a few people start donating money, others join in. Maybe once you get a few people to donate some big bucks, others will be more attracted to your project.

Don't lose hope!

First, I agree that your project looks fantastic! As for why it hasn't caught on, yet? I think Opus might've offered some relavent insight. I mean, a lot of people like 6-song autotune EPs singing about cats (not joking).

Now, what I'm about to offer is pure speculation, but perhaps this might have something to do with it. When I've seen successful kickstarter campaigns, the ones that are asking for large amounts of money, anyway, it doesn't appear to me like they're getting there with nothing more than a whole bunch of small contributions. To the best I can gather, it appears that they all get at least a handful of rather large contributions, in the hundreds and/or thousands of dollars range. Now, again this is pure speculation, but my intuition tells me that the people who are offering hundreds of dollars to a kickstarter campaign are probably usually family members or really close friends who want to see their friend/nephew/son/daughter/niece/wife/husband/BFF complete their production.

It seems to me like it is kind of necessary to get a nice chunk contributed by a small handful of people, and then that shoots you up the charts of the kickstarter pages?

Every Campaign is created with a market in mind. Don't be disheartened by other campaigns doing well. Be encouraged.

This has a market. And it's huge.

I can see where Opus is coming from, are film-makers looking for stock footage? I'd say most are not aware, or are aware, and have cowered at first glance of the price tag.

I just looked at the Kickstarter page.

Where are you telling people about this? I think it sounds like a great idea, especially for indie filmmakers. Maybe the problem is where and how much advertising you are doing.

Are you on Facebook? So are alot of filmmakers. Have you created one of those advertising "thing-eys" that border the facebook pages? Also, what about a group page? What about Vimeo - do they advertise? Everyone there is a filmmaker or video person of some sort, right?

We know about this here on IT. Have you advertised it on DV User or Creative Cow or the Final Cut Pro online groups?


-- spinner

I agree with Cracker 100% on the whole family/friends/loved ones donating. I actually think I've read an article a while back saying family and friends are the first people you should go to for help. They are that first big push.

That being said, I hope what I said didn't come off as negative. I just honestly feel that your market is filmmakers. In my opinion, filmmakers are going to grab their own footage rather than flock to buying stock footage because with stock footage it's pretty cut and dry. You get what you buy.

Much luck to you!

Cracker Funk said:

Now, what I'm about to offer is pure speculation, but perhaps this might have something to do with it. When I've seen successful kickstarter campaigns, the ones that are asking for large amounts of money, anyway, it doesn't appear to me like they're getting there with nothing more than a whole bunch of small contributions. To the best I can gather, it appears that they all get at least a handful of rather large contributions, in the hundreds and/or thousands of dollars range. Now, again this is pure speculation, but my intuition tells me that the people who are offering hundreds of dollars to a kickstarter campaign are probably usually family members or really close friends who want to see their friend/nephew/son/daughter/niece/wife/husband/BFF complete their production.

It seems to me like it is kind of necessary to get a nice chunk contributed by a small handful of people, and then that shoots you up the charts of the kickstarter pages?

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Not necessarily true.

It's calculated through both "Referrals" (How many people are referred/visited the campaign) and then how/how much people have donated. Also within what space of time. So while somebody may storm in with a 2k donation. It only wins half the battle to being "featured" or atleast gracing the main page.

44% of Kickstarter campaigns have been successfully funded. Most were, however, 5k and below. With only six campaigns reaching over the 100k mark. There's been over just 26,500 campaigns. It took two years to raise the first 5 million in pledges, and most recently, 50 million of pledges were made in just ten weeks.

Long story short. Not only is the popularity of Kickstarter growing, but so are the pledges.

It takes alot more to be put forward as a "featured campaign", as it did six months ago. There's just so much choice.

The market for your product is fairly small.

If you're raising money for a film then that appeals to filmmakers and film enthusiasts and that's a pretty big and open market. If you're raising for a stock footage library then you're only really appealing to filmmakers and, lets face it, not all of them are going to get very excited about stock footage.

What I will say is this: Don't get disheartened early on. Kickstarter is like eBay in the fact that the closer you get to the deadline the more casual investors you will get.

You're just at the very beginning of the publicity trail. I know it may seem boring but you need to be tweeting about 50 times a day at the moment. Tweet @ people and get them to tweet @ you, not to mention retweeting. Do you have a Facebook set up for the project? If so I'd like to see it and I'd be happy to spread the word about it.

Once you've got the blogs and the podcasts buzzing about the product stuff will start coming in. 30k is a pretty huge target but it's been done before and it'll be done again. You've just got to flex as much muscle and exercise as much patience as you can.

Things will come up roses

Hmm, something I'm wondering about is the green status bar beneath each project.

I find myself looking at the pictures with the green bar underneath more.

Because our ask is high, we appear to have raised nothing, as we have not hit the 1% mark (in 10% of the time) So there is no green bar. Wouldn't matter now though, as we've dissipated from sight on any of kickstarter's "discover projects" pages. Next anticipated sighting is 2 days before end, when we appear on the "ending soon page"

I think that's why people get a surge near the end. I'm concerned about betting on a 30k surge from a couple days advertising.

I appreciate the help, just wish there was something more obvious that I could change. Paper had some good ideas earlier about expanding the text pitch with some extra videos or imagery.

As far as I know if you want visits you need to pay for it unless you go viral with some Chocolate Rain thing. That's how I get hits to my commercial sites, Google Adwords. Pay pay pay. Pay to play.

My 2 cents . . .

For my first feature, I didn't use any stock footage, didn't even think about getting any . . . now that I'm in development for other projects, I'm thinking stock footage will save me a lot of time.

The other thing, having gotten over the color correction and grading learning curve, I'm confident that I can make the stock footage blend in seamlessly with the other footage (you know, fool the audience).

So, I'm thinking perhaps your target market isn't newbies or short filmmakers, but rather, experienced filmmakers.

Nate North said:

As some of you know, I've recently started a Kickstarter campaign to offer Red Epic stock footage for only $1 a clip. But for some reason, we are getting extremely poor traction.

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Let me see if I can offer some insight starting with this. Traction, honestly, isn't created for any solid project after the project is launched. In any industry, especially one that relies on word-of-mouth as much as ours, you have to start the traction before you launch anything.

That means you probably should go to all sorts of forums to start an inquiry on who's interested, what they would like to see, and building around that.

So, the first tip for any kickstarter or fundraising campaign? Start BEFORE you start, and get people involved.

I didn't do this on my first campaign, it came out of nowhere and we had a pretty dreary start. We were basically catching up to our own campaign by the time we got to our 2K mark, and that was ROUGH.

We launch our next campaign in about a month, and we're going for 60K+. We've already begun to reach out to bloggers behind the scenes and generating excitement within the niche. They're foaming to hit their readers with the info, and that attitude will see a strong run.

Check out the "DOWN AND DANGEROUS" film on Kickstarter. That's a friend of mines, Zak Forsman. In less then a week he's already at about 15K of his 30K goal. I'll go into how that's possible in a second here, but part of it was talking about it before it even came about.

We've made a solid video, followed tons of people on twitter, set up a facebook page and pushed it, written letters to bloggers and sites that would have interest, offered free product for just a retweet or mention, given a 2/1 cupon, announced it on the boards twice, sent it out to all our collective mailing lists, talked to people in person, made phone calls, gotten the word out to several podcasts, and more.

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You did the right thing, perhaps a little late. More important than starting early is actually having a relationship with the people you're approaching. I mentioned Zak Forsman in the preceding paragraph. Zak has a very strong indie film community following and it's well deserved.

He gets his name out there, his work is out there for people to check out, he attends film festivals and networks like a mother. He helped me push Superseeds as well, and he and I have an open conversation constantly about our work and push each other to our friends. Naturally, my following isnt' as large, but learning this made me break out of my shell to start networking.

A successful campaign hinges on having more outlets than just friends and family. Second tip: Build your network before you even consider a project. Years in the making, this one. Start now if you haven't.

We're edging towards $250. We spent over a grand on the video alone. So we're offering the best deal ever seen, for a product that benefits millions of people, and we're doing terrible.

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I think your lowest buy in (1.00) is so low that you may find people not taking you very seriously. Stock Footage prices exist at a certain denominator for a very... very good reason. It's quality material, stuff that you plug into major motion pictures or television.

The people who are going to spend the real cash on your 5K library will see a "low budget not worth it" stigma to your pricing approach. I'm also not saying that you're wrong, but consider that the best sales pitch is one that isn't selling on price, but benefits.

A low price should always be icing on the cake, not the cake itself.

In our upcoming campaign, a digital download will be 25.00 at the least . This is the average amount of a Kickstarter donation. At this level, we can't afford to give someone a DVD or a BluRay. Add in shipping and pressing costs of a nice package and the 25.00 becomes 20.00(ish). Not efficient.

The Pledge for a DVD will be about 40-50.00, and trust me, it's the right number. Kickstart search JOKE AND BIAGIO for an example of how to structure rewards efficiently and effectively. These two are ROCKING it hardcore, and are great personalities to boot.

Tip Three: Price Pledges Properly. Don't get in over your head on your overhead, and make sure your product looks valuable to your target demo.

What exactly Am I doing so wrong? I'm looking at kickstarter pages for hippies that want to build a box kite, and they've got 6 grand in pledges in the same time. Who does that help?

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Kickstarter's definitely not just for hippies, though. There are a few Sci-Fi short films that've launched to 30K plus. Kickstart search: Discworld

Can you believe a short film raised 50K??? I can, because they had a presentation that hit their niche's tastes. Make sure you're pandering to who you're going after.

Stock Footage isn't something that no-budget productions use alot and it's not because of the cost, it's simply that they have no idea how to use it properly or what value it adds, or have no use for it all. The people who are going to pay for your stock footage have access to libraries that they trust.

If you want to compete, 5K promises won't be enough. You have to know how to hit that audience.

Tip Four: Know who your enemy. xD haha. well, maybe not enemy!

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/156967912/the-1-ultra-hd-footage-library

What is so terribly wrong with this? This thing is a huge effort, and a community service, but I get the impression that I'd be getting further with a 6 song EP singing about cats through autotune. Why?

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And at the end of the day, Papertwin said it already:

Sometimes it just isn't the same as another campaign. You've still got time, you never know what'll happen, but take a look at what others are doing and implement accordingly.

You may do much better with the Cat Tracks, but is that what ya wanna do?


On another note, just in general, the people doing these great kickstarter campaigns all have great followings. If no one knows who you are but friends and family, then no one knows who you are but friends and family. It's everyone's job, as a filmmaker, to push themselves into the public eye and build TRUE fans (not Twitter spammers) so that they can keep doing this.

I'm guilty of not doing that, but recently have begun to branch out and really be open about my process and how I'm doing things at this level.

Anyway, those are my thoughts! Still, don't sweat it too much... it can always turn around.

Papertwinproductions said:

Not necessarily true.

It's calculated through both "Referrals" (How many people are referred/visited the campaign) and then how/how much people have donated. Also within what space of time. So while somebody may storm in with a 2k donation. It only wins half the battle to being "featured" or atleast gracing the main page.

44% of Kickstarter campaigns have been successfully funded. Most were, however, 5k and below. With only six campaigns reaching over the 100k mark. There's been over just 26,500 campaigns. It took two years to raise the first 5 million in pledges, and most recently, 50 million of pledges were made in just ten weeks.

Long story short. Not only is the popularity of Kickstarter growing, but so are the pledges.

It takes alot more to be put forward as a "featured campaign", as it did six months ago. There's just so much choice.

Click to expand...

You've got the right info on Kickstarter, Paper. Good stuff.

Great thread. Thanks for that post, Kholi

Stick with it Nate, you've got time. Just be the tortoise, not the hare.

Thanks to all for the help, collectively this really does shed some light on the issue

Special thanks to Kholi, for his encyclopedic rundown of an insiders perspective on kickstarter

Last questions,

Nick advised me to tweet 50 times a day and retweet others. Won't that make people unsubscribe? Is that the norm? I've never been on twitter before.

Secondly, when writing to bloggers, where do you find their email links (on wordpress)? I've been to 50 sites and found 2 email addresses. I wrote them each a personal (non form) letter, and got no response from either. Up until 2 days ago, I've never seen so many pages without "contact us" links. I literally don't know how to speak to them.

These are a couple practical things that might help with my traction issue.

Not everybody out there is looking for stock footage, perhaps.

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BINGO!
This idea reminds me of this couple on that show Shark Tank that wanted to sell underwear that had a charcoal grill to absorb farts for people with irritable bowel syndrome. Just too small of an audience! The Internet is tough enough as is. It's too vast. It's like being not just a fish in a lake, but a minnow in an ocean.