The Truth About Kickstarter
Some time ago I created a social blogging platform on the internetmore as an experiment than anything elseto see how well a mashup of Twitter, Tumblr, LiveJournal, and Facebook might worktaking aspects of all of them, but simplifying at the same time. The site still exists at pluggedout.org if you're interested in playing with it.
To begin with the only people that knew about it were close friendsthey watched as I built it, and threw ideas into the sorting hat as we went along. Within a couple of weeks the skeleton of the site was up and running, and everybody pitched in with weeding out the bugs. Thena couple of interesting things happened. An “A-List” Tumblr personality plugged the site Tumblr went down for several hoursAfter the site got promoted, a few hundred hits happened within half an hour. After Tumblr went down, the the hundreds became thousands. Overnight, fifteen thousand visits were made to the site. Over the next 48 hoursthirty to forty people were logged in pretty much continually, posting, liking, commenting, and building their network of friends.Then something else interesting happened.
Tumblr came back up, and everybody vanished.
I kept running the site, and kept tinkering when time and inclination presented itselfpolishing rough edges, adding new features, and (eventually) clearing down the existing contentthere was a lot of garbage from the early testing. If tumbleweed actually existed in internet terms, you would see it blow past the site these daysit's very, very quiet, and most people have settled with the status quo at Twitter, Tumblr, LiveJournal, and Facebook.
The funny thing is, the site was only ever a prototypeit was never built properly. It's foundations were hacked together in a mad two week sprint, and caution was thrown to the wind. There is a famous book called “The Mythical Man Month” by some of the early IBM architects, that encourages you to “throw away the first version”this very much applies in this case. The only real problem is that building the site properly, hosting it properly, and marketing it all cost money. Lots of money.
Aha!, I thought. A Kickstarter campaign. I had looked at Kickstarter a year ago, but at the time they would only allow physical product funding. That all changed when the “Ghost” blogging platform became the first web project on Kickstarter (which proves that “who you know” is still the most important thing in marketing). Cutting a long story short, during a quiet lunchtime last week I filled out all the blanks on a Kickstarter application, and set it in motion to see what would happen. Within a couple of days an obvious realisation occurred to me;The only way to attract funds to a crowd fundingproject is to have marketing geared up and ready to goahead of the funding drive. This is only really going to work if you are already well known in the tech/web bubble, and the popular bloggers and/or news feeds know what you're up to. Failing that, you need to pay out some serious money to have advertorial stories written by well known bloggers to seed interest in the project ahead of the funding drive.
I had none of this, and guess whatthe Kickstarter project sat like a gas station in the desert for the few days it existed before I pulled the plug. It's the classic “chicken and egg” situation. You need money to bring attention to the funding drive,but you need the funding drive to generate the money to do the marketing.
My project will carry on regardless. I will write a version 2.0 eventually, and it will quietly appear online one daywith all the features I always wanted in a social platform. The funny thing is though, social platforms need people to be “social”and I'm not entirely sure how that will work without throwing money at it.