The following is a guest post from Adam Wexler about his experience with Kickstarter and how it helped him raise almost $2,500 for his music startup, Rank 'em.
I initially heard about Kickstarter's crowdsourced funding platform from a friend, but it wasn't until popular social media VC,
Fred Wilson,
made a mention in his blog that I proceeded to check it out.
I originally looked at the platform in terms of assisting the
Minor Kings, a great edgy rock band out of Nashville, TN that I help manage. Over the next couple months, they'll be putting the final touches on their official debut album & getting on the road for the first full-leg tour. Kickstarter provided great options to fund either pursuit.
On Kickstarter's homepage, they explain that the site "
is a funding platform for artists, designers, filmmakers, musicians, journalists, inventors, explorers..." I personally believe that the most important part of that entire phrase is the "..." at the very end. As a startup themselves, they know that they don't exactly know where the platform is headed, but they want the community to help drive their future.
When I took some time to think about the platform, I realized that it had the potential to be a great resource for my own digital music startup,
Rank 'em. As we described on
our Kickstarter project page, our startup has been in development for over 24 months and 100% bootstrapped the entire time. Considering nobody from the core team has taken any pay to date, our burn rate is significantly low, and we don't require much money to continue building upon our foundation that we initially launched in Late-February.
As
Indie Music Tech already discussed, it has been a highly productive platform for a number indie artists thus far. As a consumer facing platform, we have our own "fanbase" of supporters that want to see Rank 'em become the ideal resource for accelerating music discovery that we firmly believe is possible.
Considering our hosting fees have been eating into our pockets that are not all that deep, we figured we would try to leverage on our supporters to help give us the opportunity to scale the site at a quicker rate. You never know what you can get without asking, right?
Under Kickstarter's setup, you must raise at least your initial goal amount. We set a goal that we believed we could reasonably hit in a short period of time: $1,000 in 30 days. Little did we know, but we were able to hit
$1,000 in just one week!
Unfortunately, it becomes harder to justify why you need additional funding once you've hit your initial goal. Additionally, considering Kickstarter is invite-only themselves, their userbase is limited so we were forced to rely almost exclusively on tapping into our existing networks. Either way, we were able to raise upwards of $2,500 from over 50 backers in just a month's time.
We're now in the position to launch our Private Beta in Mid-to-Late October, and potentially release our platform to the general public before the end of the year. Our model primarily relies on user adoption & inputs, and now we can finally push the platform to a wider audience without web hosting fees being an issue.
We are grateful to Kickstarter for providing the other "..."s of the world with further financial means to pursue their passions, and if you'd like an invite to Rank 'em, just
request one with the following invite code: IMT
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