Diary of a Kickstarter – Day 9

Do The Work

It’s day 9 of the Kickstarter for The Hawaii Project, April 10.

Yay, it’s Friday! Time for the weekend! Oh wait, I’m an entrepreneur. Nose to the grindstone!

Funding is at $6,725, 29% funded, 93 backers, average backing: $72, much higher than my model predicted (more on my model in a post-Kickstarter retrospective post I’m working on). Most of the new backers are people I don’t know personally, an encouraging trend. I think. Still, need some “non-linear” events to make the $ goal, and as you probably know Kickstarter is all-or-nothing.

I’ve pretty much gotten over my mild panic of two days ago. As the title of the great Steven Pressfield book says, Do The Work. Do The Work, Trust The Process, and good things will happen. Maybe not the thing you want, but good things nonetheless. We’ll make the goal, or we won’t. And if we don’t we’ll get up, dust ourselves off, and get back to work. (BTW, I’ve written about handling failure before.) Because we’ve been “doing the work”, we have an enormous amount of marketing material, refined thinking, market awareness and other stuff. If the $ don’t work out, we have all that.

The literary agent/author who was interested in a Founding Author page has seen the mockup and he commits to the reward, which is awesome. It’s the first author I didn’t have a pre-existing relationship with who signs up. Big step. He’s also an agent to many other authors, and he mentions it to them and some of them sign up too! Awesome. He also expresses interest in talking about a publisher page so I create a mockup and more detailed thoughts on that, which takes most of the day. There’s a few details left, will finish that tomorrow.

A big local (Boston) media outfit gets back in touch about coverage with some final questions. I draft a series of responses immediately (immediately!) and get them back. Hopefully that will turn into coverage before too long. I also email a few other journalists I think might be interested in what we’re doing. So far, deafening silence is my response 8).

In the good news / bad news department, the Red Sox beat the Yankees. But it took them til 1 in the morning to do it…..

Today’s music: Songhoy Blues, a west African Stevie Ray Vaughan sounding band. I defy you not to tap your feed to this music.

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