Reply To: What makes you fund a kickstarter?
Hard one for me to answer, as my motivation for funding Kickstarters is to support artists/creative people that I’m already a fan of. Having cool or interesting funding options might influence me to give more, but I don’t use Kickstarter as a way to discover new music, which is a little closeminded of me.
Besides this forum, I don’t pay attention to any of the other places where people have been posting about Marian Call’s Kickstarter, so I’m not sure how viral it’s gotten; I assume somewhat viral but perhaps it’s full-blown. But virality is mostly unpredictable to me, or at least I have no idea how to bottle it, and if I did I’d be a millionaire (or at least have a bunch of Twitter followers or something).
Back-of-the-envelope here, but my instinct is to think of potential backers as either True Fans or casual fans, where your True Fans are the ones who will fund you regardless of how cool the rewards are, and your casual fans are the ones you need to capture somehow. I guess I’ve just reduced the problem to, “How do I establish a fanbase?” which doesn’t make it any more tractable. But this is just to point out that you may get some skewed answers here, since these forums (and forums in general) are naturally a little predisposed to have a lot of people with True Fan mentalities. (Not to exclude the casual JoCo fans here! Just that reading, much less commenting on, a musician’s forums implies a certain level of devotion.)
Hmm, pithy short paragraph that answers your question and then two tortuous grafs that don’t come to any conclusions. I should try to be helpful to wrap things up:
MeaghanO (aka the original Scarface) works for Kickstarter and has compiled (not sure if she’s still responsible for this) those e-mails they send that spotlight interesting campaigns; she might have insights or know where to obtain some.