When a Kickstarter Fails | M Rathsack | Episode 747

M Rathsack | Episode 747

M Rathsack is a raku potter living in Western North Carolina. M is also the owner and teacher at M’s School of Art which she established over 14 years ago. M also paints a little and has her hands in all sorts of other crazy creative ventures!

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How nervous were when you did your Kickstarter campaign that you wouldn’t reach your goal?

I was nervous enough that I didn’t want to do it to begin with! I thought, Who on earth would just give me money! Who would do that! But I also realized that there was no skin off my back if I did do it. I would just be back at square one if it didn’t work.

How did you reach out to your followers and let them know what you were doing?

I used primarily Facebook. I just started posting Dancing Potter and my personal page. I said, Hey, Guys. I’m going to be doing this Kickstarter thing. I would tease it for a few days and post photographs of my work. I would do little stories in blurbs of what was happening. So I was building everybody up for the launch. But that was all Facebook.

So you launch it. What happens in the first one week of the launch?

The first day I wasn’t sure if anyone would even participate. There are always some people who are really excited about pledging the first day. So I had way more people that I expected that would pledge on the first day. But then the first week, I didn’t really know what to expect. I didn’t know how much of the funding I should expect to be receiving at that point. I only did a month. I did not want this to drag on all over the place. So I thought maybe I could get a quarter of my funding in the first week… which I didn’t get. I wasn’t sure what to base any of it on in the first place.

When did it dawn on you that this was probably not going to get funded?

About half way through. I was looking at the trends and saying, If this many people are coming out of the woodwork in week one, then I can expect this percentage less in week two, and then maybe in week three there would be a jump because there would be a little more excitement… I was also told that there would be a big push at the end in the forth week, and there was a little of that. But half way through I knew it wasn’t going to happen because it was just too astronomical to try and reach that number.

Once you knew that, where did the idea come that you could still be funded, but without Kickstarter?

I had conversations with friends who had pledged and they would ask how it was going. I had to say it wasn’t going to happen. I was trying to be upbeat about it, but they were saying, I’ll give you my money. You can still have my money. I thought, Huh. Okay… So when I had friends expressing that to me, I got the idea of why don’t I just push for that? I didn’t do it on the campaign, but I did put up some information that said, “Hey, Guys. If I don’t make my goal, then I don’t get anything. I’m going to come up with Plan B and I’ll keep you informed on how that is going to work.” So I was formulating how I was going to do that.

Did you do that on your Kickstarter page or on Facebook?

Facebook. I kept it out of Kickstarter cause I was a teeny tiny hopeful that there would be some kind of a miracle. I didn’t want to blow Kickstarter out because I was being pessimistic.

Once Kickstarter did not work, how did you go about presenting Plan B?

I posted about how that was going to look and said thanks for everyone supporting me and here is Plan B. I contacted everyone through messenger because I didn’t want to post with my Paypal and Venmo and all that. So I contacted everyone who messaged me and had pledged in Kickstarter and I had a form letter that said, Here’s what happened. Here’s what I’d like to do. Here’s how you can do it. Here’s all my information. And “Yay, I love you!” Then I just left it to people to decide if they wanted to contribute. And then the money just started coming in through Venmo and Paypal and messages left and right… “We love what you do. We still want you to make this happen.” So it was Facebook and direct messenger to all these people that I knew. I also posted a little about it in a Kickstarter update and said, “Hey! Guess what… Kickstarter didn’t work, but it’s still happening.” Even though it’s a failed project, I wanted the public to go to my page and see that something is still happening.

In the form letter did you tell them that the pledge rewards were still the same?

Yes. Absolutely. I made a spreadsheet of everybody and their contact information and what reward they wanted, that kind of stuff. Kickstarter will create a spreadsheet for you if your campaign is successful. So I created my own spreadsheet so I could keep track and keep moving forward in a professional way. I would totally do a Kickstarter again because I learned so much.

Have you been fully funded by the people that you reached out to?

Funny thing… I got more because people who saw all this happening on Facebook where, Oh my gosh! I forgot to pledge. Can I still pledge? So I had abot 20 more people contribute after the fact!